Valleywag
media
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celebritards
Luke Wilson just another bored Twitter user?
Stars — they're just like us, if by "us" you mean "people who use the Internet too much." Luke Wilson, the Hollywood B-lister best known for playing a schlubby everyman, also appears to be a typical user of Twitter, the blogging service which sanely limits its users' oversharing to 140 characters at a time, when it's not actively destroying the news business. Someone signed up for a "LukeWilson" account back in April. More » -
twitter
Twitter's bad news is a bad business
People who use Twitter, a service which posts short updates to the Web and cell phones, love nothing more than to Twitter about themselves, and the medium they've so enthusiastically adopted. If you go by the Twitterers' collective reporting, every event, from an earthquake in Los Angeles to terrorist bombings in Mumbai, is more notable for the fact that people are writing about it on Twitter than for its inherent interest as news. The dominant narrative of Twitter is the rise of Twitter, the latest force to displace the mainstream media and roil the world's information economy. Too bad the real story of the company is one of top-to-bottom incompetence. More » -
evan williams
Why Twitter's CEO turned down Facebook's $500 million
Twitter CEO Evan Williams always seems to be where the action is. He sold his blogging company to Google in 2003. He chased the short-lived podcasting craze with another startup. That company accidentally spawned Twitter, the microblogging service that's stolen the buzz from bloggers. It seems sensible that Williams would sell Twitter to Facebook, another social networking site that actually makes money. So why did he and his board turn down a $500 million offer from Facebook? More » -
we read twitter so you don't have to
Kevin Rose's cold tweeting in your face
Digg poster boy Kevin Rose is so hot that 726 people have already subscribed to a Twitter stream on which Rose pretends to be a head cold. For context, New York Times reporter Matt Richtel has 819 followers to the novel he's posting as tweets. Note to self: Become a celebrity first, then take up writing. -
politics
Obama's Twitter goes silent
@barackobama: Please update your Twitter. Since last Tuesday's historic election, Barack Obama's Twitter account hasn't sent any messages. Some Internet President-Elect! He didn't even use Twitter to announce his transition website, change.gov — and what is Twitter for, really, if not spamming your friends with your latest URL? There's no better sign that his 127,196 followers have been pumped and dumped — Twittered into contributing money and time, and then passed over for more presidential means of communication. Like, say, press conferences. -
When to pull the plug on a startup
Tough times, easy decisions. How can you tell if a startup's founder has too much time on her hands? When she is spending time impersonating cats on Twitter.
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we read twitter so you don't have to
Zappos layoff turns into lovefest
Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, has a promising career as a cult leader. In a blog post, the online shoes-and-clothes retailer's boss acknowledges the layoffs his employees were Twittering about this morning, writing that the company had laid off 8 percent of its workforce. He all but admits the cuts were forced on him by investor Sequoia Capital. The severance packages are generous in comparison to most startups; two months or more of pay, and six months of health insurance. Sweet enough, perhaps, that people won't ask a key question about the layoffs More » -
layoffs
At Zappos, careers live by the Twitter, die by the Twitter
No company has embraced Twitter quite like Zappos, the online shoes-and-whatever-else retailer — from its CEO, Tony Hsieh, on down. It even hosts a live feed of all Zappos-related messages on the microblogging service. That has made it easy to gather that the company is going through a tumultuous round of layoffs. More » -
politics
Internet fails to explode as Barack Obama wins
CNN, ABC, NBC, and Fox have called the presidential election for Barack Obama. Amazingly, Twitter is still online. Current is still broadcasting vibrating states.
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