Twitter: Where’s the Money?

Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams gets grilled at the Web 2.0 Summit about the company’s revenue model (and present lack thereof). Williams dodges the question, but reiterates his confidence that the micro-blogging service will be able to capitalize on the commercial activity already occurring on the site.

The complete interview with Federated Media’s John Battelle can be viewed at Fora TV here. And a contrasting argument to the social media boom (or fad, if you prefer) by Jon Fisher (head of some division of Oracle) can be seen here.

The Twitter “Fail Whale”

This is a rather interesting metaphor, isn’t it?

It’s hard to expound too much on it past observing that the notion of a seemingly blissfully oblivious, and rather pacific whale being haplessly lofted in a net by a group of inane, twittering birds as a representation of systemic failure is kind of amusing. And of course, there’s a whole back-story to the iconic image…

Update: Could be the end of this little experiment for me. Over capacity, failed logins, forgotten passwords supposedly sent (but never received) and so on. Fun for a while, but altogether too flaky.

Update2: Ah ha. From their status page…

For the past several hours, we’ve been contending with a high rate of errors on twitter.com. This problem is being caused by over-consumption of resources on our webservers due to several changes we’ve made in the past few days.

Give it another day or so, I guess. But this kind of nonsense can’t go on much more. You can’t get people hooked on crack and the suddenly pull the plug because of “over-consumption”…

More “Twits”

No, not those hopeless nitwits… It’s another hilarious installment of the WP’s series where they pillory the inane and/or ridiculous Tweets of celebrities and others through dramatic reenactments.

The soulless, self-serving missives of Barbara Walters (or more likely her publicist) are particularly funny.

Windows 7.0 Party Time!

I’m beyond speechless. Sadly, the actors in this painfully upbeat “launch party” video for the release of the latest version of Microsoft’s Windows OS weren’t quite so reticent…

Apologies for making you suffer through that hacktacular video — presuming you watched it beyond the 20 second mark. In truth, it was a completely unrelated pretext just to note that there will be light posting and relative inactivity here for a while due to work-related and personal stuff going on at the moment (generally good things, but very time-consuming).

I’ll try to occasionally post on Twitter in the meantime. And yes, I know many people think that’s a thoroughly unserious medium, but I’ve decided to give it the benefit of the doubt for the time being. Beside which, I like the notion of attempting beat the challenge of the puny 140 character limit without all that maddeningly cryptic text-message crapola).

Look! A Shiny Rock!

Hey, just for fun, let’s see what the Washington Post is up to today…

Okay, that was kind of a cheap shot because truth be told this video wherein celebrity Tweets are dramatically re-enacted is actually quite hilarious. But I wonder if Howie Kurtz will be ironically sneering at it on CNN next weekend.

Social Networks Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

‘E-Mom’ Gloria Bianco shows Jim and Tracy how geographical distance is no longer a roadblock to shamelessly interfering with the lives of your children.

Flutter

You may have seen this already when it came out on April Fool’s Day. If not, enjoy. It’s kind of funny dig at Twitter.

Incredibly, a number of the 1,200 or so commenters on YouTube seem to have thought this was real. How on earth do people that dumb survive? It’s baffling.

WPITW: Twitter!

More accurately, Olbermann should have made “spammers on Twitter” as his “Worst Person in the World”… As reported a couple of months ago on the U.K. tech site The Register, these depraved assholes are now aiming to pollute yet another form of electronic communications with their toxic advertising waste:

After undermining the usefulness of email, turning newsgroups into a forum for promoting sex sites and filling blog comment sections with adverts for penis pill adverts and get rich quick schemes, spammers have set their sights on a new target — Twitter.

Richard Stiennon of ThreatChaos.com has published an analysis explaining how spammers are lining up to exploit the popular micro-blogging service as a medium for junk mail messages.

Personally, in the absence of having them drawn and quartered or summarily dispatched to the gallows, I’d like to see every spammer bankrupted with ruinous fines and then thrown in jail for a period of no less than a year, followed by a lifetime ban preventing them from ever owning or using a computer.

But actually, it’s the second WPITW here that interests me more. Refer back to this post from yesterday with respect to Gibby’s comments from 2007 about Media Matters and the “liberal smear merchants” using that organization as a “script service” etc., and contrast that to Brit Hume admitting the other night that he used to crib extensively from Brent Bozell’s hacktacular Media Research Center. Pot… meet kettle.

Huh?

Today, Bloggin’ Tory supremo Stephen Taylor asks: “Who are the populists and who are the elitists?”

This would, of course, be a fairly asinine question on its face at the best of times, but it’s made even more so by his qualification “on twitter…” Presumably, a meaningless, completely artificial distinction can be made between Stephen Harper, Michael Ignatieff and Jack Layton according to the number of lonely berks “following” each of them on Twitter.

Given the mundane, impersonal nature of the “tweets” originated by the leaders (which likely are just executed by an office assistant in any case), it’s difficult to see what point there could possibly be in being a “follower” of such things, let alone how this would be indicative of some imagined populism or elitism.

Maybe I’m missing something here…

Twitter Shmitter

Gawd, here’s another wretched invention that’s destroying civilization. I suspect that clinical psychologist Oliver James is probably correct when he suggests that “Twittering stems from a lack of identity” and guesses that the typical “follower” is likely to be “someone who is young and who feels marginalised, empty and pointless.”

p.s. Hey you kids, get off my lawn!