Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that some New York coffee shops were pulling the plug on customers that park themselves at tables, open their laptops, and hang out for hours, buying perhaps only a single latte as their cafe rental fee.

While independent coffee shops that are struggling to make ends meet may see the need to flush out the low-revenue laptop users, the major chains are not so strapped.

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Techmeme is on fire this morning with discussion of Rafe Needleman’s CNet post about Twitter’s supposed plans to index the content of links shared over the microblogging service. Ex-Googler turned Twitter exec, Santosh Jayaram, said as much last night, as well as mentioning plans to rank search results by the reputation of the author.

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Over the last few months, there have been countless stories of cutbacks at companies large and small. Real people are losing jobs. For some, that means losing their homes or being forced to change careers. Lately, we’ve been hearing the stories of many of the people on the receiving end of the hits recently sustained by the tech industry. But there is another side to layoffs that doesn’t get told very often. That’s the story of the people who do the laying off, those who make the decisions about who stays and who goes. Do they deserve our sympathy or our derision?

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The opening party of Boston-based Northbridge Venture Partners’ West Coast office in San Mateo, Calif., could not have come at a more awkward time. With the U.S. stock market sinking fast and rumors of venture capitalists being unable to access funds committed to them, I did not expect the shindig to be a happy affair.

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In 2001, the first dot-com economy collapsed. New companies couldn’t raise funds to continue operating. Existing companies couldn’t go public or get bought. My employer (Red Herring) folded, as did hundreds of other businesses. Almost all companies with speculative growth-based (as opposed to revenue-based) business models died off. And Aeron chairs flooded the market.

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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.

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If you follow me on the nanoblogs, you may have seen me complaining recently about getting pitched on new Web apps that I find either derivative or confusing. Or both. Now, in any entrepreneurial ecosystem, a big proportion of the ideas that people come up with will be bad, and many of those bad ideas will become actual products. But at the moment, the ratio of bad Web products to good (or even interesting) products is worse than usual. Here are a few reasons why. …

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Last week I discovered I was using Twitter too much. After an hour online with Twhirl, I got this message in the app: “Limit exceeded, paused 5 min.” The error condition cleared up shortly, but the next morning, after just a few minutes, it came back and did not resolve. I had to go back to accessing Twitter via the Twitter.com site, where I still had access.

I had been bitten by a deficiency in Twitter’s API (application programming interface), which allows alternate interfaces like Twhirl to work at all. The problem, it turns out, is temporarily fixable for end users, but Twitter is going to need to re-code its API to make the Twitter platform for third-party apps and services more robust.

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Maybe two years ago, I hosted a panel discussion on the emerging Web 2.0 economy, and I asked my panelists if we were in a bubble. Because it’s clear to me that we are. Not that it’s a bad thing, mind you. This is how technology evolves: like life itself, in blooms and crashes. And I think we should all acknowledge where we are in the cycle. Anyway, one of my panelists, SoftTech venture capitalist Jeff Clavier, was adamant that this was no bubble. Now Mr. Not-a-Bubble is trying to convince start-up companies that their income, if it’s in the $300,000-a-month range–a range that most companies made up of three guys and a credit-card-funded Amazon S3 account would kill for–is “noise” that distracts them from their potential.

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