ZuDfunck

ZuDfunck's Perfect Twitter App: A Unibody MacBook

So I just downloaded A Twitter Client on my MacBook
And then it occurred to me
I don't need this Sh#t
My MacBook is my Twitter client!

Maybe folks who have big time work machines
With all the applications firing need a little cubby
That they can say is for Twitter

I am not so confined I have a 2.4 GHz MacBook
Devoted to the Twitter thang
Mostly a Firefox browser with some 8 tabs
Holding stuff I found from my RSS reader
Waiting an appropriate time to throw up from
My Hootsuite interface
Then monitor with my Twazzup search set to @ZuDfunck
As well as the Twitter homepage on another Tab.

Am I wrong or isn't that the perfect Twitter App?

So folks stop trying to sell me on the perfect Twitter App
For the Mac
The Mac is The Perfect Twitter App!

I would relish your comments
As I feel that is All
Unless you have something to say!

ZuDfunck Migrates To Twitter

Hear Ye!, Hear Ye!, Hear Ye!

The micro blogging reality that is Twitter has taken out another Blogger!
We can no longer deny the death of Blogging
Under that stress and dismal fact
We are forced to move our operations
Lock Stock and Barrel
Great film! Actually:
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
To a more stringently structured location.
But man on man it is jumping!
There are followers galore
ReTweets by the Dozens
If you don't know what I am saying
Then you don't know what is Happening
Why am I writing this way
I am practicing my Micro Speak
This is how they Write
Little bursts of Text
Tweets of Wisdom
Blurbs of Text
Tweets

Good lord
Who thought ZuD would end up at Twitter
Not me
I thought we could Survive
But the Tide is Changing
And go with It
We Will
Tweet
Tweet
ZuD is a Twit
@ZuDfunck

ZuDfunck Contemplates Migrating Operations To Twitter

Seriously considering migrating our operations to Micro Blog service Twitter

Although we have disparaged it in the past as a walled garden and gathering spot for time wasting, mind numbing mediocrity, we have gotten accustomed to its unique qualities and feel it is time for ZuD to make the leap full time.

I wouldn't do anything with out letting you guys know first, so let me know what you think in the comment section below or tweet me up at @ZuDfunck

Calling All Geeks: Invent The Big Undo!

I'll probably want to Undo something someday. So geeks you all aren't doing anything this weekend. Get to work on the Big Undo!

5 Things We Wish We Could Undo on the Internet

By Owen Thomas

Gmail has a new unsend feature — sort of like the broadcast delay in case Janet Jackson shows her nipple, but niftier because it's online! It made us think of other things people should undo.

Facebook Photo Unpost Ever regret drunkenly uploading that picture to Facebook? We know a couple of people who could have used this.

Twitter Undershare: Is there something you need to tell the entire Internet about? Actually, there probably isn't. But something about the message-broadcasting service seems to beg people to share too much, 140 characters at a time. You can delete posts, but they still end up sent to people's cell phones and indexed in search engines. Where's the "untweet" button?

Tumblr Unreblog: What happens when your girlfriend follows the same cutie you do on David Karp's kiddy blogging service, and notices your habit of reblogging the Tumblrette's every last quip, pic, and quote? Ah, for a way to instantly zap all of your reblogs! It's either that, or propose a threesome.

LinkedIn Snub: So you meet a "social media marketer" — i.e., someone trying to get paid to talk to their friends on Twitter all day — at a party. You grudgingly exchange business cards. The next day, you get the inevitable connection request on LinkedIn — even though, you barely know the twit, let alone feel comfortable recommending their work. The feature LinkedIn needs: A way to politely acknowledge your interaction without actually exposing your whole list of industry connections to them.

Untexting: If AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile can shuttle text messages from phone to phone through the magical ether, surely they can reach into your friends' devices and delete that hastily sent SMS before it's read and the damage is done.

Get to work, geeks! There's too much information on the Internet as it is. Time to make the world safe for undersharing!

