| Once Again, the Lawsuit Proves its Worth as an Attention-Getter [UPDATED] |
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Someone created a fake Twitter account for St. Louis Cardinals’ manager Tony La Russa. The account’s Tweets were offensive, referring to the deaths of pitchers Darryl Kile and Josh Hancock. It was immature, obviously the work of a young kid. La Russa contacted Twitter and asked them to shut down the account. No brainer, right? Wrong. Three weeks later, Twitter hadn’t responded. So La Russa filed a lawsuit in San Francisco County Superior Court. Thirty minutes later, the account was gone. According to CEO Biz Stone, “We don’t have a list of trademark names we’re going through. It’s more like, let us know.” I’m thinking that policy ain’t gonna fly much longer, now that Twitter’s been anointed by Oprah and celebrities are giving us all the details of their fascinating lives. UPDATE, June 8: Twitter says they won’t settle with La Russa. They’re also working on verified accounts for “a small set of public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other celebs who run the risk of impersonation.” |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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Comments (0)June 3, 2009
| Stop Grousing About “The Media”. It Beats The Alternative. |
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Tomorrow’s the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising. Right now Chinese Web surfers can’t access Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and many more social networking sites. (Plus Microsoft’s Hotmail and Bing search engine. Go figure.) Coincidence? Nah. It’s the Great Firewall of China, doing what it does best. Think back to May 1990, the 20th anniversary of the Kent State shootings. Was the NY Times shut down for the day? Heck no. Did they publish a story about Kent State? Heck yeah. Despite its flaws and faults, God bless free and independent media. P.S. The Times has an interesting story today about the 4 photographers who got the shot of the Tiananmen Tank Man. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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May 29, 2009
| Again with the Scooping |
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Last month I had an idea for a post, came into the office, and found that TechCrunch beat me to it. Today the same thing happened. (I guess I’ll have to start working 16 hour days, 7 days a week, like Michael Arrington does.) I was mulling over yesterday’s product announcements by Microsoft and Google in my mind last night. Microsoft’s was just so, well, Microsoftian: “Let’s trot out the next version of our search engine. We’ll call it a ‘Decision Engine’ and give it a spiffy name, but it’ll be basically the same old warmed-up leftovers. Kinda like how we do operating systems.” Google’s announcement? It was real Googley: “Let’s change everything. We’ll create a comprehensive communication tool that combines all the things we use now, but are segmented or fragmented. It’ll be flexible. And open source, so it can grow in ways we haven’t thought of (yet).” As I’m bouncing these ideas around in my head, my T-Mobile G1 buzzed and started to load its new firmware update, codenamed “Cupcake“. (I’m digging the on-screen “soft” keyboard and auto-rotation between portrait and landscape modes. My wife is wondering why the seemingly-normal man she married is now getting frothy-mouthed over a phone upgrade.) Anyway, Android, the phone’s operating system, is free and open source. Google gives it away for free to handset manufacturers. Could these two companies be any more different in how they view the world? To get back to this article’s narrative hook, Arrington beat me with a great post titled, “What Just Happened? Thursday Was Supposed To Be Bing Day.” The image at the top is a hoot, as is this gem: “You know that scene in the Lord Of The Rings movie where the huge eye of Sauron on top of that mountain swings its view from the alliance troops massed at the Black Gate of Mordor over to the real action, Frodo with the Ring at the Cracks of Doom? That’s basically what happened today. The eyes of the world, and the press, swung from San Diego to San Francisco as they realized what was happening. And what was happening was this: Google stole Microsoft’s thunder with one of the most ambitious and exciting products the tech world has seen in a long while.” |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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May 28, 2009
| Another Product Announcement: Google Wave |
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While we’re on the topic of product announcements, Google’s announced Wave, which is all about rich, multi-threaded, real-time communication. It is, according to its developers, the answer to the question “What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?” I don’t have access to Wave right now. Even if I did, I don’t have time today to review it myself. (I’m due at Drexel in an hour.) Here are posts from Wired, Tim O’Reilly, and TechCrunch (plus a TC video interview with Wave’s developers) that you can digest. That said, here’s the best, most concise summary of Wave I could find (from the Wired article): “There are few effective ways to communicate within small groups, whether co-workers, friends, or family. Most of us use e-mail, just addressing a new message to a bunch of people. This starts a thread, which eventually gets twisted and fragmented into side conversations and becomes more and more confusing. The more-organized among us use tools like IM or IRC chat rooms, wikis, group blogs or web apps built for threaded communications, such as FriendFeed. Google Wave is an attempt to replace not one but all of these methods, rolling threaded conversations, real-time chat, nested comments, media sharing, link sharing and wiki-style collaboration into a familiar interface that looks and behaves like an e-mail inbox, complete with folders for keeping things organized and a search box for digging up older threads.” It sounds interesting, but it also goes against my Keep It Simple Stupid sensibilities. I guess I’ll have to use it for awhile before I make any judgements. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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May 26, 2009
