Steve Martin’s not going to let his one-liners on Twitter go to waste. Instead, he’s going to recycle them for a for-charity book.

The actor/comedian announced the move on his Twitter feed on Thursday:

The title of the book: “The Ten, Make that Nine, Habits of Very Organized People. Make that Ten.” Grand Central Publishing, a unit of Hachette Book Group, will publish the book in 2012.

Martin joined Twitter in September 2010 and now has close to 1.8 million followers. Martin’s not the first to recycle tweets into a book. The forerunner for Twit Lit was Justin Halpern, who got a book deal and a short-lived TV show based on his Shit My Dad Says Twitter feed.

Some recent Martin tweets:

“Dinosaurs did not walk with humans. The evolutionary record says different. They gamboled.”
“Got the new iPhone and it keeps saying, ‘you’re a creep.’”
“I’m for the Wall Street Occupiers. But will they accept me when they find out I sell packaged mortgage default instruments to children?”
“I’m tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period”
“I got a flue shot and now my chimney works perfectly.”

Image courtesy of Flickr, Ellasportfolio

BONUS: 10 Must-Follow Fake Twitter Celebs

Looking for other funny celebrities to follow on Twitter? These accounts aren’t the real deal … but they’re all the funnier because of it.


1. Not Burt Reynolds


Not Burt Reynolds has less followers then most accounts on this list, but with tweets like "When I lose a follower, I just assumed they died. Because let's face it, it's hard not to love me," and "You can call it a mustache, or a hairy set of angel wings," the account's sure to catch fire. Follow this account for tweets documenting what you imagine Mr Reynolds' life would be like.

Click here to view this gallery.

More About: shit my dad says, Steve Martin, Twitter

Just when you think there couldn’t possibly be any more information coming at you on the social web (and I am using the term “information” very loosely), another source pops up. First it was just Facebook messages, then it was following people on Twitter, now there’s Google+ and LinkedIn and Instagram and half a dozen other newcomers — all producing streams of activity that compete for our increasingly scarce attention. David Shing, the “digital prophet” for AOL, said this week that he expects unfriending and unfollowing to become a major phenomenon, and I know just what that feels like: a friend unfollowed me recently, and it got me thinking about this attention economy we are living in.

As anyone who follows me through Twitter or any other social network probably knows by now, I am pretty active on a number of different services for a variety of reasons. I don’t use LinkedIn very much — mostly because it feels like a site where you go to post your resume, rather than a place you go to have a discussion with people about something — but I post links there when I have a new blog post, and sometimes check out LinkedIn Today for industry news. I mostly use Facebook for social reasons, to keep in touch with family, but I post links there too. And I am a fan of Instagram for photos, for reasons that Om has described, and have been trying to post more to Google+ as well.

Am I part of the solution, or part of the problem?
The result of all this is two-fold: I wind up posting many of the same links — to my blog posts, as well as to photos and other things — to multiple networks, because I don’t know which of them my friends and followers (and potential readers) are using the most. Like me, I suspect many of them use multiple networks for different purposes. And I often re-post links in Twitter, because as Bitly has shown with its link analytics, the “half-life” of a tweet is remarkably short, and so many people may not see it. The other effect of this is that in some networks, such as Google+, I don’t participate as much as I should, and I sometimes get criticized for just posting links and then not sticking around.

I try not to clog up my stream with unnecessary things, and I try to make my activity on any network a mix of professional and personal, with humor and conversation and photos mixed up amid the blog posts and other industry-related things. I think it helps when people, including journalists, are human in that way (although not too human, hopefully). But I can see how my stream could be noisy for some — and it certainly has turned out to be for one friend, who said recently that they were forced to unfollow me. I’m not going to name them because it’s not really important who they are, I’m more interested in their reasons; they said they unfollowed me because:

I’m frankly tired of people who talk about themselves or promote their work. Repetition just makes it worse. Bombarding me with the same content multiple times in multiple channels makes you uninteresting to me.

I was somewhat taken aback by this, I admit. I assumed people would just ignore the tweets or messages they weren’t interested in, as I do when I come across things in other people’s streams that I don’t find relevant. But when I asked this friend to explain, they described something that I thought was probably pretty common for some people — and something that might possibly become more widespread, as Shing described in his recent interview with The Guardian. In effect, this person said their attention was a precious resource, and that I (and presumably others) were wasting it:

Twitter is no different from any medium in this respect – I only follow what deserves my attention. Diluting my attention stream is a great way to tell me that you do not share my concern about allocating it.

Information overload and Shirky’s “filter failure”

I think this is a feeling we probably all have now and then, thanks to what some call information overload and Clay Shirky has called “filter failure.” Maybe we feel it when our inbox is filled with messages that have been sent by someone clicking “reply all,” or maybe when we get inundated with Facebook messages and photo tags, or — on the far end of the spectrum — when we try to follow someone like Robert Scoble on a new social network like Google+. The uber-blogger and social-media maven described recently how his own wife deleted her Google+ account because of the signal-to-noise problem caused in part by Scoble himself.

Facebook has only added to this phenomenon with its new “ticker,” which scrolls by as you watch the page, with every “like” and message and Spotify song appearing and then disappearing. Facebook seemed very proud of its new “frictionless sharing” social apps, but many expressed concern about the volume of noise that would be created — and I think rightfully so. In a way, these concerns are the same as the ones my friend has: where do I spend my attention? There is a finite amount of it, and so at some point we have to choose where to allocate it. I spend less time on Facebook in part because I have too many “friends” there and the signal-to-noise ratio is quite low.

How do we solve these kinds of problems? I don’t really know. Filters such as Circles and Facebook lists — or even a new network like Bill Gross’s Chime, which lets you follow only part of a person rather than everything they post — might be part of the solution, but they also just increase the flow. Do we have to get ruthless with our friend and follower lists, and prune them even if we risk offending someone? Perhaps. All I know is that the problem isn’t getting any better — if anything, it is getting worse.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users John Lambert Pearson and Kevin Dooley

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NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social mediaPlayers and Strategies for Real-Time In-Stream AdvertisingFinding the Value in Social Media Data

Since late 2007, an obscure Twitter account has been automatically tweeting a single word every half an hour. The ultimate goal: to tweet every word in the English language. We spoke to the guy behind Everyword. More »

Hi everybody.

I’m Rich. I work at 10 Yetis PR Agency. (‘Hiiii Rich’, you say in a soothingly choral sort of way).

And I’m an addict. (You clap empathetically, looking at me with a knowing approval and compassionately tearful gleam in your eye).

