The clue's in Twitter's name for this footballers' tweets refusenik | Anna Kessel

Wayne and Coleen Rooney have been busy tweeting each other since the Manchester United forward's debut on Twitter. Photograph: Mark Campbell/Rex Features

There was a sporting stir in our household over the bank holiday weekend. Not because Queens Park Rangers' hopes of promotion were put on hold after a scintillating 2-2 draw with Cardiff City, nor because Arsenal messed up yet again, but because the real Wayne Rooney had finally joined Twitter. What a relief. Personally I had been beginning to lose hope.

Later it was reported that it took @Wazzaroon08 a few attempts to get the hang of the 140-character tweets, which is understandable as he is already so eloquent with just the four, but once he found his comfort zone there was no stopping him. He and wife Coleen even managed to tweet each other! Once baby Kai is inducted into the twitterverse none of the Rooneys need ever speak to one another again, #hello21stcenturyfunctionalfamily!

The good news did not stop there. Joining Wazza was Asamoah Gyan, while Darron Gibson popped in for a quick bite before hastily retreating faster than a cat backs out of a litter tray. Ooh, stinky.

Apparently both Wazza and Gibbo's appearances (and disappearance) were big news, although in this instance Sky Sports News decided not to give it the breaking news treatment. Not that SSN is averse to breaking news about Twitter. Who could forget the excitement when @rioferdy5 exclusively tweeted that he was unable to reveal anything about @Wazzaroon08 (in tweet-utero as he then was) purportedly leaving Manchester United?

At which point I may as well confess that I'm a Twitter-hater, along the Ice T principles (don't hate the tweeter, hate the game). I have recently been advised that this is akin to hating telephones, cars and Google, or, as a friend put it, "insisting on listening to the wireless". At the ripe old age of 32 I'm being written off as a fuddy-duddy. True, I did watch Countryfile at the weekend (fly fishing on the river Usk, hell yeah!) but I fail to see anything fogey about refusing to join a virtual reality cult. Sorry, but if you're self-identifying as a "follower" you may as well go the whole hog and sign up with the Cruises.

I'm not ruling out Twitter altogether, I do concede it has its uses. Take, for example, the well-traversed extract from an impressive canon of work by Darren Bent, this one circa 2009. "Do I wanna go Hull City NO. Do I wanna go stoke NO do I wanna go sunderland YES so stop fucking around, [Daniel] levy." Genius. Like reading a script from The Wire, the unparalleled beauty, authenticity of language and certain rawness of his words. If every tweet was elevated to that level of expression the twitterverse would be an exciting place. Sadly, as it stands, tweetheads, it ain't.

Another pro-Twitter line of argument is that the public can finally access what multimillionaire sports stars actually think about. That in a world of spin where if you say "Kate Middleton is a commoner" enough times in an ITV documentary the nation will believe it, we are finally able to cut through the propaganda and touch the truth.

Well, sort of. I've heard of at least one footballer offered £20,000 to promote certain fizzy drinks companies in his tweets, while another told me that the main reason his colleagues go on Twitter is to flog their own brand.

Having learned absolutely nothing of note from Wazza since his debut (I do not count a photograph of him standing outside a tanning salon as news) I'm afraid I'm sticking to my typewriter-like stance on the subject.

As if I needed further persuasion, however, it came on Sunday evening settling down to watch United, the BBC's dramatisation of the Munich air disaster. From the sofa I was gripped as the plane crashed in the snow. Tears pricking my eyes, a lump formed in my throat as I watched a young Bobby Charlton stagger around, dazed, while his team-mate Harry Gregg pulled bodies from the wreckage of the plane.

Palms sweating, I silently willed Bobby to tear his hands away from his eyes and tend to Sir Matt.

All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a flicker of movement in my peripheral vision. My husband was reaching into his pocket to pull out his mobile phone. I watched, aghast, as he casually scrolled down the screen.

"What are you doing?" I hissed. "Just having a look on Twitter," came the reply. "Why?" I hissed back. "Just to see what everyone's saying about the film."

