The Social

For Twitter, the past year has been a series of coming-out parties as it jumped further and further into the public eye. But it wasn't until this month's post-election upheaval in Iran that it became really clear: Twitter, you're not in Silicon Valley anymore.

"They have a responsibility that goes way beyond what they originally imagined," said Patrick Meier, director of research at DigiActive, an organization dedicated to helping activists better utilize new-media communication and networking tools. "This is a tool that can help communication in politically volatile situations."

Up to this point, much of the hype about Twitter's use in crises and disasters (as well as political events like elections) has been how quickly it can spread raw eyewitness reports, sort of the ultimate center for participatory "citizen journalism." There was the U.S. Airways incident in January, in which a photograph posted with Twitter app TwitPic was one of the first close-up looks at the emergency landing of a passenger jet in the Hudson River. When a wave of terror attacks sent the Indian city of Mumbai into chaos, many turned to Twitter for the most immediate information available.

In the aftermath of the contested Iranian elections, however, it's been Twitter's potential as a communications medium, rather than simply a source of up-to-the-minute news, that has been front and center. It's usurped Facebook as the social-media tool in the spotlight. The U.S. Department of State even requested that the company reschedule a planned outage so that it would be less likely to disrupt the flow of information coming from Iran.

"It's humbling to think that our 2-year old company could be playing such a globally meaningful role that state officials find their way toward highlighting our significance," a post on the Twitter blog by co-founder Biz Stone read.

Therein lies the uneasy truth: In a major international crisis, one of the prime channels of communication and news for individuals, media outlets, and governments alike is a 2-year-old start-up in San Francisco with 50 employees, no discernible business model, a history of technical instability, and a misinformation-related lawsuit on the table. This is a problem.

"It's just a start-up, and here they are playing geopolitics in some of the most crucial events we've seen recently, and that's kind of worrying," Meier said.

"There's definitely a risk...There are always going to be, I think, dangers in relying on all different kinds of technologies for many different reasons," Meier continued. "A related question to ask is, well, what's the alternative? The cell phones (in Iran) were blocked intermittently, Internet sites were blocked, (but) a few people were able to use Twitter. That was one of the last things that people were able to use, and when you're in that kind of an environment, when things are coming to a showdown, you use what you can and you try and do so as securely and as safely as possible."

The question now is to what extent Twitter, which has declined to comment beyond posts on its official blog, is obliged to step up its game. This is not always an easy question to answer.

It's ambiguous, for example, as to how much responsibility Twitter should take for the content spread over its network. As a communication platform, Twitter needn't be held accountable for the accuracy of everything that its millions of members "tweet." But it already has misinformation problems: Twitter has been sued by St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa over a Twittering impersonator, something that led the company to start rolling out a "verified" accounts program.

"Part of the way that I look at Twitter is much the same way that I look at citizen journalism, and chiefly the sort of early-breaking, unvetted citizen journalism," said Rachel Sterne, founder of user-contributed news site GroundReport. "You take it as an early warning system, you take it as a litmus test where something is happening somewhere in the world, and then the next step for responsible news gatherers is to check your sources."

But if La Russa's lawsuit is any indication, Twitter can't take a completely laissez-faire approach when it comes to accuracy. It's not Wikipedia, with an army of volunteer fact-checkers that manage to self-correct errors and hoaxes most of the time. When something is "tweeted," it's out there, it's public, and it's searchable.

In addition to the content on Twitter, there's the service itself, and it's a service that was once known for embarrassing unreliability. The days when a Steve Jobs keynote could turn Twitter into the famed "fail-whale" error message are over, thankfully, but vulnerabilities remain--the fact that Twitter required maintenance serious enough to disable its service for several hours, for example.

Unstable servers and fail-whales are just the surface, though. It's even less clear as to how effectively Twitter could handle large-scale denial-of-service attacks, phishing, hacking, or more serious forms of sabotage or cyberterrorism.

These are things that Twitter needs to be ready to handle internally, Meier said. He brought up the incident early last year in which a network in Pakistan knocked out the entire YouTube service for several hours. "A government didn't react, the U.S. didn't react, (and) there was no public relations or diplomatic reaction," Meier said. "All that happened was that YouTube found out about it, got their tech people in a room for a few hours, got YouTube back online and did it, and yet it was an international incident at the same time."