Read more on Are you addicted to early adoption?…

The perfect life, that’s what I called it – the phenomenon that has spread across the two social networks I frequent. Facebook Photos is nothing new and has come up here as a subject for discussion earlier. But its rise has been meteoric, just like the social network. The best vacations, the coolest friends, the hottest parties, the snazziest gadgets, seems everyone can haz it. Twitter is not far behind. People, almost like brands, out to show their best side. Made for Facebook/Made for Twitter/ Lies of Life, call it what you will. Of course condolences would pour in if someone had a distressing update. Either outrage against the wrongdoer if any, or at least a +1 to show solidarity. Unfollow, unfriend you’d say, but these are not bad people, they just have a perfect life. Unfortunately, the networks work as emotion aggregators too, forcing me to vent once in a while. [image source Check it out for more awesomeness ] And yes, I generalise.

I have wondered about the motivation. Maybe we like to share happiness more than sadness by default. Maybe sadness is a private thing we choose only to share with dear ones. (do you think there’s a social network idea there? A mutant version of Path) Maybe the algorithms ensure I see only the happy ones. Or maybe it’s indeed true that our vanity stops us from showing that we have been humbled, beaten, saddened by a human hand or a twist of fate.

A few minutes after I tweeted about the perfect life, I got a message on the blog (deleted now) from an old dear friend S, who had gotten in touch after quite a while. In the long years before a virtual home, when a real diary was a lifesaver, hers would probably be the name that was mentioned most, before the rise of the  thenceforth omnipresent D.

S isn’t on twitter, so she would have no idea of the coincidence. She was happy about the progress I was making, doing the things I love to do and generally having fun. And that led me to wonder if I, in my own limited way, was also feeding the perfect life network. So here’s setting the record straight. In case you see my vacation photos, restaurant visits and general attempts at humour and think that the story begins and ends there, you couldn’t be further from the truth.

As many of my posts would indicate, I have multiple ‘missed life crises’ – singer, author, theatre actor, h3ll, even cricketer, and perhaps a few more too, all skills I have either displayed to some degree or think I possess. I think way too much for my own good and am forever irritated at the inequity of life (in terms of those more unfortunate) and not being able to do much about it. I am constantly trying to shed baggage and sometimes failing miserably. My feelings of insecurity would be legend if they were a published work. Thankfully D exists. There is more, but that’s enough fun at my expense. The silver lining is that I’m learning through it all. Meanwhile, all I’m trying to say is that the grass on the other side is probably photoshopped. If it’s not, they’ve probably worked hard to make it this way. And we can too, if we try. Please smile now, and mean it. Or I’ll have to ask you to Like the post

until next time, open source happiness

PS: It was only recently that I gave off my fakemytrip.com domain to mygola. I had bought it thanks to an irritating status on FB, and had a 4sq based idea around it.

You know the usual litany of complaints about Twitter: it’s full of inane ramblings; it’s stuffed with unverified information — or it’s just too much information for our poor brains to cope with.

But not everybody thinks that Twitter is too much. In fact, U.K.-service Bonfire.im wants to turn up the heat — by adding a chat interface on top of Twitter itself.

Bonfire, which has just gone live, is a browser extension that uses some smart code and clever techniques to add an instant messaging layer into the Twitter website. If another user you follow is currently on Twitter and using Bonfire, they’ll have a little green light next to their name — just click on their button and you can start up a chat session right there, without ever leaving the page.

Founder Josh Russell describes it as “Facebook chat for Twitter”, which gives you a good idea of what it feels like to use — and to some degree what it looks like, too. But it’s also more than that: it brings the idea of presence to the site too, which in many ways could end up being as important to the service as the ability to talk. After all, it’s one thing to read people’s messages; it’s quite another to be able to see that they’re looking directly at Twitter right at that moment.

If used properly Bonfire could not only be a godsend for IM and Twitter addicts — but for all the people who follow them, too. After all, think of all those times you’ve been barraged with two people chatting away publicly to each other and wanted to tell them to take it off Twitter… well, now they can do it really easily.

Of course, Twitter already has a way for people to have private conversations, through direct messaging — but it’s got an entirely different interface, it’s a long, long way from real-time and it suffers from a few interface problems. Bonfire could prove to be a smart way for — whether it’s individuals, groups of friends, or companies who use Twitter for customer service.

It’s not going to be for everyone, but with 100 million active users globally Twitter is a broad church. Russell suggests there may be a significant audience for what he’s offering — particularly for those who are already heavy IM or BlackBerry Messaging users, for example.

“Twitter is a big place,” he says. “It’s hard to nail down a typical Twitter user. But we think it’s likely that we’ll see both the BBM generation and people who get their news from Twitter being big groups of initial users.”

It’s still very early days — the team has been working on the service for just a few months, with some small seed investment — and the feature set is fairly limited right now. But ultimately, says Russell, Bonfire may consider developing further features or adding other platforms, too — but he says it’s important to avoid mission creep for what is already a potentially overwhelming product.

“We’re building Bonfire to service as many people as possible, and we have that in mind when considering every feature,” he says.

Still, for anyone who thinks that adding instant messaging is just too much to cope with for Twitter users, there’s a one-word answer: Tweetdeck. The power users’ client of choice, also based in London, is utterly overwhelming to anyone new to Twitter… and yet it was so well-used that it ended up being bought by the service itself in a deal estimated at $40 million last year.

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Finding the Value in Social Media DataIn Q3, NewNet Focus Turns to Business Models and SearchFlash analysis: the future of Yahoo

Online social networks are everywhere these days, a truly global phenomenon. But where are the different social networks having the most success in terms of popularity? That is what we’ll try to answer in this post.

We have included 11 social networks in this survey: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Orkut, Tumblr, FourSquare, MySpace, LiveJournal, Hi5 and Bebo.

Please note that this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list covering all social networks out there. There are literally hundreds of them.

To map popularity, we’ve used Google search statistics (their Insights for Search tool). This will give us a good indication of the interest – or popularity, if you will – of a social network in a given region. We’re basing this survey on search results from the past 90 days, so it’s a reasonably large, up-to-date sample. After all, we want to know the situation right now.

A few initial observations
We’ve gone through and summarized some of the information for you, but please feel free to scroll down and check out the individual social networks you’re interested in.