On 09-09-09 Beatles Rock Band Debuts

Keeping you guys in the loop of what's hip is my job and this placemarker, that isn't the right word, for the Beatles Rock Band site is cool. The audio loop must be a little ditty they recorded, you'll hate this, some Forty Years Ago!

Hat Tip: hannahighpoint
 

Vote on Facebook's Redesign

So TechCrunch ran this post. How can we vote on whether we like TechCrunch?

Facebook Poll: 94% Of Users Don’t Like Redesign

by Michael Arrington

A Facebook application is polling users on the the new site layout . So far, just over 5% of the nearly 800,000 respondents give it a thumbs up. The rest go the other way.

Users can also leave comments with their thoughts. Recent user comments include “Missing so many features I used to adore. I am saddened,” “Please change it back to the way it was,” and “I hate it and if it doesn’t change I will only check it once in awhile.” Ah, the fickle user.

Until January users and advertisers could create polls directly within Facebook, and the company used them extensively at the Davos World Economic Forum. It would be great it they brought that feature back directly.

Has Mark Zuckerberg Lost His Touch In Redesigning Facebook?

The article is right, people hate change, even if they vote for it. But some of these stories bring a tear:

Facebook's algorithmic best-of selections, meanwhile, have been shunted over to a right-hand column which users can't control. That's leading to all kinds of hilarity, a tipster reports:

A woman complained about not being able to delete things from the "highlights" sidebar because a friend is also friends with her ex-husband. The friend tagged the ex in a photo and I guess the photo was popular enough to wind up in the ex-wife's highlights sidebar. So now every time she signs on, there's a photo of her ex-husband waiting to greet her. Awesome!

Another person complained about the same highlights sidebar because several friends had joined a group that uses an X-rated photo for its logo. Having several friends join a group apparently puts the group and its logo in the highlights. She is now greeted with said explicit photo every time she signs on, with no way to get rid of it.

Among the many worthless apps on FB, there is one called "big wet boobs." As I said in my last email, whenever people send virtual stuff to each other, each "gift" shows up one right after the other on your home page. So this person now has dozens and dozens of entries showing "Bob sent so-and-so Big Wet Boobs." (This one in particular sent me into fits of giggles.)

This redesign, in short, promises to be the kind of nightmare presented by Facebook's debacular Beacon ads, which exposed users' purchases to friends willy-nilly before an embarrassed Zuckerberg nixed them.

Facebook's strength has always been its filters — the ability to get a picture of what your friends are up to without being drowned in updates. Zuckerberg has thrown his 175 million users into the deep end of the pool, with the thought that the masses are like him and his friends — omnivorous consumers of momentary trivia. There's a reason why Facebook has more than 175 million users and Twitter a mere 6 million: Because Facebook has offered a better product than Twitter.

Has, past tense. Facebook snuck up behind MySpace and zoomed past it; it is now almost twice the size of the struggling News Corp. property. Zuckerberg appears to be worried Twitter will do the same. Certainly there are Twitter fanatics telling him he's missing the boat, 140 characters at a time, all day long. And Zuckerberg is right to be paranoid. But there's a reason why paranoia is classified as insanity.

Jon Stewart's Assertions 'Unfair and Absurd' says NBC Boss Jeff Zucker

I know there are a lot of Fanboys of Jon Stewart on Twitter and Facebook but it's time to get back to reality. CNBC did not contribute to our economic tsunami.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker fired back at comedian Jon Stewart on Wednesday, saying it was "unfair" and "absurd" for the funnyman to criticize CNBC and question its coverage of financial news.

"Everybody wants to find a scapegoat. That's human nature," Zucker said during a keynote address at a media industry conference. "But to suggest that the business media or CNBC was responsible for what is going on now is absurd."

"Just because someone who mocks authority says something doesn't make it so," Zucker said, describing the comedian's comments as "completely out of line."

Zucker's comments are the latest salvo in a war of words with Stewart, who hosts the mock news program "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" on the Comedy Central cable television network owned by

Viacom Inc.