I could barely believe my ears. "But it's not even finished yet!" I yelled. My husband shrugged as I turned my head back to face the TV screen, desperate not to miss another millisecond of how the Busby survivors might be coping.

Then, in a sudden moment of clarity, I finally understood what I had to do. Reaching for my phone I quickly tapped out the message: "Do u wanna miss the end. NO. R u gonna waste the rest of ur life floppin on Twitter YES. So stop fucking around and watch the telly."

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READ MORE » The clue's in Twitter's name for this footballers' tweets refusenik | Anna Kessel

Twitter’s Biz Stone: ‘We’re Long Overdue To Be Knocked Down By The Press’

Twitter co-founder and creative director Biz Stone took to his personal blog today to respond to Fortune’s cover this week on the operational problems plaguing the company.

Stone basically says that Twitter has received its fair share of good press over the past few years from media outlets and it was only a matter of time before a publication knocked the company down. He writes, the normal press cycle is to put a company on a pedestal and then knock it down. He says that Facebook and Google have both received the same sort of treatment from the press.

He doesn’t really do much in the post to defend the reports from yesterday but he did say that Twitter has to prove that the press is wrong so we can write a comeback story.

From his blog post: Twitter is an important company and it’s under scrutiny from journalists—this is exactly how it’s supposed to work. Now it’s our job to prove the reporters wrong so they can write an article later about how we have made dramatic progress.

READ MORE » Twitter’s Biz Stone: ‘We’re Long Overdue To Be Knocked Down By The Press’

Twitter’s Phantom Punch

Yesterday, the story on everyone’s mind in the tech world was the turmoil at Twitter. Led by the Fortune cover story written by Jessi Hempel, if you read it, you might think the sky is falling on Chicken Little. Not surprisingly, Twitter responded — sort of.

Though it wasn’t an “official” response, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone put up a post on his personal blog late last night directly addressing the Fortune article. He even invoked Rocky.

Yes. Fight!

The problem with Stone’s post is that he fails to respond in any way to the actual content of the Fortune story. Instead, he focuses on Fortune’s history of flip-flopping. They love Facebook, they hate Facebook. They love Google, they hate Google. They love Twitter… You get the point.

It’s a smart maneuver by the man who actually used to run communications for Twitter back in the day. (As a sidenote, I fondly recall our back-and-forth emails along the lines of “Hey Biz, why is Twitter down now?” “Hey MG, looking into it.”) But let’s be clear about what the maneuver is: straight-up diversion.

Stone’s post is implying that Fortune’s post is simply a continuation of a cycle they follow to build a company up only to knock them down. Though not stated, the underlying idea here is that these stories create more interest and thus, more readers. That’s undoubtedly at least partially true. But again, it’s also implying that there is actually nothing wrong at Twitter. And that’s simply not true.

Anyone with any sort of connections to the tech scene out here will know that a few things have been afoul for quite some time at Twitter. That’s not saying the company is collapsing, but Fortune doesn’t say that either. There has been trouble behind the scenes. It’s real. And it’s hardly some well-guarded secret.

You’ll notice that Stone does not deny any of that. Again, he simply diverts attention away from it by throwing a punch at Fortune for their editorial practices. “Are there problems at Twitter?” “Hey, look over there!!”

Stone also notes that, “Twitter has had so many ups and downs you’d think we would have had more negative press.” Apparently, he hasn’t been closely reading TechCrunch over the years. While all of us love and are addicted to Twitter, we’ve had dozens of negative stories about the service — and rightfully so. These include stories wondering if yes, Twitter is collapsing. We even had posts with the title “Trouble At Twitter“.

What Stone likely means, of course, is that the mainstream media has been largely kind to Twitter over the years. That seems largely true but for a different reason than Stone concludes.

Stone suggests that the mainstream media has shown Twitter nothing but love, but he leaves out the fact that it’s largely because they did view them as Rocky (to borrow Stone’s metaphor) for a long time. As in, they thought Twitter was a joke that could never compete on the big stage.

Hell, most of the mainstream media had absolutely no idea what Twitter was until mid-2009 or into 2010.