Top countries for each social network (in terms of interest)

Facebook is most popular in Turkey and Venezuela.
Twitter is most popular in Venezuela and Brazil.
LinkedIn is most popular in the Netherlands and India.
Google+ is most popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Tumblr is most popular in the Philippines and Brazil.
FourSquare is most popular in Indonesia and Malaysia.
MySpace is most popular in Puerto Rico and Myanmar (Burma).
LiveJournal is most popular in Singapore and Russia.
Hi5 is most popular in Thailand and Romania.
Bebo is most popular in Ireland and New Zealand.
Orkut is most popular in Brazil and Paraguay. The interest shown for Orkut in Brazil far outstrips that of any other country.

It’s worth pointing out that this doesn’t necessarily mean that the majority of users come from these countries. We’re talking about sheer interest in a service. The size of the local user base will depend on the size of the Internet population in that country.

Also note that we haven’t compared the social networks against each other. This is a survey that examines where each social network has managed to garner the most interest in its service.

Some standout countries in this survey

Brazil is in the top five for Twitter, Orkut, Tumblr and Bebo.
Singapore is in the top five for LinkedIn, Tumblr, FourSquare and LiveJournal.
The United States is in the top five for LinkedIn, Tumblr and MySpace.
The Philippines is in the top five for Tumblr, FourSquare and LiveJournal.
India is in the top five for LinkedIn and Orkut.
The United Kingdom is in the top five for LinkedIn and Bebo.
Indonesia is in the top five for Twitter and FourSquare.
Venezuela and Turkey are in the top five for Facebook and Twitter.

That was just a brief summary. Why don’t you go ahead and have a look for yourself? We’ve listed the results for all the included social networks here below. We’ve also included direct links to Google Insights for Search if you want to dig even deeper into the results and play around a little.

Facebook

Countries with the highest interest in Facebook:

Turkey
Venezuela
Tunisia
Colombia
Dominican Republic

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Facebook here.

Twitter

Countries with the highest interest in Twitter:

Venezuela
Brazil
Indonesia
Turkey
El Salvador

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Twitter here.

LinkedIn

Countries with the highest interest in LinkedIn:

Netherlands
India
United Kingdom
Singapore
United States

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for LinkedIn here.

Google+

Countries with the highest interest in Google+:

Taiwan
Hong Kong
Nepal
Finland
Honduras

(Ok, Hong Kong isn’t a country per se, but Google Insights for Search lists “regions”, which don’t always correspond to countries.)

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Google+ here.

Orkut

Countries with the highest interest in Orkut:

Brazil
Paraguay
India
Haiti
Oman

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Orkut here.

Tumblr

Countries with the highest interest in Tumblr:

Philippines
Brazil
Australia
United States
Singapore

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Tumblr here.

FourSquare

Countries with the highest interest in FourSquare:

Indonesia
Malaysia
Singapore
Thailand
Philippines

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for FourSquare here.

MySpace

Countries with the highest interest in MySpace:

Puerto Rico
Myanmar (Burma)
United States
Jamaica
Trinidad and Tobago

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for MySpace here.

LiveJournal

Countries with the highest interest in LiveJournal:

Singapore
Russia
Belarus
Ukraine
Philippines

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for LiveJournal here.

Hi5

Countries with the highest interest in Hi5:

Thailand
Romania
Peru
Laos
Portugal

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Hi5 here.

Bebo

Countries with the highest interest in Bebo:

Ireland
New Zealand
United Kingdom
Brazil
Australia

You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Bebo here.

Final notes
As you noticed, we only included a limited list of social networks in this survey. For example, we didn’t include social networks that are regional by nature, i.e. don’t have a global focus. There are plenty of country- or language-specific social networks that are successful in individual countries, for example VKontakte in Russia and the Russian-speaking countries of the former Soviet Union, Mixi in Japan, RenRen and Qzone in China, Hyves in the Netherlands, etc.

If you’re curious, you can check out a similar survey we did three years ago, in August of 2008. We thought an update was long overdue, since things change so rapidly in social media.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has just dropped some numbers at a speaker dinner here at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Costolo revealed that the company has gone from 90 million tweets per day in September of 2010 to 100 million at the beginning of this year to 1/4 billion tweets per day as of today, a 177% percent change.  Twitter is now serving up a billion tweets every 4-5 days, Costolo said.

The company has gone from having 30% of its 100 million users active every day in January 2011 to over 50% active daily users today. The recent iOS 5 Twitter integration has notably increased signups 3x.

Costolo said that those 250 million tweets mean that there’s enough content on the site that a new user should be able to find something relevant to them, “We’ve got to figure out how to capture the volume at the same time as separating the signal from the noise.”

Costolo has ambitious plans for scale, “We think that we can be on 2 billion devices around the world, and reach every person on the planet, and the way to do that is through simplifying.”






Crunchbase





TWITTER






Company:
Twitter


Website:
twitter.com


Funding:
$1.16B



Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...






Learn more

Are you a techie looking for work? We recently offered some tips on landing jobs at Google, Apple and Facebook, but there are more companies in the Valley than those three. And you might be wondering what the culture is like at each of these companies, as well as at LinkedIn, Twitter, Eventbrite, Gaia and Tagged.

Back in August, we brought you word of awesome perks at various startups; now, we bring you perks at a number of Silicon Valley’s largest and finest. From yoga to catered lunches, 401(k)s to dry cleaning, sports teams to vacation days, these tech companies seem to understand that quality of life affects productivity — and that having to run fewer errands after work means you’re more likely to stay at the office.

Check out the infographic below from ResumeBear for a breakdown of who offers what perks. Do you work at any of these companies and take advantage of any of these perks? Let us know in the comments below.

Social Media Job Listings

Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

Interactive Designer at Weber Shandwick / Powell Tate in Washington, DC
Digital Producer at Adkeeper in New York
Software Engineer — Front End at Yelp, Inc. in San Francisco

Infographic courtesy of ResumeBear

More About: Facebook, features, Google, infographic, job search series, jobs, linkedin, mashable, Tech, trending, Twitter
For more Business coverage:Follow Mashable Business on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Business channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

We just can't stop talking about how lovely our community is. You guys are AWESOME! We've got another example of how some of our friends on Twitter collaborated to create a story on Twitter. We started chatting with @asmita when we were looking for people who could conduct storytelling workshops in their neighbourhoods. At the same time, 4 of our authors were collaborating to write a book in 2 days. Inspired by the live write-a-thon, Asmita decided to collaborate with other tweeple and write a children's story.Asmita tweeted to ask if anyone would be interested in joining her and soon enough she had a team of writers - @ratna_rajaiah, @neobluepanther, @hersoapbox and @asmita. While they were writing the story @pushpz also jumped in to write the story. They defined the method they would use to create the story - one person kickstarting the story and sending out a few tweets and then letting the next writer take over. The hashtag for the story tweets was #swpb and we watched the story unfold over a few days.Asmita's blog says, "We wanted to kick off the story by drawing inspiration from an illustration from Pratham Books website but could not reach a consensus. So I took the liberty of picking up their story title “The Timid Train” and starting the story from there."Asmita has compiled all the tweets on her blog. You can read the entire story here. Let @ratna_rajaiah, @neobluepanther, @hersoapbox, @asmita and @pushpz know what you thought of their story. Leave a comment on this post or on the story post to give them your feedback.A big thank you to @ratna_rajaiah, @neobluepanther, @hersoapbox, @asmita and @pushpz for creating this story.Image Source : Katey Nicosia

It’s a bit surprising that Google’s smartphone and tablet platform didn’t find a use for the @Android handle on Twitter until now, but that problem has now been rectified.

