The Whole Delivery

Oh, is Amazon talking smack to Apple? It appears so : Youtube is gearing up to offer live streaming . A nice runthrough on Net Neutrality from CNET . Not a surprise that this current college generation is in a Mac loving mode . Not surprise that Mark Zuckerberg reminiscences on his days of being a certified classless clown .

Real dumb : Phil Corbett, the latest standards editor at the Times (maybe the greatest job in the world?), has issued a proclamation! Yesterday, the following memo went out, asking writers to abstain from the invented past-tense and other weird iterations of the magical noun-verb "Twitter." His case isn't terrible, actually—and he offers this terrifying vision: "Someday, 'tweet' may be as common as 'e-mail.'" Oh dear. Well, read for yourself and decide. It makes no sense whatsoever to make even a fuss about this. There are many analysis one can draw from this, but to me, this just makes the New York Times look more old, scruffy, and elitist. And stupid.

They have to turn off the shinny nice stuff until things get better : Update: 9:32 AM PDT / 16:32 UTC: To help stabilize the site we’re turning off a set of features including but not limited to: Twitter Search, hovercards, web sidebar data (trends, friends counts, etc), and profile image uploads. Update 9:57 AM PDT/ 16:32 UTC: Timelines are now current. Various other features remain disabled. I guess BP's oil spill has extended to even Twitter's fail whale:

So far : Zuckerberg: Before we get into the changes we get into the changes we’re doing today. i want to go through how we got to where we are now. I think it’s really easy to lose track of the fact that the service we have today is different from what we had in 2004. Over the last year, one of the big things we looked at was News Feed. In December added per-post privacy. Another thing is applications. We started with simple model for privacy around applications – it was “Allow” or cancel. We saw over time a lot of apps just used basic information about you. Most things didn’t use friends’ photos. We felt this model wasn’t granular enough. With how these screen shots are looking...... ....There appears to be some improvement, but the full proof still needs to be provided. The ACLU of California is giving there thumbs up actually: After months of privacy-failing moves, Facebook is finally friending privacy again. Facebook’s about-face on privacy comes as a result of mounting pre...

Photo from Washington Post That Zuckerberg guy, with his silly opt ed yesterday : We have heard the feedback. There needs to be a simpler way to control your information. In the coming weeks, we will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use. We will also give you an easy way to turn off all third-party services. We are working hard to make these changes available as soon as possible. We hope you'll be pleased with the result of our work and, as always, we'll be eager to get your feedback. From Tech Crunch today : On stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City, Facebook’s vice president of product Chris Cox announced that starting tomorrow, Facebook will be rolling out “drastically simplified” and improved privacy controls. He didn’t give any details, but did suggest that they should alleviate some of the recent privacy problems Facebook has faced. Ever since the recent wave of privacy backlash began following Facebook’s f8 conference, Facebook has been say...

Pop champagne indeed Conan's favorite videos from Youtube Okay, maybe there is a link to that, haha. To Tevin, thanks to, of course Youtube, Goodnight and again, HAPPY BIRTHDAY YOUTUBE!

And Conan O'Brien, and every other celebrity : Twitter is all sorts of wacky today. Earlier Mike Butcher at TC Europe reported on a bug which can be used to force any Twitter user to follow you. Now, everyone’s follower count has been wiped out, at least temporarily. If you look right now at the TechCrunch Twitter account, for instance, it lists 0 followers and 0 following. That is down from 1.4 million or so earlier this morning. This is true for every account. It appears to be temporary and part of Twitter’s attempt to deal with the first bug mentioned above. Tweets still seem to be going out, so everyone can breathe easy.