Stewart has blasted CNBC's reporting of the financial market meltdown, saying the channel was too cozy with corporate chiefs and key government officials.

The comedian has lobbed particularly harsh criticism at CNBC commentator Jim Cramer, and last week invited him for an appearance on the comedy show, where he hammered the guest for his coverage of Wall Street.

"Listen, you knew what the banks were doing, yet were touting it for months and months," Stewart said during his March 12 show. "The entire network was. Now to pretend that this was some sort of crazy, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami that nobody could have seen coming is disingenuous at best and criminal at worst."

Zucker, speaking at the

McGraw-Hill

Media Summit in New York on Wednesday, said that CNBC's reporters and commentators had done a "terrific" job and the network remained a "go-to" place for financial news.

"It's unfair to CNBC and to the business media in general," Zucker said. "I don't think you can blame what happened here on the business media."  continued

Note to Jurors: No Internet Usage

Going to be on Jury Duty? Leave the PDA and Internet alone!

Mistrial by iPhone: Jurors’ Web Forays Are Upending Trials

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: March 17, 2009

Last week, a juror in a big federal drug trial in Florida admitted to the judge that he had been doing research on the case on the Internet, directly violating the judge’s instructions and centuries of legal rules. But when the judge questioned the rest of the jury, he got an even bigger shock.

Eight other jurors had been doing the same thing. The federal judge, William J. Zloch, had no choice but to declare a mistrial, wasting eight weeks of work by federal prosecutors and defense lawyers.

“We were stunned,” said the defense lawyer, Peter Raben, who was told by the jury that he was on the verge of winning the case. “It’s the first time modern technology struck us in that fashion, and it hit us right over the head.”

It might be called a Google mistrial. The use of BlackBerrys and iPhones by jurors gathering and sending out information about cases is wreaking havoc on trials around the country, upending deliberations and infuriating judges.

Last week, a building products company asked an Arkansas court to overturn a $12.6 million judgment against it after a juror used Twitter to send updates during the civil trial.

And on Monday, defense lawyers in the federal corruption trial of a former Pennsylvania state senator, Vincent J. Fumo, demanded that the judge declare a mistrial after a juror posted updates on the case on Twitter and Facebook. The juror even told his readers that a “big announcement” was coming Monday. But the judge decided to let the trial continue, and the jury found Mr. Fumo guilty. His lawyers plan to use the Internet postings as grounds for appeal.

Jurors are not supposed to seek information outside of the courtroom. They are required to reach a verdict based only on the facts that the judge has decided are admissible, and they are not supposed to see evidence that has been excluded as prejudicial. But now, using their cellphones, they can look up the name of a defendant on the Web, or examine an intersection using Google Maps, violating the legal system’s complex rules of evidence. They can also tell their friends what is happening in the jury room, though they are supposed to keep their opinions and deliberations secret. Continued

@JamesByers, Where Art Thou?

Anyone know what happened to muscle dude pictured James Byers?

Once you do get Suspended what do you do with all that Free Time?

How To Get Followers And Reach Twitter Nirvana

Even though this is a Blog and not Twitter. Hopefully you know the difference. Now see ZuD? You have already violated one of the rules. You were Rude! Apologize to the Folks. I am sorry! Okay then, continue. My point was in the interest of Twits attention span here is a skimming of another Blog's post: For the actual post go Here.

Gaining followers on Twitter is a goal of most who use the microblogging service—whether they want to admit it or not. It may provide only a casual ego boost but, for most, it's still a positive event when another person starts following your amazing, 140-character-at-a-time wit and wisdom.

"How do I gain more followers on Twitter?" is, then, a question that some of us Ars staffers are asked often. Most of us use Twitter to have fun with friends and readers; we gain followers the real way, without resorting to dirty spamming tactics. 

Because of this, we're offering our own guide to gaining Twitter followers—the way that doesn't involve flashing a "Do you know who I am?" card. Here are six tips on how to win friends and influence Twitterers.