You won’t find much to read just yet, but if you want to follow the future adventures of iOS’ biggest nemesis, hop on over to @Android and hit the follow button.

The official account of the Android developer team is still over at @AndroidDev.

In one of its first tweets, the Android Twitter account posted a video of Google employees erecting a 10-foot tall Ice Cream Sandwich statue; check it out below.

More About: android, Google, Mobile, smartphone, social networking, Twitter
For more Mobile coverage:Follow Mashable Mobile on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Mobile channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

If you’re a BlackBerry owner, Research In Motion’s recent outage probably isn’t that funny, but if you’re anyone else, there’s a lot of good tweet material.

Many Twitter users took the outage as an opportunity to launch some zingers at the beleaguered RIM, which had the bad luck of experiencing a global outage at the same time positive reviews rolled in for the iPhone 4S and users rushed to download iOS5.

In a press conference on Wednesday, RIM CTO for Software David Yach blamed backlogged messages in Europe for the issue as Twitterers blamed RIM. Here are some of the funniest tweets so far:


@petridishes



Click here to view this gallery.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Marich Terz

More About: blackberry, outages, RIM, Twitter
For more Mobile coverage:Follow Mashable Mobile on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Mobile channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

The real-time search engine Topsy, which has until now indexed Twitter, today adds public Google+ posts.

In what it says is an improvement on Google’s newly added Google+ search feature, Topsy says it ranks search results by trying to determine which users and posts are most globally and recently relevant for the query, rather than whether a user is close to or within the searcher’s Google+ network.

Google isn’t handing out much access to Google+ to developers yet, so Topsy is crawling the site’s public posts. That’s different from how Topsy indexes Twitter, which is through an agreement to use the official Firehose of all user tweets.

It’s unclear how many people are using Google+ these days, though user registrations seem to have ballooned up to at least the 50 million mark. According to Topsy’s observations, the number of public posts and comments on Google+ had grown to two million per day as of last week, up from 200,000 when it opened to the general public.

It should be possible to use Topsy search to get a better idea of how big Google+ is — or at least how big public behavior on the site is. For instance, Topsy execs told me Google+ was already getting 100,000 videos posted per week, compared to 200,000 posted on Twitter. After I mentioned how much it seems Google+ people like to bitch about Facebook, they found 82,000 mentions of Facebook on the site in the previous day.

Those numbers change every day, but now that Topsy’s Google+ search is open to the public, users can check for themselves.

Topsy has worked on, but never released, search for public Facebook posts, which it said Facebook makes difficult by throttling API access and other means. The search start-up might next release search for sites like Quora or blogs, the execs said.

Write it only if you mean it.

On Twitter, Sally Hogshead (one of my most favorite people!) asked, "How well do you need to know someone before endorsing them on LinkedIn?" My tweet back was: "I'd say well enough to give an authentic endorsement. I was asked to give one by someone I never worked with. Huh?!?" What's the big deal? Why not just write a testimonial or endorsement for anyone who asks? It's simple, fast and easy to do it and nobody gets hurt.

Maybe...

If you don't have to look someone in the eyes or disrupt their day and you can simply whip off an email to your entire address asking for a testimonial or a recommendation, it removes a lot of courage. An email request simply isn't the same as doing it in person or calling to ask for something. Email has de-personalized a lot of our communication, and - in many instances - this is a very good thing, but not when it comes to recommendations and testimonials.

Why saying "no" is often the right thing to do.

I have think skin and I have a hard time saying "no" to anything, but I often ignore, delete or refuse to write a testimonial or recommendation unless I can be both sincere and authentic about it. Pushing this beyond recommendations and testimonials, I feel the same way about writing a review for a product and/or service. The thing is that the Internet has completely democratized publishing. It's free. Anybody can do it. Anybody can do it very fast. If we don't put any integrity into the words we write and simply toss recommendations and testimonials around like they're meaningless, guess what?

They become meaningless.

Much in the same way that I don't like Blog posts for the sake of Blog posts, any publishing of content that the person who is creating it wouldn't stand behind with full - one hundred percent - integrity diminishes the value of the entire Internet. There's also something about holding yourself up to that kind of higher standard that elevates both the quality of things you can find online while at the same giving you a personal "out" when someone you haven't spoken to in over a decade asks for a LinkedIn recommendation, even if you have never worked with them and the last time you saw them was your final year in High School.

It turns out that the integrity and quality of everything that you see online won't be the responsibility of traditional editors and the local intelligentsia.

It's going to be up to you, me and everybody we know. Yes, we have a fairly good infrastructure that - to date - has been fairly good at self-policing itself. But, it's a fragile relationship that can crack at any moment. You may think that a recommendation for someone on LinkedIn that you don't really know won't make all that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, but if everybody thinks like that, how valuable/credible will those recommendations be? If you're writing them without thought or care, how much do you value the other ones that you come across? If you're constantly publishing content that you don't believe in or wouldn't stand behind, what does that say about the credibility of everything that everyone else is publishing online?

The integrity of the system is up to you. Are you ready (really ready) for that responsibility?




Tags:

authenticity

blog

content

editor

email

endorsement

integrity

intelligentsia

internet

linkedin

product review

publishing

sally hogshead

testimonial

tweet

twitter

Twitter engineer Miguel Rios pays tribute to the man, the legend. Zoomed out you see the portrait of Steve Jobs. Zoom in, and you see public tweets tagged with #thankyousteve sent out over a four and a half hour period on the evening of October 5. Tweets are ordered by number of retweets, left to right and top to bottom.

See the full-sized version here.

Napster co-founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker is appearing in our newsfeeds with increasing frequency these days.