Stone does end his post strong though. “Twitter is an important company and it’s under scrutiny from journalists—this is exactly how it’s supposed to work,” he writes  Yes, that’s exactly right. You know what’s worse than getting taken down in the press? Getting no press at all because your company is considered irrelevant (see: above).

“Now it’s our job to prove the reporters wrong so they can write an article later about how we have made dramatic progress,” he continues. Again, right. At the end of the day, what matters are results. None of Twitter’s issues are unfixable. And even better, if Twitter continues to achieve growth and gains success from a monetary perspective, it will coat any problems they do have in a fine gloss that the press and others will look right past. You think Facebook doesn’t have internal issues? Yeah, right.

Stone then does what needs to be done and (rightly) praises the 400+ employees working for Twitter who are devoting their lives to it. It’s rah-rah from a journalistic perspective, but it’s exactly what a leader of a company needs to do when employees are reading about company troubles in the press.

But now I’m glossing over Stone’s glossing over of the real issues at hand. In Rocky’s boxing parlance, his post was a phantom punch. Sometimes you can win with those. But throw too many and you might end up on the wrong side of Clubber Lang’s prediction in Rocky III: “pain.”

[image: MGM]

READ MORE » Twitter’s Phantom Punch

In The Post-Client Era, Did Tweetbot Just Swipe Twitter’s iPhone Crown?

Don’t focus on making new Twitter clients.

The message has been very clear — well, moderately clear — for weeks now. If you’re a third-party looking to develop in the Twitter ecosystem, you should focus on data or niche experiences. Good thing Tweetbot didn’t listen.

If you’ve looked at Twitter tonight, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the massive amount of buzz surrounding Tweetbot. It’s a new Twitter iPhone client made by Tapbots. And yes, it is very good.

It’s so good that it has a number of people promising to walk away from Twitter’s own iPhone client. And that’s interesting for a few reasons.

First of all, while apps like Echofon, Twitterrific, Seesmic, TweetDeck and other have their fans, Twitter for iPhone has been the undisputed king of Twitter iPhone clients since it was still known as Tweetie. In fact, that’s why Twitter bought it last year, along with developer Loren Brichter, and turned it into Twitter for iPhone (making it free in the process).

Second, Tweetbot isn’t free — it’s $1.99. It apparently doesn’t matter, people are still insanely excited for this app.

Third, Twitter is in the midst of a big push to get everyone using their own clients, and have been touting that shift taking place. Obviously, if Tweetbot actually does catch on, that could throw a wrench into things.

The backstory of Tweetbot is equally as interesting. It was a year ago yesterday that Mark Jardine wrote a post on Tapbots blog exposing the Tweetbot project to the world. At the time, they had been at work on the app for nearly 3 months when something funny happened: Twitter bought Tweetie. This caused them to second guess not only the pricing of their app, but also continuing to develop the app itself.

As Jardine notes in his “concerns” list at the time:

Will they [Twitter] eventually kill all 3rd party iPhone/iPad clients to prevent confusion between their app and all the rest?

A year later, that’s sort of what Twitter would like to happen (though obviously they wouldn’t use the word “kill”). But recently, Twitter had a bit of a nightmare with regard to Twitter for iPhone when they decided to shove advertising — I mean the dickbar — I mean the quickbar into the app. It was ill-advised and didn’t last long. Still, it has planted a seed of doubt in many users head about the direction of the app.

Enter Tweetbot.

A year after it was first announced we have the app. Both Shawn Blanc and MacStories have very thorough reviews of just what makes it so good. I’ve only been using it this evening, but my initial impression is that I too might be willing to replace Twitter for iPhone with it. It’s simply very well designed and great for power users — particularly those who use Twitter Lists.

I also love the idea of adding some chaos into the mix. If Twitter doesn’t own the most popular mobile client, what does that mean? Would they have to buy Tweetbot? Do they make moves to shut it down or limit it? What if Bill Gross tries to buy it? It’s enough to keep a blogger busy for weeks. The game has changed.

Try Tweetbot here — again, it’s $1.99, but worth it.

Peliculas Online

READ MORE » In The Post-Client Era, Did Tweetbot Just Swipe Twitter’s iPhone Crown?