(Note: If you think Twitter is composed of inane, meaningless chatter, then it's obviously not for you, and neither is this article.)

1) Fill out your bio
2) Be yourself
3) Engage in @ replies, but don't go overboard on @ replies
4) Come to think of it, don't go overboard on anything
5) If you have nothing to say, don't
6) Don't give yourself an ulcer when followers leave

There are no explicit rules for how to use Twitter, of course, and ultimately, people are going to use it however they see fit; that's the beauty of such a flexible social platform. Still, if you follow these unspoken etiquette rules for being a good Twittizen, you should have no problems gaining followers the old-fashioned way.

Your Online Presence Circumvents Reinventing Yourself

When you've documented everything online, how do you rediscover yourself as someone different, as you go through life? This young lady asks that Profound Question:

Online social networks are so new that it’s impossible to know their long-term impact. There’s some evidence that college students have mixed feelings about being guinea pigs for the faux-friendship age. One student interviewed for a study of why and how college students use Facebook, which was published last year in The Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, admitted that being privy to the personal details of “friends” who she had not seen in years made her uncomfortable. “Someone from earlier in her life had broken up with a boyfriend,” an author of the article, Sandra L. Calvert, a professor and chairwoman of the psychology department at Georgetown University, told me. “She felt she knew all these intimate details about this person, yet they hadn’t actually been in touch for five years.” On the other hand, a study published in 2007 in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication suggested that hanging onto old friends via Facebook may alleviate feelings of isolation for students whose transition to campus life had proved rocky. Evidently they took comfort in knowing that “Dylan is drinking Peets.”

That may well be, but something is drowned in that virtual coffee cup — an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness. Perhaps my nieces will find a new way to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation. Perhaps they will evolve through judicious deleting and updating of profile information, through the constant awareness of their public face. Maybe the Greek chorus of preschool buddies will be more anchor than albatross, giving them strength to take risks or to stick out tough times. It could be that my generation was the anomalous one, that Facebook marks a return to the time when people remained embedded in their communities for life, with connections that ran deep, peers who reined them in if they strayed too far from the norm, parents who expected them to live at home until marriage (adult children are already reclaiming their childhood rooms in droves). More likely, though, the very thing that attracts us oldsters to Facebook — the lure of auld lang syne — will be its undoing. Kids, who will inevitably want to drive a stake into the heart of former lives, may simply abandon the service (remember Friendster?) and find something new: something still unformed, yet to be invented — much like themselves. Full Article

Peggy Orenstein, a contributing writer, is the author of the memoir “Waiting for Daisy.”

Society Doesn't Need Newspapers, We Need Journalism

Maybe you have heard of this Dude: Clay Shirky. He wrote this killer post: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. Quotable text was jumping out of his post and I encourage you to read it whole. I snippet the last few graphs to whet your appetite. Bottom line is don't fear the change the demise of newspapers brings, just join the revolution to seed it's replacement.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

Hattip: Flap

Which Is More Responsive: Facebook, FriendFeed or Twitter?

This Dude does some interesting Analysis of a Text Message he sent out on FB, FF & Twitter:

What did I do?!

I posted an identically-phrased note on Facebook, Friendfeed, and Twitter  at around 1:30am PDT Friday morning.  Specifically, I posted this: “Could you kindly help me with a super-quick experiment (takes less than 30 seconds)? I’ll share results Thanks!”

Why?

I was curious to see which set of friends/subscribers (henceforth referred to as “contacts”) would be more apt to read my note and reply.

What happened?

As of nearly 40 hours after posting…

Continued

Steven Johnson Describes 'News EcoSystem'

I like what this dude is putting down:

At SXSW '09, Steven Johnson sees thriving 'news ecosystem'

Steven Johnson and the growth of the news ecosystem. Credit: David Sarno / Los Angeles Times

When the going gets tough, get out the metaphors. That strategy was demonstrated nicely Friday at the South by Southwest conference by media and technology scholar Steven Johnson (@stevenbjohnson).  In addressing the paradigm shift that's clear-cutting old, tree-based media such as newspapers and magazines, and fertilizing the many digital news biomes, Johnson developed the picture of the news as a thriving, jungle-like ecosystem:

Today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line. That complexity is what makes it so interesting, of course, but also what makes it so hard to predict what it’s going to look like in five or ten years.