First, there was the Forbes cover. Then there were the Facebook ads asking users to “Like” Sean Parker on Facebook, which Gawker discovered was part of an effort to build up buzz for an upcoming blog. On Monday, we learned Rhapsody had signed an agreement to acquire Napster, the music-sharing site he helped start (though there is some dispute about his exact role, and whether he was a co-founder of the business along with creator Shawn Fanning) at age 19.

Parker sent his first tweet Monday afternoon, apparently apologizing to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for joining a rival service. It reads: “Sorry Zuck, I had to do it eventually. (Actually @scooterbraun made me do it.)” Scooter Braun is Justin Bieber’s manager.

As The Next Web points out, Parker has been planning his Twitter debut for some time. His account already has verified status. He has amassed 3,600 followers and counting at the time of this writing.

The question is: Why now? Is he seriously invested in his forthcoming blog launch? Or is he suddenly interested in making himself better known? One possibility: It was revealed last week that Parker is working on a new live video startup called Airtime, so his social media presence may be all about promoting an eventual product launch.

In the meantime, we wonder how many followers he’ll have by the end of the day Monday. My bet: 60,000.

More About: Facebook, napster, sean parker, Twitter
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A recent photograph in The New York Times — for a story about cooking with chicken skin — has spawned the latest popular parody account on Twitter: @NYTchicken a.k.a. “Sexy Chicken.”

After The Times published “Chicken’s Attraction Is Truly Skin Deep,” the somewhat provocative photo in the story immediately caught the attention of social media users. The next day, @NYTchicken popped up on the web.

Since Sept. 30, the account has attracted more than 1,600 followers with 19 humor-filled tweets. Sexy Chicken even caught the attention of KFC’s social media team, which tweeted, “@NYTChicken For goodness sake, cover yourself. I recommend something in a nice Original Recipe.” (See collection of tweets below.)

KFC jumped on the opportunity to have some fun with Sexy Chicken because the humor in the situation fit well with the company’s playful Twitter strategy. “Corresponding with the Twitter account of a famous photo of a chicken fits nicely at the intersection of engagement and fun,” KFC spokesman Rick Maynard told Mashable.

PETA, however, didn’t find anything funny about the picture created by NYT photographer Tony Cenicola or the subsequent parody. PETA tweeted, “@NYTChicken If pic was decapitated & amputated puppy corpse who’d laugh? If ur veg pls choose less offensive pic nxt time.”

Q&A With Sexy Chicken

With all this attention thrust on such a young Twitter account, we couldn’t help but wonder what was on Sexy Chicken’s mind. Luckily, we got a hold of @NYTchicken for a pluckin’ awesome Q&A.

Mashable: How did you get approached to pose for the NYT article? And did you feel comfortable on set?
“I’m a professional, so of course I’m comfortable on set. However, since I am kosher, one rule I have is that I won’t pose with pigs.”
Sexy Chicken: “I’m represented by the d’management group in Milan. The New York Times contacted d’management looking for ‘a busty chicken model with excellent skin.’ I’m a professional, so of course I’m comfortable on set. However, since I am kosher, one rule I have is that I won’t pose with pigs.”

Mashable: How are you dealing with your sudden rise to fame?

Sexy Chicken: “It’s been amazing! I’m thrilled with the response. I feel a little like Scarlett Johansson.”

Mashable: What do you hope to accomplish with your new Twitter account?

Sexy Chicken: “I’m hoping it leads to more modeling gigs. It’s hard out there for a chick.”

Mashable: I see that you’re following only two people, @Pete_Wells and @ErnieAnastos. Why them?

Sexy Chicken: “I have to thank Pete for giving me such an opportunity to model for the Times. He’s a God in the poultry world. Ernie Anastos is my biggest fan.”

SEE ALSO: Top Fictional Accounts | Top Fake Celebs | Top Social Media & Tech Spoofs

Mashable: What’s your reaction to @PETA’s latest tweet and link?

Sexy Chicken: “Oh, please. Puppies don’t do anything for me anyway. I’m only attracted to animals on two legs, like roosters and George Clooney.”

Mashable: How’s your relationship with @kfc_colonel after its Original Recipe tweet to you?

Sexy Chicken: “Do I look like a Perdue chicken? I’m free-range and organic, baby. I wouldn’t be caught dead (so to speak) in a KFC bucket.”

Mashable: Boxers or briefs?

Sexy Chicken: “Commando.”

View “@NYTchicken, Twitter’s Sexy Chicken” on Storify

More About: parody, Social Media, the new york times, Twitter

The Social Media Infographics Series is supported by Vocus‘ Social Media Strategy Tool, a free, six-step online tool that lets you build a custom social media framework tailored to your organization’s goals.

Since its launch in the summer of 2006, Twitter has become the leader in microblogging, limiting even its most famous users to a concise 140 characters. This infographic details Twitter’s most influential content creators, staggering adoption rates, and struggle to turn a profit.

Curious about The Biebs‘ first tweet? Wondering which event caused the latest tweets-per-second record? Scroll on down for a bird’s eye view (see what we did there?) of the world’s favorite real-time information network.

Infographic design by Emily Caufield

Series supported by Vocus

This series is supported by Vocus‘ Social Media Strategy Tool, a free online tool which lets you build your own custom social media framework in six easy steps. It helps you determine your organization’s goals, explore the latest MarketingSherpa research data, and create your own workbook packed with the strategies, tactics and resources you need. Try it today!

More About: features, infographics, mashable, Mashable Infographics, Social Media, Social Media Infographics Series, Twitter
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Eight years ago on this day in 2003, I started Blogging.

Here's some basic info about what has transpired in eight years here at the Six Pixels of Separation Blog: over 2700 Blog entries, over 20,000 comments and over 270 audio Podcasts. If you have read or listened to only one percent of all of that content, you'll know that both acknowledging this milestone or speaking about the numbers (how big/how many) is not my style. But, when I woke up this morning and saw the date notification in my Outlook, it gave me pause. It wasn't a sense of pride or accomplishment, either. The only question that continually popped into my brain was: was all of this Blogging worth it? And, the answer is obvious: yes.

Yes it is.

Starting this Blog was (and still is) without the question the single most important thing I have done in my professional life. It has changed me. It has changed the way I learn and grow and it has changed how I think about the world (and business and marketing and media and beyond). In spending some serious time soaking in this anniversary, I listed out why Blogging was (and still is) the smartest thing I have ever done.