But the Twitter situation is very different, and not only because governments have started to take note in this situation. YouTube is a hosting platform that relies chiefly on other communications channels to spread the word about content hosted there: if it goes down for one reason or another, people can upload videos elsewhere. With Twitter, the technology itself isn't the only piece of the equation. What's equally important is the constantly updating, searchable mass of short public messages being broadcast and received around the world. This cannot easily be uprooted and replicated elsewhere.

Both the possibilities of mass misinformation and technical problems lead to another issue for Twitter: revenue. Pundits' calls for Twitter to get cranking on its yet-to-be-unveiled business model have turned into little more than a broken record, but the prominence of Twitter as a communications channel in the Iranian crisis raises the question of whether a pre-revenue company--no matter how cushy its venture backing--is up to task.

If Twitter is going to continue to have this kind of role in international affairs, it's going to need infrastructure so rock-solid that it drives the "fail whale" into extinction. It will need to hire employees with expertise in public policy and communications and a legal team capable of handling issues much more serious than a ticked-off baseball team manager. Those things take money, and this is a company whose co-founder once hinted that hiring an advertising sales staff would be too labor-intensive and costly.

Sterne, however, thinks that might be asking too much of Twitter. "I think the most important thing for Twitter is to focus on their technology and make sure their platform is up," she said. "They're not in the diplomatic game, and they're not a news outlet, so it's not up to us to hold them responsible for the content that goes across their network, it's up to us as consumers to be responsible consumers."

But, as Meier pointed out, turning things up a few notches could be in Twitter's own self-interest. If it doesn't make some moves to be ready for the international stage, it could be a major missed opportunity for the company.

"The activist will adapt if the environment changes," he said. "If Twitter goes down, they'll find something else."

A State Department press briefing gives some insight into why the U.S. government requested that Twitter postpone a scheduled downtime during a crucial period in the post-election upheaval in Iran.

"I think, as I was following this, these developments over the weekend...I began to recognize the importance of new social media as a vital tool for citizens' empowerment and as a way for people to get their messages out," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Tuesday, according to a transcript of the department's daily press briefing (which was not held specifically to address the Twitter question). "And it was very clear to me that these kinds of social media played a very important role in democracy, spreading the word about what was going on."

CNN reported Tuesday that the State Department had been behind the decision by Twitter and its hosting provider to reschedule the downtime for an hour when it would be the middle of the night in the Iranian capital of Tehran.

Kelly was then asked to comment on "discussions that (the State Department is) having with networking sites about maintaining the technology, about how the State Department as an institution is monitoring these type of sites to gain information about what's going on."

His response: "We're monitoring many different media, including some of these sites. And we've had, of course, talks with Twitter as well...I don't want to go into the detail of the nature of those talks right now."

Another reporter then pointed out that "by not providing any information on the nature of the talks, it indicates that you have some role in kind of providing messages to Twitter, messages to Iranians."

Kelly denied this. He said he was not sure who exactly within the State Department had been in touch with Twitter and added that "we use a number of social media outlets, and we're in constant contact with them. And as I said before, we were, of course, monitoring the situation through a number of different media, including social media networks like Facebook and Twitter...this is about the Iranian people. This is about giving their voices a chance to be heard. One of the ways that their voices are heard are through new media."

With the Iranian government clamping down on foreign journalists, Kelly has a point: access to Twitter and ilk are crucial sources of information.

Social media tools like Twitter and Facebook have already emerged as sources of raw news in disasters and political crises before--from the Hudson River emergency plane landing to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. But this is the first time they've been highlighted as vital information channels in Iran--both for protesters trying to spread information and for government authorities trying to gather it.

When Twitter rescheduled some planned downtime in order to stay accessible for Iranian users in the midst of political upheaval, it was at the request of the U.S. State Department, according to CNN.

This should not be taken to mean that the U.S. is attempting to get involved at this point, CNN added. The State Department is working with multiple social-networking and communication services to ensure that conversation and information channels stay active.