Johnson began his talk by observing that when he was a college student and Macintosh computer fanatic in 1987, he had only one regular outlet for news -- the monthly issue of MacWorld magazine: in essence, one static source containing stuff that had happened a month earlier. As time went on, more current Mac and Apple news became available, first through dial-up networking services like CompuServe, then on the incipient World Wide Web. Technology news sources, both Apple-related and otherwise, continued to proliferate and diversify as the Web grew:

We all know where this is headed, but let me spell it out just for the record. If 19-year-old Steven could fast-forward to the present day, he would no doubt be amazed by all the Apple technology – the iPhones and MacBook Airs – but I think he would be just as amazed by the sheer volume and diversity of the information about Apple available now. In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make it to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Jobs speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceeds anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt.

Because Tech news planted its online roots more than a decade ago, Johnson says, you can think of it as the news ecosystem's "old-growth forest," compared with ...

... other areas that have emerged only in the last few years. Johnson pointed to Web coverage of politics: Media-wise, the 2008 election was a world away from the pre-Web 1992 election, when news choices for consumers were shockingly limited from today's perspective: You had your daily newspaper, a few TV news shows and whatever magazines you had delivered. It was a news "desert" rather than a rain forest.

Continued

Steven Johnson and the growth of the news ecosystem. Credit: David Sarno / Los Angeles Times

When the going gets tough, get out the metaphors. That strategy was demonstrated nicely Friday at the South by Southwest conference by media and technology scholar Steven Johnson (@stevenbjohnson).  In addressing the paradigm shift that's clear-cutting old, tree-based media such as newspapers and magazines, and fertilizing the many digital news biomes, Johnson developed the picture of the news as a thriving, jungle-like ecosystem:

Today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line. That complexity is what makes it so interesting, of course, but also what makes it so hard to predict what it’s going to look like in five or ten years.

Johnson began his talk by observing that when he was a college student and Macintosh computer fanatic in 1987, he had only one regular outlet for news -- the monthly issue of MacWorld magazine: in essence, one static source containing stuff that had happened a month earlier. As time went on, more current Mac and Apple news became available, first through dial-up networking services like CompuServe, then on the incipient World Wide Web. Technology news sources, both Apple-related and otherwise, continued to proliferate and diversify as the Web grew:

We all know where this is headed, but let me spell it out just for the record. If 19-year-old Steven could fast-forward to the present day, he would no doubt be amazed by all the Apple technology – the iPhones and MacBook Airs – but I think he would be just as amazed by the sheer volume and diversity of the information about Apple available now. In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make it to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Jobs speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceeds anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt.

Because Tech news planted its online roots more than a decade ago, Johnson says, you can think of it as the news ecosystem's "old-growth forest," compared with ...

... other areas that have emerged only in the last few years. Johnson pointed to Web coverage of politics: Media-wise, the 2008 election was a world away from the pre-Web 1992 election, when news choices for consumers were shockingly limited from today's perspective: You had your daily newspaper, a few TV news shows and whatever magazines you had delivered. It was a news "desert" rather than a rain forest.

Steven Johnson and the growth of the news ecosystem. Credit: David Sarno / Los Angeles Times

When the going gets tough, get out the metaphors. That strategy was demonstrated nicely Friday at the South by Southwest conference by media and technology scholar Steven Johnson (@stevenbjohnson).  In addressing the paradigm shift that's clear-cutting old, tree-based media such as newspapers and magazines, and fertilizing the many digital news biomes, Johnson developed the picture of the news as a thriving, jungle-like ecosystem:

Today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line. That complexity is what makes it so interesting, of course, but also what makes it so hard to predict what it’s going to look like in five or ten years.