8 Reasons Why Blogging Still Rules:

It's slow. I'm in no rush. Most brand are. They think that Social Media is cheap, fast and easy. Blogging has taught me that nothing could be further from the truth. In 2008, I wrote a Blog post called, In Praise Of Slow, that evolved into a much longer and important piece of my first business book, Six Pixels of Separation and the idea still rings true. Blogging has taught me the merits of building true relationships between an audience and content... and that takes time. Lots of time and effort. As fast and simple as it is to publish content with a Blog, success with a Blog as an engine of Marketing is a slow process. And, like a great cup of tea, the process is worth it if you have the intestinal fortitude to see it through.

Critical thinking. People like to think that Blogging is about the discourse (the comments, trackbacks, links, likes and tweets). While this makes up an important piece of the Blogging puzzle, the main reason I Blog is to publicly think about New Media and my media hacking ways. To be blunt: it's a selfish act. The only part that isn't selfish is that I publish it for the world to see, comment on and criticize. But (to be blunt again), that is selfish too, because everything that everyone tacks on to my Blog posts make me think more (and even rethink my initial positions). The simple act of Blogging forces me to think in a more critical way and to get that thinking down in writing. The writing part is (obviously) the hardest part of critical thinking. Putting your thoughts into words is not easy.

The people you meet. People often talk about stepping away from the computer to enjoy the conversation and meeting of people in the real world (more on that here: The Real World). My Blog has allowed me to not only meet, but become very close friends with people I would have never met otherwise. When I was a kid, I often wished that someone at my school liked comics or martial arts as much as I did. Now, we take for granted how easy it is to meet and connect with fellow, like-minded individuals. I don't take our connectivity for granted. Ever. Blogging has allowed me to meet and connect with people by removing the challenge of geography. While I don't often get to press the flesh with certain individuals often enough, I enjoy waking up and hanging out online with friends like Seth Godin, Amber Naslund, Julien Smith, Hugh McGuire, Liz Strauss, Christopher S. Penn, Mark W. Schaefer, Hugh McGuire, Tamar Weinberg, C.C. Chapman, Arjun Basu, Joseph Jaffe, Tom Peters, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and countless other (just look at my Blogroll on the left for more or who I follow on Twitter or Facebook:) I have coffee with all of these people each and every morning - whether they know it or not.

Writing (and reading) as art. This concept was really driven home to me after reading the book, Linchpin, by Seth Godin. Some people paint, some people scrapbook and others twiddle on a guitar in their basements. I write about business, marketing and media hacking. That is my art. For years, I thought it would sound either pretentious or ridiculous to say that writing about business is an art form. Well, this is my art. Take it or leave it.

Personal branding. Really, it's about reputation. It's easy to say something. It's easy to do something. It's hard to build a real reputation that is based on who you truly are for the world to see. This Blog is as real as it gets. It has been a tool, platform and space for me to demonstrate how I think. I believe the results are reflected in how Twist Image (my marketing agency that I own with my three other business partners) has grown over the years. I also believe that there is no better resume than this Blog to define me. I wish more people understood the power of having a living and breathing ongoing publishing platform that allows you to demonstrate how you think, that anyone can access from anywhere.

My place to go. I'm hooked on Arianna Huffington's line: "Self expression is the new entertainment." People often ask, "when do you find the time to Blog?" All I can think to myself is, "when do you find the time to watch half of the television shows and movies that you've watched?" By definition, I'm much more interested in active media than passive media. So, while you're relaxing and watching a sitcom, I'm relaxing and writing a Blog post. This is my place to go. My Blog is my treehouse. This is where I go for fun.

It keeps me regular. I made a commitment to publish six pieces of text-based content and one audio piece each and every week. You can use all the Metamucil you want, my Blog keeps me regular. Knowing that I am committed to creating and publishing this amount of content makes my ears perk up. It keeps me open to uncover new and interesting topics to discuss. The regularity and consistency of the Blog has forced me to keep that "nose for news" that I first developed when I started off in professional journalism during my late teens.

It connects me to you. Think about life before Blogging. You would be waiting for a new book to come out or for a published piece in a newspaper of magazine. No more. Blogging connects me to you. You don't need to read it every day and you don't even need to leave a comment, and yet it still connects us (some more than others). I Blog in the hopes my thoughts resonate. I Blog in the hopes that it creates a level of discourse. I Blog because I'm tired of "top 10 reasons"-types of Blog posts. I Blog in an attempt to raise the bar. I Blog because it connects me to people like you... the exact kind of people I have been waiting my whole life to meet.

Why do you Blog? Better yet, why don't you Blog?




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KLM now responds to your questions within the hour via their Twitter account. To promote the 24/7 service, they replaced their usual typed responses by a living alphabet.

For 1 day, The KLM Reply saw 140 KLM employees give unique replies to friends’ and followers’ tweets and posts, by assembling the answer live before their eyes. All within the hour.

Company: KLM
Agency: Unkown
Country: The Netherlands

Related posts:KLM: Surprise

Mumbai. Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan is all set to join Facebook after joining Twitter. However on Facebook, he is going to be more active and personal with his fans. King Khan is all set to send out personalized birthday wishes to his fans by posting messages like “Happy Birthday my sweetest friend” on their Facebook walls through a Facebook application.
But this is not going to be free for the fans; they will have to shell out some money to see SRK post some finest birthday wishes.
“Just 500 rupees,” informed Chanchal Pandey, the publicity agent of the Bollywood superstar, “Fans have to authorize an application named SRKsays and make a payment of 500 rupees through credit card, and their job is done. The application will find out their birthday as per their Facebook profile information and post a birthday message on their wall on behalf of Shahrukh.”
The application will post personalized and unique messages on the Facebook walls that will appear to have been posted personally by Shah Rukh Khan from his personal profile. A sample post could look something like this:
Shah Rukh Khan’s Facebook application wishes you a Happy Birthday
The application will also broadcast an update on the Facebook ticker that will read something like “Manish Kumar was just wished by Shah Rukh Khan on his birthday” so that other users are tempted to use the application as well.
When contacted by Faking News, King Khan confirmed the development and hoped to connect with his fans on Facebook on a daily basis. He also termed it as “democratization” of his celebrity status.
Shahrukh Khan dancing at a wedding party
“See, I have been taking part in weddings of the rich and powerful and acting as if those rich people were my personal friends. But the truth is I did that for money,” SRK candidly admitted, “Now if I can act like personal friends of the rich and the powerful, why should I deny the same rights to my fans who are not so rich and powerful?”
Shah Rukh claimed that 500 rupees that he was charging was a modest professional fee that his fans should pay for this “service”. In return, fans will get a memory that they can cherish for whole of their life.
“Their Facebook friends will be jealous, and they can frame the screenshots of the wall post to show it off to their non-Facebook friends,” SRK’s publicity manager explained.
Facebook experts believe that the latest campaign by Shah Rukh Khan is going to be a runaway success and he could earn substantially this way, more than what many other actors earn through box office collections. However some experts foresee trouble for SRK.
“Is this application going to be exclusively for Indian fans only? What if Facebook users from Pakistan are going to authorize this application? We could see another political controversy with parties like Shiv Sena opposing this move,” a Facebook expert warned.
Experts also foresee other celebrities, especially Salman Khan and Aamir Khan, joining Facebook to launch similar applications. While Salman’s application could give birthday bumps to users, experts believe that Aamir will wait till Facebook becomes perfect and launches its new Timeline for every user.
Unconfirmed sources suggest that model Poonam Pandey too could launch a Facebook application that will post her semi-nude pictures on walls of users for free.
Possibly Related News:Mayawati joins facebook! Exclusive snapshot of her wallFacebook launches Facebook Tsunami to take on Google WaveHoneymoon picture on Facebook receives “Hang Kasab” commentEarliest facebook users oppose immigration of orkut usersNow Salman can “burn” Shahrukh; Madame Tussauds to sell celebrity wax candles