In the last development between tension between Wikileaks and Facebook (as well as Facebook's latest possible disturbing actions), the social protocol giant took down the "fan-generated" Wikileaks page that had 30,000 people on board and had been operating for a few years. For the moment however, the Wikileaks "Official Fan Page" on Facebook is still up. So unsurprisingly, Wikileaks tweeted about that 30,000 fan-generated page being taken down out of nowhere. In its usual snarky tone that can either make you love them or hate them, Gawker and their writer for this story in Adrian Chen points out the Facebook and Wikileaks acrimony from the past, highlighting the following episode in 2008. In short as you will see from the link , a Swiss bank named Julius Baer wanted to sue someone at Wikileaks for posting stolen documents of one of its clients. Since Wikileaks owners are basically specialist in being incognito and anonymous (up until the recent intervie...

We'll see if this 1% feels like a true 1% in due time. Twitter has radically reduced the amount of spam on the site, announcing that just over one per cent of all tweets are now spam-related. This is a significant change from August 2009 when spam was at its highest on the site accounting for a massive 11 per cent of tweets sent. The micro-blogging site has put in measures to cut down spam on the site even further, but it does admit that "while the battle will never be over, we're doing well on the front lines." Since I somehow got back into the public timeline, I have been getting spammers left and right. Maybe in regards to the ones with the tweets having all the current trending topics on them is what Twitter's main task was here. If so, than those spammers will still gladly exaggerate your stat totals.

Here we go again, thought at least this time it isn't another ploy to make your profile less private.....at first glance. They have implemented QR or Quick Response codes. Here's Tech Crunch with the few info : Judging from the tweets about this, the QR codes don’t seem to actually function yet, and the links on pages appear to come and go. We’re trying to get more information and will update accordingly. In case you’re not familiar with QR codes: QR is short for Quick Response (because they can be read quickly by a mobile phone through its camera). They are used to take a piece of information from a transitory media and put it in to your cell phone – this can be links, videos, text, photos and more. QR codes are generally more useful than a standard barcode is that they can store much more data. The other key feature of QR Codes is that instead of requiring a scanner to ‘read’ them, most modern mobile phones can convert them and there are applications out there for smar...

Basically, everyone is hating or not happy about Facebook's continued obsession for traffic by trying to be like Twitter instead of being the separate entity that it is suppose to be . Facebook announced this morning that its 350 million users will be prompted to make their status messages and shared content publicly visible to the world at large and search engines. It's a move we expected but the language used in the announcement is near Orwellian. The company says the move is all about helping users protect their privacy and connect with other people, but the new default option is to change from "old settings" to becoming visible to "everyone." This is not what Facebook users signed up for. It's not about privacy at all, it's about increasing traffic and the visibility of activity on the site. And : “The Facebook privacy transition tool is clearly designed to push users to share much more of their Facebook info with everyone, a worrisome developmen...

Biz Stone Still Making Big Moves Besides the horrible Kanye rumor that people think is funny that they haven't taken down YET....today has been a landmark day for the Bird company. First, it was made official that Microsoft Bing would put status updates of Facebook and Twitter on their program . Biz Stone talked about it on their blog , which is still on a Blogger template, I might add! We have a team focused on delivering value from a search and discovery perspective at Twitter and they're just getting started. Twitter is earning a reputation for delivering real-time results to queries about things that are happening right now. Moreover, there are already tens of thousands of Twitter apps and more to come because people want the choice to consume and create tweets wherever and whenever they prefer. The folks over at Bing took a keen interest in Twitter and worked fast to establish a working relationship with us in line with our open approach. Then, here comes this news about ...

The nutcase that put up that assassination poll on Obama. Just a kid. As many of our commenters speculated, fortunately, there was not. The Secret Service has since been able to identify the person responsible, and is it turns out, it was a juvenile. According to the AP, the Secret Service met with the child and his parents, determined the poll was nothing more than a prank, and will ultimately not file charges. Now a kid nowadays can range from someone who is, say, 8 years old, to one that is, well, 17. Either way, no rational kid any age would do that. And really, was it just a joke, or was that a coverup for real anger? Who knows except that kid and his family.