Johnson began his talk by observing that when he was a college student and Macintosh computer fanatic in 1987, he had only one regular outlet for news -- the monthly issue of MacWorld magazine: in essence, one static source containing stuff that had happened a month earlier. As time went on, more current Mac and Apple news became available, first through dial-up networking services like CompuServe, then on the incipient World Wide Web. Technology news sources, both Apple-related and otherwise, continued to proliferate and diversify as the Web grew:

We all know where this is headed, but let me spell it out just for the record. If 19-year-old Steven could fast-forward to the present day, he would no doubt be amazed by all the Apple technology – the iPhones and MacBook Airs – but I think he would be just as amazed by the sheer volume and diversity of the information about Apple available now. In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make it to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Jobs speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceeds anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt.

Because Tech news planted its online roots more than a decade ago, Johnson says, you can think of it as the news ecosystem's "old-growth forest," compared with ...

... other areas that have emerged only in the last few years. Johnson pointed to Web coverage of politics: Media-wise, the 2008 election was a world away from the pre-Web 1992 election, when news choices for consumers were shockingly limited from today's perspective: You had your daily newspaper, a few TV news shows and whatever magazines you had delivered. It was a news "desert" rather than a rain forest.

It's The WorldWideWeb's Birthday, Happy 20th WWW!

I didn't get a card or cake, maybe this post can suffice

Happy 20th Birthday, World Wide Web

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb

On March 13th, 2009 the World Wide Web will turn 20 years old. Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented this world-changing layer on top of the Internet on this day in 1989. It's hard to overstate the impact this young technology has had already and it's even more exciting to think about where it's going in the future.

Berners-Lee has some great ideas about where the web should go next. His vision is of a major advance that could serve as the foundation for innovations that we can't even imagine today.

One year ago Berners-Lee said that all the pieces needed to build a new Semantic Web are now in place. Last month he gave an impassioned talk at the high-profile TED conference about a related concept called Linked Data, a set of ideas he outlined in 2006. The gist of the idea is that we need every institution that can do so putting raw data in standardized format up on the web.

What's so exciting about raw data? We'll defer to Berners-Lee's 15 minute explanation at this year's TED conference. The video of his talk will be posted on the TED website early Friday morning, but ReadWriteWeb readers can check it out now.

Thank you Tim, for what you've done for the world already.

iPod Touch Bursts Into Flames While in Kids Pocket

As we turn our attention to things non-twitter we see this unfortunate kid who had an iPod Touch burst into flame. We are skeptical, but hey, we all got to get along.

The mother of a kid living in Cincinnati, Ohio is suing Apple and 10 unnamed retail employees from the Apple Store in Kenwood over an iPod touch that allegedly exploded in the child's pocket. According to the complaint filed yesterday in the Southern District of Ohio, the plaintiff had the "iTouch" (as the lawsuit refers to it) in his pocket during school when the unfortunate accident happened, resulting in hospital bills and other monetary losses thanks to the disintegration of the iPod touch and, well, the kid's clothes.

As the story goes, the iPod touch was sitting in the "off" position when it unexpectedly popped and caused the kid to feel a burning sensation. At that time, he stood up and noticed that his pants were, in fact, on fire. "Plaintiff A.V. immediately ran to the bathroom and took off his burning pants with the assistance of a friend," reads the complaint. "On said date and at said time, the Apple iTouch had burned through Plaintiff A.V.'s pants pocket and melted through his nylon/spandex underwear, burning his leg."

<!--Nerd alert -->

Upon learning these facts, much of the staff here at Ars took an inordinate amount of time out of our busy day to discuss whether this was a reasonable possibility. The lowest melting point of nylon is approximately 374 degrees Fahrenheit—a temperature that an iPod touch could not reasonably reach without you noticing beforehand (that's hotter than the temperature it takes to fry an egg, by the way). However, because the lawsuit claims there was fire involved, all bets have to be off. Fire is most definitely hot enough to melt nylon, and if there was an explosion to cause the "pop," then there may not have been a way for the kid to notice the heat beforehand.