Facebook sucked up most of the oxygen in the technology world on Thursday, with the launch of a series of fairly radical transformations of the giant social network, which now reaches about 800 million people (we’ve collected our coverage of the f8 conference here). So where does that leave Google and its Google+ social network, or Twitter and its goal of becoming a real-time social newswire? Facebook’s changes have clearly upped the ante for Google, which desperately needs the signals that come from social activity to feed into its search and advertising algorithms, but Twitter is playing a somewhat different game, and Facebook seems more like it could be a partner rather than a competitor.

At Facebook’s last f8 conference in April 2010, the social network launched its “open graph” platform and plugins, which allowed any website to create Facebook “like” buttons and widgets and connect those to its content — and millions of websites have done so in the months since that announcement. In a sense, Facebook extended its tentacles outward and grabbed hold of activity that was occurring elsewhere on the Internet, then incorporated that into the site and showed it to users. Masterminded by CTO Bret Taylor, this was a fairly massive shift in what the site was about. No longer did people have to go to Facebook to interact with content; they could do it anywhere.

The latest changes are partly about reversing that process, and creating more reasons for users to spend time on Facebook itself and engage with content there. Social apps like the ones launched for Spotify and Hulu let users watch movies and listen to music within Facebook; social-reading apps like the ones launched by The Washington Post, The Guardian and News Corp.’s The Daily let users read stories from those publications within Facebook and share them with others; and other social apps let users share their physical activity and so on. All this takes place on Facebook — which is a risk for media companies, as I tried to outline on Thursday.

The introduction of “frictionless sharing”
In addition to the launch of social apps, Facebook changed the way sharing of that activity happens, and effectively removed the necessity for publishers or services to use the “like” button — a fairly significant move, as MG Siegler noted at TechCrunch. As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described it, the need to click a button to share things was getting in the way of users sharing, so the new process (where users give an app or service approval once and then all their activity is automatically shared) creates what he called “frictionless sharing.” Items a user is reading or listening to or otherwise interacting with simply show up in the new “ticker” section of a user’s page.

These substantial changes to the way users interact with Facebook and Facebook-based apps are a significant threat to Google in trying to grow its Google+ network. Before the new features were launched, as well as others that came before f8,  Google’s new offering looked pretty competitive: the addition of “Circles” to create groups of specific friends was something Facebook didn’t really have (although it has had Lists for some time), and it made it easy for people to share photos and other content. It also had the advantage of being an “asymmetric” network like Twitter, which meant that anyone could follow another user without having to get their explicit approval.

Then Facebook launched “smart” lists, which make it easier to group friends and connections on the network, and just as quickly launched a “subscribe” feature that added an asymmetric aspect to the service — allowing users to get updates from people even if those other users weren’t their friends. Now, the social apps and frictionless sharing have upped the ante even further: what does Google have that can offer these same kinds of features? Although Google+ has an API now that allows developers to connect their apps and services to it, there are no “social apps” for Google+ yet, and no services that can feed content into the network as seamlessly as those from Spotify and Hulu.

Even when those apps appear, which they undoubtedly will, Facebook has something Google doesn’t have and may never have: namely, 800 million users who spend huge amounts of time on the site — according to Zuckerberg, the network saw over half a billion users in a single day recently. Google may be huge, but the idea of it as a social network is still relatively new, and so it has an uphill climb even to gain awareness with non-geek users, let alone chip away at Facebook’s dominance. There will be a certain contingent of users who resent the fact that Facebook is trying to take over their lives and become “the consumer OS,” as Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff put it, but their numbers might be too small to make a real difference.

Google gets frozen out, but Twitter plays a different game
The risk for Google, as we’ve described before, is that through these new services and features, Facebook starts to accumulate an even larger body of data about the activity of those 800 million people — and about their desires as well, since the network is expected to launch a “want” button soon. That is gold for an entity like Google, not only because those signals are important for search but because they are increasingly important for advertising. And there is virtually no chance that Facebook is ever going to share any of that information with Google, or provide it in a form that allows for easy scraping.

And what about Twitter? As I’ve argued in other posts, I think Twitter is playing a different game — one that Facebook may be trying to get into with some of its changes, but isn’t well-suited for. In a nutshell, Twitter isn’t a social network at all, and never really has been. It allows for social behavior around information, but it is not in any sense a one-size-fits-all social destination with timelines and social apps and games, and all the other things Facebook (and Google) want to offer. It’s designed to do one thing well: short bursts of information, like a real-time social newswire. And it can target users based on that.

Real-time news isn’t something Facebook is very good at. It may talk about changes to its news feed making it “your personal newspaper,” but that news is still mostly about friends and what they are doing. The addition of news sources via the subscription feature — and the rollout of social apps from news publishers — may change that mix somewhat, but it’s not going to provide what Twitter provides. There’s also the risk that Facebook’s frictionless sharing simply produces too much noise for many users, as the site tries to be all things to all people. So long as Twitter focuses on doing one thing well, that will be its ace-in-the-hole. Google, however, badly needs some more cards.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Tambako the Jaguar and See-ming Lee

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@jinadcruz Yes. Or use this bookmarklet to make it quicker It embeds the tweets as HTML hence more permanent.

You can now follow this blog on Twitter where I'll share all the links posted to this blog including 140-character opinions on urban planning, if there is such a thing.

