The micro-messaging service Twitter Tuesday suspended the accounts of users don_draper and peggyolson. If those names sound familiar, you’re probably a fan of the hit AMC show “Mad Men.” Those two Twitter users take their names from two of the main characters on the show, and over the past several weeks had been providing updates, mostly in character from what I could tell.
We have already seen tons of things people do on Twitter to help their business–marketing people selling stuff, community managers engaging in various activities with their users, startups providing technical support, bloggers hunting for scoops and promoting their articles. But Jason Goldberg, CEO of SocialMedian–which was recently launched to the public–has found a new (and kind of unexpected) way to use Twitter for business: He is attempting to raise investment right within the microblogging service.
Investors and marketers have been agog over the potential for Twitter–unlike other social media properties, such as Facebook and MySpace–to crack the code, finally, on wringing revenue from millions of users. But the optimists better brace for disappointment.
There seems to be some grassroots support for the idea of an emergency broadcast system on the micro-messaging service Twitter, at least from people who have emergencies to broadcast. The latest cry for help: A Chinese journalist nabbed by security forces during the Olympics and forced to go to a village far from the event.
You can see Zhou “Zuola” Shuguang’s Twitter stream here, but it won’t do you much good if you can’t read Chinese. A translation of his Tweets is on Global Voices Online. According to the article, Zuola–a childless 27-year-old–was ordered to meet with police over accusations of having two children, one more than the local limit. On meeting the police, he was placed in a car, driven to a mining town, and placed under house arrest.
As more of the student population gets access to broadband connections, faculty at major universities are exploring how rich media and online interactivity can enhance, supplement, and even replace the classroom experience. In the latest development, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas is going to experiment with replicating a graduate seminar online in order to serve a very specific function: providing graduate students at other institutions with access to a course that isn’t offered by their university.
Today, Google’s Gmail service experienced a system-wide outage that affected regular Gmail accounts as well as enterprise users. In the course of the afternoon, the service came back up for a little while, but as of now, there are still a lot of users who can’t access their accounts (Update: looks like Gmail is now up and running again). Google is updating users through a forum on Google Groups. A lot of frustrated Gmail users used Twitter to voice their grievances, which, surprisingly, handled this sudden spike in traffic extremely well.
Every time I get invited to a new microblogging service, I cringe. Because once I try it (which, of course, I will; I can’t help myself) and develop even a small network of people on it, I can’t really leave. I don’t want to be rude to people I’ve started to communicate with. And then I get mad.
In yet another powerful showcase of Twitter’s potential power as a disseminator of information, today several people received the first information via the service that NASA has confirmed that its Phoenix Mars Lander has, in fact, found water on Mars. It’s still not on CNN.com, not on MSNBC.com, not on Fox.com. But a Twitter search query reveals it’s all over Twitter.
As a result of the news spreading quickly through Twitter, it’s also now all over FriendFeed, where some discussions are taking place on the subject. This is the kind of stuff these services are built for.
The water was found in ice-rich soil. Tests confirmed the ice was water-based.
Twitter users are very familiar with the iconic image of the Fail Whale. This social object has been latched onto by Twitter fans not just as a representation of Twitter’s downtime, but also as a representation of the community’s love for the service and their hope for its triumph over its many struggles. Despite Twitter’s troubles, most of its users stayed true, watching and waiting as the team began the long process of recoding the application in order for it to scale up. As Twitter succumbed to the strain of running their under-provisioned service, the Fail Whale “over capacity” image would appear. And this image began to take on a life of its own.
It began with a twitter from one of Capitol Hill’s best-known technophiles.
“I just learned the Dems are trying to censor Congressmen’s ability to use Twitter Qik YouTube Utterz etc–outrageous and I will fight them,” Representative John Culberson, Republican of Texas, wrote last Tuesday on his personal page on the online text-messaging site Twitter, where he posts a daily, rapid-fire log of his thoughts. Messages on Twitter are called tweets.
A few hours after he posted his first complaint (always 140 characters or less when twittering), Mr. Culberson logged back on: “Before I could post a Tweet I would have to get approval of the twits that run the House!” And an hour later: “The Dems will do this unless the Internet community stops them.”
The New York Times today finally got around to noticing that when Web sites go down, people are increasingly likely to get mad and generally react the way I might if I drove to my favorite bar and found it closed for a private party. I might be miffed and share a few choice words with members of my party before deciding on a new locale. However, when we write blogs or tweets (if Twitter is up), the inconvenience and our subsequent vitriol is archived forever and transmitted around the world rather than just to our friends. And because millions of other people want to go to that same bar, the chorus of curses grows quickly.
Human history is one of progressive improvement in communication. From the 20th century, mail was a fundamental form of communication. The invention of email changed two things. It became cheap to send short mail, and delivery was instant. Email became favored for both corporate and personal communication. But email faces increasing competition. Chat, text messages, Twitter, social networks and even life-streaming tools are chipping away at email usage. In this post we take a look at what’s happening and assess if email is in danger.
Amazon.com (AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos has taken a stake in Twitter, the red-hot microblogging service. Twitter announced the move in a blog post Tuesday. Bezos made the investment through Bezos Expeditions, a vehicle for his personal investments. Also investing in the company is venture firm Spark Capital; partner Bijan Sabet will take a seat on the Twitter board.
The best thing with which to mock a company that shouldn’t exist is a company that doesn’t actually exist. And San Francisco’s Internet hipsters won’t just snicker about your start-up behind your back; they’ll do it where your vanity Google Blog Alerts will find it. Plurk is only the latest target–a start-up that lets users post short updates to the Web, as Twitter does, but adds a timeline. Plurk’s faux nemesis: Pheltup, “the first social network that not only tells you WHO is doing WHAT; but also WHY.” When some Twitter “thought leaders”–Pheltup’s target market–fell for the rumor that it had acquired the freshly hatched Plurk, it just showed how easily pranked the neophile cool kids of the Web are. What upped the ante is that Plurk’s real executives are now actually responding to the (fake) buzz about their “crude and unwholesome” would-be owners.
The Twitter guys have been getting a lot of flak over the past few months (and rightly so, in many cases) for the unreliability of their app. But I think they should get some props for opening up and talking about what’s going on over there. Granted, this newfound desire to engage in dialogue (or damage control) should have come a lot earlier, at least in my opinion, but at least they are doing it now. They’ve even managed to foil Mike Arrington’s attempt to start a late-weekend bitchmeme by asking some rather pointed questions of the company.
Although they kind of dance around the specifics a little in their responses, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone of Twitter seem to more or less confirm many of Arrington’s suspicions about their architecture–they admit, for example, that the company is restructuring the way that the system functions, and have brought in some big brains in order to do so.
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