<!-- End nerd alert -->

Source

Twitter's Suggested Users List Bidding Starts At $250K

This just gets better, in follow up to previous post, this dude puts a price tag on it!

How Much Is A Suggested Slot On Twitter Worth? Jason Calacanis Offers $250,000.

When newbies sign up to Twitter now, they are presented with a list of 100 suggested users to start following. Simply being on that list can boost your followers well above 100,000. Several people and organizations on the list (such as Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Kevin Rose, the New York Times, and CNN) now have more than 250,000 followers each. Many of the most popular Twitter users are on the list, including TechCrunch (we have 214,465 followers). It is insane.

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, who is no Twitter slouch himself with 61,266 hard-earned followers, thinks that being one of the top 20 on the suggested list will be worth as much as a Superbowl ad within five years. He is offering Twitter $250,000 to lock in a spot on the suggested list for two years, or $120,000 for one year. I emailed Calacanis (who is our partner in putting on the TechCrunch 50 conference) and he confirms the offer is dead serious. In fact, he contacted Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams last week about it, and is lobbying investor Fred Wilson. Calacanis writes:

I believe that in five years the top 20 recommend slots will be worth $1m a year each–super bowl commercial level in fact.

. . . this is 100% dead serious. I’m thinking of sending the check today anyway…. if it sits on their desk they might just cash it.

He wants to lock in the price now because he thinks it is a great marketing opportunity. It is not unusual for people on the suggested list to gain 10,000 new followers every day. That comes to 3.6 million a year, and even if half unsubscribe, that is still a direct channel to more than a million potential customers. Those are customers who feel a connection with you because of the personal nature of Twitter messages.

If other companies feel the same way, sellingthese slots could be a lucrative side business for Twitter. At $120,000 a pop, 20 slots would generate $2.4 million in revenues the first year. There are already brands on the suggested list, such as JetBlue, Zappos, Whole Foods, and Dell Outlet. Why not make them pay? To avoid spamming, Calacanis suggests a simple rule:

people who buy the slot will lose it if they abuse it. they are limited to 10 tweets per day and they can’t spam the list. if I suck folks unsubscribe. if i spam (i.e. go above 10 tweets per day) they knock me, jetblue or Zappos out of top 20.

I think Calacanis just can’t stand the fact that he is no longer one of the top Twitter users and wants to buy his way back to the top. Dave Winer argues that the suggested list is a bad idea in general. But maybe Calacanis is onto something. How much do you think a top-20 Twitter slot will go for in one year?

Source

Dave Winer Whines About Twitter's Suggested Users Page

Who even knew Twitter makes suggestions? Where have I been? So the cats out of the bag and we'll see where this goes. It seems like high school all over again: student council president, homecoming queen and whomever is most popular. Gotta love Twitter, just for the drama of who is where and where is you.

I first noticed this when I was on Ana Marie Cox's page on Twitter. All of a sudden she went from 3 or 4 thousand to over 60,000 in less than a week. She had no idea why. A thread opened, there were theories that it was a spam attack, but then Williams jumped in and said it was because she was on the Suggested Users page. The LA Times ran a story on it, and then pretty much everyone knew. Scoble and Leo were openly angry, understandably so. These guys worked really hard to be at the top, I watched them do it, and now they're not even close to the top. (BTW, Cox is no longer in the Suggested Users list.) 

I don't have a quarrel with the people who got the boost, I think it's pretty clear none of them asked for it. I do think the company should have done this much more carefully. Now there's no way to put the toothpaste back in the tube. And the people who got the push have a problem if they are members of the press, because this gift they got from Twitter is worth money. It might be worth a lot of money. If one of them posts a pointer on a Twitter account it's going to get a lot of flow. And what if a reporter were critical of Twitter in a piece she wrote, would Twitter revoke her status?  

