The Whole Delivery

Ten years ago today we finally released what had been my life's work up to that point: The College Dropout. — KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 10, 2014 I say "finally" because it was a long road, a constant struggle, and a true labor of love — KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 10, 2014 to not only convince my peers and the public that I could be an artist, but to actually get that art out for the world to hear. — KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 10, 2014 I am extremely grateful to each and every person along that road who helped, lent an ear, lent their voice, — KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 10, 2014 I am extremely grateful to each and every person along that road who helped, lent an ear, lent their voice, — KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 10, 2014 Ten years later I am still the same kid from Chicago, still dreaming out loud, still banging on the door. — KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 10, 2014 The doors may be heavier, but I promise ...

The top three: 3) One from Huffington Post news editor Johanna Barr. (Full disclosure, I know her): I can't believe Beyonce wore white to all those people's weddings. — Johanna Barr (@JohannaBarr) January 27, 2014 2) Charlemagne, with his proper Country Music analysis: I think Taylor was supposed to win but they saw her wilding to hard to Kendrick and called an audible. — Charlamagne Tha God (@cthagod) January 27, 2014 And the #1 tweet of the night from an unlikely source, Arby's Restaurant shares their thoughts on Pharrell's synonymous Fedora hat . 1) The tweet of the month and one of the tweets of 2014 Hey @Pharrell , can we have our hat back? #GRAMMYs — Arby's (@Arbys) January 27, 2014 It was so legendary that even Pharrell had to provide a witty reply: Y'all tryna start a roast beef? 😄😘 " @Arbys : Hey @Pharrell , can we have our hat back? #GRAMMYs ” — Pharrell Williams (@Pharrell) January 27, 2014 The top three tweets of many gr...

People are just sick, especially when jealous on their soul grips : Kanye West has finally decided to follow somebody and that person has opted out of his newfound fame. Steven Holmes of England is the only person that West has decided to follow on social media monolith Twitter. Kanye began following Holmes on July 31 to which Holmes replied, "holy s**t, bro." "You are the chosen one dun dun dun dun," Kanye tweeted to Holmes, appointing him the first person he'd follow. Holmes quickly went from a few followers to now well over 5,000 (5,674 at press time). "I won't be speaking to any more press/journalists," Holmes said rejected his recognition. "I won't be speaking to anybody else, surprisingly not everyone wants to be famous. That's all I'm saying. This has been completely surreal and I really have no desire for this attention i'm just a normal person." Holmes has had his share of haters, as most people would l...

She isn't going anywhere, and she is calling out the real idiots here : Shirley Sherrod, the former Agriculture Department Georgia Director of Rural Development, says she is a victim. A victim of poor reporting and, as she contends, clear bias and racist coverage from both Andrew Breitbart and Fox News. "When you look at their reporting, this is just another way of seeing that they are (racist)," Sherrod told me about Fox in a lengthy interview Tuesday night. "But I have seen that before now. I saw their reporting as biased during the Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration." The Murdoch Comedy Network doesn't know what to do, playing keep away and just looking at the White House at this. It will be interesting how further low O'Liely will go after he has done nothing but slam Sherrod repeatedly from the moment he laid eyes on the story: Oh, and in one of the lies of 2010 (and of all time), look at Mr. Straight Jacket himself, offerin...

With how things were going in the 9 PM slot, it was about time for it to happen . Larry King, whose nightly CNN talk show was long a required stomping ground for striving politicians and contrite celebrities, announced Tuesday that he is going to step down from the program in the fall. But he isn't entire gone from television, and he even broke it on Twitter .

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:

Photo from the Associated Press To put their workers in such danger, leading to their death, is already enough of a case for these monsters to be incarcerated now. But added intentional negligence on their part adds to the punishment they should have already received . A shocking memo has revealed that British Petroleum admitted to congressional investigators that their decision to ignore warning signs hours before an oil rig exploded led to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Tests indicted that something was wrong on the Deepwater Horizon, yet BP made a "fundamental mistake" in continuing operations, according to the memo released by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.). Two hours afterwards, the rig exploded, ultimately killing 11 workers. "The data suggests that the crew may have attempted mechanical interventions," the memo said. "But soon after, the flow out and pressure increased dramatically and the explosion took place....

I can't believe I'm seeing this : As Liliana said : It shouldn't surprise anyone that has been able to pay attention though: It shouldn't at all.

Here :

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.

Just unbearable : I had no problem with the whole "Baseball is a Father-Son" thing. But basketball is a babymama's game? Adam Serwer gave a quality reply to this trash : But I will go a little further here. Jason Whitlock can be a real idiot sometimes. But damn, this one really really hurts my eyes.

Look what pleasant thing key to us shortening our long massive leaks on Twitter is getting some deserved attention . The default link shortener on Twitter, bit.ly, just keeps getting bigger. In March, 3.4 billion bit.ly-shortened links were clicked on, up from 2.7 billion in February and only 87 million a year ago. Yesterday was a record day for bit.ly, with 147 million clicks (see chart). Even though Twitter still dominates, more than half of all bit.ly links are encoded somewhere besides Twitter.com. Of the 40-50% created within the Twitter ecosystem, a large chunk occurs via Twitter clients and services. But other services such as Facebook are growing as well. About 100 million clicks last month went to Facebook. The diversification will only matter if Twitter ever decides to replace bit.ly as the default shortener with something like twee.tt, which Twitter owns. But there is no indication any change is imminent. The Promoted Tweets which Twitter is about to roll out as its firs...

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.

Golf Channel analysis Charlie Rymer (the one on the right) shows how emotional he was after "Today's President of the United States" press conference The touching things in life. Miscellaneous Don't know what got into Elton John to say this . Who cares ? The Pulitzer isn't worth what it used to be, especially since Politico people are on the board now. Just give them the trophy. Amazing how Twitter can now lead to shows being produced based on the strength of one page . And how did I miss this until now...... Classic :

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 ...

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...

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...

Well, yeah. At least someone calls out the No Fun League for what they are. Will be interesting though if he actually goes and does this, or if he is doing this for more Me-Chad. And would be even more hilarious if ESPN placed this one on their Breaking News line. Updated : And Oregon have decided to suspend LeGarrette Blount for the rest of the season.