Twitter is great. Twitter is a bitch. Every day, for the last 8 months, I’ve faced this conflict. Twitter is a wonderful way to spend time online, it’s also an utter waste; it’s a phenomenon, it’s also a nuisance. Every time I log on, I do so with a certain guilt, as if I’m still in college and lighting up a cigarette. When I’m logged on I’m sucked into this universe filled with hashtags, retweets and links. It makes me forget the real world, makes people around me think I’m doped.

Sidvee, or rather @sidvee (also the founder of the very successful @kweezzz) echoes my thoughts on Twitter albeit much eloquently. He peppers the post with hashtags like most of us do even for mundane tweets.

Widget for sharing your twitter favorites on your blog.

Naked Twitter is a Safari extension that strips away all the eye candy and sidebar clutter give you just the tools you need. Nice enough that some may be able to forgo the need for a dedicated client.

"Who-not-to-follow: Find out who I have explicitly un-followed. Do not ask me to follow them. Find out people that you have shown me that I have ignored, do not show me those people. If they have appeared 3 times on my sidebar and been ignored (less than 3 actually), that is an explicit (but no click) thumbs down."

Exactly my beef with recently-introduced Twitter's 'Who to Follow' feature. Unlike other social networks, Twitter doesn't offer you options to turn off features that you don't like or want. Probably in terms of simplicity and intuitiveness, it makes sense but as tweeting matures and advanced users want to err...tweak their usage, it may be needed.

An awesome app for your iPad to aggregate links, photos, videos, etc. posted by your friends on Facebook and Twitter. If you don't have an iPad yet, check out the video. As an advertisement, it is as cool as it can get. I'll try it out and probably post a review.

"The winners of Slate's contest to rewrite the Declaration of Independence in a single tweet."

"Follow our high-speed replay of the World Cup and find out how Twitter reacted to every game"

"When your readers want to comment on a post, they’ll simply click on a button and provide their Twitter credentials to identify themselves. You’ll also see their Twitter avatar alongside the comments if you’ve setup avatar support on your blog."

"Far from being a tool of revolution in Iran over the last year, the Internet, in many ways, just complicated the picture."

"Twitter offers an easy wizard at twitter.com/goodies to help you embed Twitter lists as a widget in your web pages. You can customize the color scheme and the widget dimensions so that it blends perfectly with your site."

"This is what @robinsloan uses to snag tweets for blog posts. You can use it, too...
But only at your own risk. Paste a tweet URL below:"

"Among the many criticisms of Twitter, the most common by far is that no one cares what you ate for breakfast. In fact, quite a few people care."

"The U.S. Library of Congress announced this morning via its official Twitter account that it will be acquiring the entire archive of Twitter messages back through March 2006."

"The chatter in Twitter can accurately predict the box-office revenues of upcoming movies weeks before they are released. In fact, Tweets can predict the performance of films better than market-based predictions, such as Hollywood Stock Exchange, which have been the best predictors to date."

How we use or rather ought to use Twitter

"Get links from your twitter stream in clean RSS format"

The furor was kicked off by comments from Anamitra Banerji, the head of product management and monetization at Twitter, who told MediaPost.com that “We are working on an ad platform, but it’s only in the test phase.” He declined to give an exact date on when the micro-blogging site would launch an ad platform

I’m told that Twitter is a river into which I can dip my cup whenever I want. But that supposes we’re all kneeling on the banks. In fact, if you’re at all like me, you’re trying to keep your footing out in midstream, with the water level always dangerously close to your nostrils. Twitter sounds less like sipping than drowning.

That's how you deal with bigots with hateful signs

Tweet Blender is a WordPress plugin and a Widgetbox widget that blends Twitter tweets from multiple sources. For WordPress, it shows up in the blog sidebar and also automatically adds a tweet archive page.

Howlarious! RT @karmadude: the kind of conversation you don't want to get in on twitter

Five journalists plan to lock themselves away in a French farmhouse with access only to Facebook and Twitter to test the quality of news from the social networking and micro-blogging sites.

82% of Twitter users have less than 100 followers and roughly the same percentage are following less than 100 people themselves.

Please feel free to use any of these, but not to make a buck.

I want to know what Dr. King would make of Twitter, the insistent social-media service that asks its users to describe “What’s happening?” in 140 characters or less.

Obviously there are real people using twitter for leisure and not for business, and I kept asking myself how I could find these people and, more importantly, how I could get them to follow me.

At first, Twitter can be overwhelming, but think of it as a river of data rushing past that I dip a cup into every once in a while. Much of what I need to know is in that cup

Mr. Tharoor said that he embraced Twitter because it helped Indians understand what he did every day, and it helped him understand what his followers thought.

Droplr is the best way to share files from your Mac on the internet.

Just mashed up a quick applescript to post the currently selected news item in NetNewsWire to Twitter.

Conversationlist is a Twitter list of the people that you talk to (and about) on Twitter. The list is automatically updated daily, so that it always reflects the people that you are paying attention to right now. If you @reply (or @mention) someone, they're added to your list. If you stop talking to that person, they drop off your list.

Socialite is a beautiful Mac OS X application, designed to make it easy to stay in touch with the social networks and services that matter to you. From news on Digg, photos on Flickr, statuses and photos on Facebook and Twitter updates, to full Google Reader RSS syncing, Socialite keeps all your social networks in one convenient place.

Click through these lists and you’ll see a different world than you would have thought possible on Twitter.

The Nest Unclutterer allows you to review a list of accounts that meet your user-specified criteria before any blocking or unfollowing occurs.

Dell says it has made $3 million using Twitter.

Edgar Allan Poe would love Alexander Graham Bell's workshop here. Pendulums, buzzers, and ticking sounds everywhere, with a mysterious note to the chambermaid in crabbed script. In a droll nod to shifting technologies, there's an 18th-century ear trumpet on the settee, where Mr. Bell evidently left it while in a fog of inventive absentmindedness.

Despite all the recent Twitter-enthusiasm about this platform's unique power to alert millions of people in decentralized and previously unavailable ways, there are quite a few reasons to be concerned about Twitter's role in facilitating an unnecessary global panic about swine flu.

I am @twitlookup a lookup robot for twitter. using me you can lookup dictionary definitions, weather and ipl cricket scores. tell your friends on twitter about me.

the whole breakfast question is a huge straw man periodically pushed across the tracks in front of speeding internet technology. There is much that happens on Twitter or on blogs or on Facebook that has nothing to do with small groups of people communicating about seemingly nothing.