| Facebook Says Spasibo for the 200 Million Bucks |
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Facebook has announced that they are taking a $200 million investment (for a 1.96% ownership stake) from Digital Sky Technologies, an investment group based in London and Russia. DST is getting preferred stock in the deal, but no seat on the FB board. FB is now valued at $10 billion, 2/3 of what it was when Microsoft pumped $250 million into it back in 2007. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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May 14, 2009
| This is Why I’d Never Want to Run a Social Networking Site |
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On Tuesday Twitter made what they called a “small settings update” so that you would no longer see @replies to people you don’t follow. They called them “one-sided fragments” and “undesirable”. For 99.9% of the humans on the planet, this was fine. For the Twitter power users it was like “kaboom” — here’s a sampling of the ire poured out in the blogosphere: So, like Facebook when the users revolted, the Twitter team had to retweet retreat: “So here’s what we’re planning to do. First, we’re making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon.” Got that? Me neither. Anyway, I’d like to take this opportunity to point out the following:
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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May 7, 2009
| Twitter Search Goes All “Knock Knock, Neo” On Its Engineers |
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Here’s an interesting quote from an article about changes Twitter’s going to make to its search algorithm: “Finally, a real-time search story from [Twitter Vice President of Operations Santosh] Jayaram, which he used to illustrate the immediacy of Twitter Search during the panel discussion: he told of being in the Twitter offices in San Francisco on March 30, when the Twitter engineers noticed that the word “earthquake” had suddenly started trending up. They didn’t know where the earthquake was. Several seconds later, their building started to shake. The earthquake had been in Morgan Hill, 60 miles south of San Francisco, and the tweets about the shaker reached the office faster than the seismic waves themselves.” FYI, Twitter plans to index the content of links included in Tweets — Can you say, “spam”? — and is working on a reputation ranking system. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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May 1, 2009
| Well, It Took ‘Em a Month … |
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… But Twitter finally made their “Discovery Engine” search tool available to the unwashed masses like me. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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April 29, 2009
| How Much Love Does Google Have To Give Newspapers? |
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Earlier this month I wrote about how newspaper publishers were threatening action against Google for “stealing” their copyrighted stuff. Danny Sullivan wrote a long rant titled “Google’s Love For Newspapers & How Little They Appreciate It” that’s a great read. And a great indictment of how newspaper publishers just don’t get how their business model has to change. Anyway, today I read a short post on Search Engine Land about how Google’s now Tweeting stories from Google News. Think about it: Google’s posting stories that they take the time and effort to index onto the world’s most popular Web property, and they’re providing links back to the publishers’ Websites to boot. They are driving users to those sites. Googlenews has (as of now) 2,965 followers. After 8 days. Do these newspaper publishers get any of this? |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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| Twitter’s Retention Rate Is 40%. Should They Be Concerned? |
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NielsenWire reports that 60% of new Twitter users do not return to the site: “Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty. Frankly, if Oprah can’t accomplish that, I’m not sure who can.” The Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog follows up with the question, “So what does it all mean –- and does it even matter?” Well lemmee jump in here and say this: you don’t actually have to visit Twitter.com once you set up your account. You can send Tweets from your phone, for example. I use Twitterfeed to dump (and “dump” is a totally appropriate word wrt the commentary I produce on a daily basis) my blog posts to my Twitter stream. I don’t go to Twitter to read ‘em again. Nielsen didn’t acknowledge any of this in their post (although one commenter did.) So as far as I’m concerned, we still don’t know what Twitter’s retention rate is. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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