Um, facebook, this was up for a while (click on to see the madness): Would be a good time to be a little faster next time taking loon stuff like that down. And oh, delete that persons page.......forever. Update : Greg Sargent is reporting that the Secret Service told Facebook to take down that poll. Betting this won't be in there movie .

It really doesn't matter to me : There's a lot of talk today about our financing. A few hours ago we closed a significant round of funding with a group of investment firms that we're excited to publicly thank: Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Benchmark Capital. It was important to us that we find investment partners who share our vision for building a company of enduring value. Twitter's journey has just begun and we are committed to building the best product, technology, and company possible. I'm proud of the team we've built so far and I'm confident in the future we'll build together. What matters is Twitter staying Twitter. If that means seeing Ad's, then so be, because they have to make money somehow for how everyone uses their platforms by using them nowadays (including myself), so.......so be (and not the drink or South Beach). And it's much more welcomed news than seeing another soc...

Any............thing. It's official: Jesse Eisenberg will play Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in "The Social Network," a film based on the creation of the social networking site. But he's not the only rumored name now confirmed to be in the film. Variety reports that Justin Timberlake will also star in the flick alongside Eisenberg. Timberlake will play Napster co-founder Sean Parker, who became Facebook's founding president. Andrew Garfield has been cast as Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder who had a falling out with Zuckerberg as the site became a financial success. The crew, along with director David Fincher, will begin filming next month in Boston before moving production to Los Angeles. Biz Stone might as well get ready to make his Twitter film soon. And while we're at it, let's just give Mashable their movie as well, since they report on all of these things from social media all the time.

It really hurts my eyes, it is so damn ugly, and it sucks.

Pathetic once again from Zuckerberg and crew One of Twitter’s strongest features is the @reply, where you can direct a message to someone else on Twitter by typing @ and then their username. Facebook, which is trying to emulate some of Twitter’s best features, doesn’t have anything similar in the News Feed. In short, it’s not easy to have a public conversation. Very soon, that will no longer be the case. Facebook just introduced the ability to tag your friends in status updates. What makes this really interesting though is how you tag people: Using the @ symbol. Facebook has just turned on their own version of Twitter’s @Mentions feature that will be rolled out over the next few weeks. And oh boy...it now works The @ symbol now works just like Twitter, and not just for users, but for groups and fan pages as well. Facebook has just stepped deep into Twitter’s territory. How long until you can see your @reply history? We’re betting not very long at all. They might as well call themselv...

But they are already irrelevant to most now, even with this latest acquisition for a whopping $20 million. MySpace is close to acquiring popular social music service iLike, we’ve confirmed with multiple sources. The deal, which should close this week, will be MySpace’s first acquisition since new CEO Owen Van Natta took control of the company in April 2009. The price is “around $20 million.” I guess for music, My Space is still rele....oh, who am I kidding. Also in news, another great move from the best social network right now : According to a statement sent to us by uSocial, who markets products like a “$1,000 Twitter followers for $87” package, “Twitter has recently moved to [shut us down], by claiming [we're] “spamming.” uSocial takes issue with this claim, saying, “the definition of spam is using electronic messaging to send unsolicited communication and as we don’t use Twitter for this, the claims are false.” The company probably put itself on Twitter’s radar last week, whe...

These guys are just great Some of Twitter's best features are emergent—people inventing simple but creative ways to share, discover, and communicate. One such convention is retweeting. When you want to call more attention to a particular tweet, you copy/paste it as your own, reference the original author with an @mention, and finally, indicate that it's a retweet. The process works although it's a bit cumbersome and not everyone knows about it. Retweeting is a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be. The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact and the more efficient dissemination of information across the entire Twitter ecosystem is something we very much want to support. That's why we're planning to formalize retweeting by officially adding it to our platform and Twitter.com. And when will it launch? We are still sketching out exactly how this feature and its API counterpart works. Sharing our thoughts before launching means...