TechCrunch uses their Twitter page to point to articles on their site, and every page has ads on it. So the gift from Twitter is worth dollars to them. It's hard to imagine them pulling punches when it comes to reviewing the company. But are they likely to be more kindly disposed to the company? It's hard to imagine when they're delivering so much free flow that doesn't earn them a warm space in your heart.  

And what about Scoble, Leo, Guy and Jason? Did they say something to offend Twitter? Possibly. I can name one thing for each of them that the guys at Twitter probably don't like. But why should I have to even think about this? Until they tilted the table so heavily in favor of these people, I didn't. But it always bothered me that they could. 

Why does the NY Times get the gift but the LA Times doesn't? 

Why is Tim O'Reilly on the list, but not Jay Rosen? 

Why TechCrunch and not GigaOm, PaidContent, SiliconAlley, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, VentureBeat, etc etc. 

Think about it this way -- do you know who wrote Apache or PHP? Do any of them have the power to deliver so much flow to an installation of their software? Imho, that's exactly the relationship Twitter should have with its users. Or the phone company and users of phones -- they shouldn't jump into a conversation and say (for example) "We know someone really cool you would probably like to talk to. We're connecting you to them now." 

Bijan says that Twitter is the little guy, but to me they look big -- huge -- when they have the power to move people up the ladder so quickly, and introduce doubt about their relationship with individual users. When being in favor with Ev means so much. That's screwing the whole thing up.  

Bottom-line: This isn't the way the Internet works. The guys at Twitter should know this. I think they're living in a bubble, and creating one at the same time. No one likes someone who pops the bubble while it's still building. So be it. We need to get that power out of their hands, or they need to disclaim it. They're such a small guy, it's really puzzling why they would do something that alienates so many. Most people won't say it, for the obvious reason that their business interests prevent them from. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be said. 

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LA Times on Twitter: Mindcasting is the New Lifecasting

The LA Times weighs in with this story, mindcasting is the new lifecasting, I think we will see lots and lots of these stories as Twitter becomes assimilated into more mainstream media. And to think you knew it all before the LA Times! Congrats...

Mindcasting is where it’s at.

The distinction is courtesy of Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu), a journalism professor and new media analyst at New York University. For him, Twitter is a new way to conduct a real-time, multi-way dialogue with thousands of his colleagues and fellow netizens.

“Mindcasting came about when I was trying to achieve a very high signal-to noise-ratio,” he explained. This meant using his Twitter account to send out tweets pointing to the best media news and analysis he could find, 15 or 20 times a day. “I could work on the concept of a Twitter feed as an editorial product of my own.”

As Rosen noted, that product is itself a distillation of the huge stream of input he gets from the nearly 550 journalists, analysts and news outlets he follows on Twitter. “I’ve hand-built my own tipster network,” he said. “It’s editing the Web for me in real time.”

Now zoom out and think of Rosen, his hundreds of sources and his 11,000 followers, each as a kind of individual information amplifier, consuming and passing along the most interesting stuff that comes their way. So when the Gazette newspaper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, announced it was re-engineering itself, with the newspaper as just one container for its news, Rosen saw the news tweeted by Scott Karp, a Web journalism entrepreneur he follows — and shared the story with his own audience.

It’s people-powered media in action. And yet a Time magazine columnist wondered this week, “Could a service that seemed to be designed specifically to provide its users with incessant interruptions, empty of almost any meaning or importance, really succeed?”

Nah, seriously? If Twitter was nothing but a way for the masses to meaninglessly interrupt each other, it wouldn’t have attracted the deafening media buzz in the first place, let alone millions of users, or a hyper-caffeinated developer community that cranks out new tools every day that allow users to search, sift and harness the geyser of content that Twitter has become.

The not quite 3-year-old San Francisco-based company says its user base has grown by 900% in the last year alone. Last month the company accepted an additional $35 million in venture capital, too, a hint that investors see potential where skeptics don’t.

Continued