"By necessity, the U.S. is staying hands-off of the election drama playing out in Iran, and officials say they are not providing messages to Iranians or 'quarterbacking' the disputed election process," the article by CNN's Elise Labott read.

Because the U.S. has no diplomatic relations with Iran, information gathered on the Web is crucial to its understanding of the post-election unrest that has led to mass protests and fatal clashes with police. Twitter, where users have been filtering relevant information with the hashtag #iranelection, has been a crucial hotspot for raw news.

Twitter's planned maintenance, according to a post on the company's official blog, was selected by its hosting partner, NTT America. The update is "a critical network upgrade [that] must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter," however, so it will instead take place this afternoon when it's well after midnight in Iran.

Meanwhile, in a sort of digital twist on that famous scene in The Thomas Crowne Affair, a new viral campaign is going around Twitter: Users from around the world are resetting the location data in their profiles to Tehran, the capital of Iran, in order to confuse Iranian authorities who may be attempting to use the microblogging tool to track down opposition activity.

In running for attorney general of California, Facebook executive Chris Kelly is returning to his roots.

"Ever since I worked in public life when I was very young, I thought it was something that I might do at some point," said Kelly, a former Clinton campaign and White House staffer who serves as the massive social network's chief privacy officer and head of public policy.

"Over the past few years at Facebook, it's become clear to me that the role of the attorney general is incredibly able to help make change in the world, and that's what I got into technology to do, too," Kelly, who is a Democrat, continued in an interview with CNET News on Thursday. "So looking at how to do that in the political realm is something that's been under consideration for me for a long time, and it seems like it's the right time to give it a shot."

Kelly is staying with Facebook, which recently surpassed 200 million active members and continues to grow fast, while his campaign is still in the exploratory phase. He said that he will "continue to be active at Facebook for at least the next few months," and implied that he won't formally step down unless he is elected.

As for financing, Kelly said that "quite a number of people have pledged a fair amount of money," but added that he had not yet made a decision about self-financing. He didn't comment on whether this might include cashing out part of his stake in Facebook. California campaign finance sites do not yet list any donations to the Kelly campaign.

So how are his chances? Kelly will likely have strong rivals both in the Democratic primary, which takes place in June 2010, and the general election that November should he emerge victorious in the primary. With an executive post at one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley and a campaign platform focused on bringing everything from personal safety to violent crime control into the 21st century, Kelly can likely craft himself as the high-tech candidate.

"We're going to put together what we think is a fantastic story for the voters that reflects what the future of California should be," Kelly said to CNET News. "The reaction to somebody with both public and private sector experience stepping into this race has been very good and very exciting, and I'm thrilled to be looking at it long and hard and to be hearing from people abut their ideas about how to improve the state."

Photos: From tech exec to politician

As attorney general, Kelly has expressed a desire to crack down on the white-collar crime that has been partially responsible for dragging California and the rest of the U.S. into a deep financial recession. He's also committed to bringing better technological strategies and equipment to law enforcement authorities, and pledges to not take his eye off online privacy.

"When I talk about technology, technology is never a panacea," Kelly admonished. "It has to be deployed in ways that are trying to build safer social systems. For instance, Facebook is not just about the deployment of technology in these areas, we made choices around being a real-world identity platform and enforcing the fact that you can't use a fake name and things like that. When you talk about technology, (it's) the place that it's been used most effectively. (In law enforcement) there's a technology component to it, but ultimately the goal is to find the people who are committing the crimes, and arrest them."

Kelly's tech cred is high. But on the flip side, popular though it may be, an affiliation with a social network like Facebook does come with some baggage. Controversial interface redesigns probably won't hurt his campaign a bit, but Facebook has suffered negative press over the past few years for its allegedly intrusive Beacon advertising program, phishing schemes and viruses that continue to pop up, and ironically a high-profile campaign on the behalf of several states' attorneys general to tackle the issue of sex offenders maintaining a presence on Facebook.

Kelly acknowledged that this sort of press could turn into fodder for negative campaigning. "I expect that the politics-as-usual crowd will try to make a bunch of stuff out of situations where Facebook has acted incredibly responsibly, and has been able to address the real problems of the Internet, and to build the systems that build a safer and more trusted online experience over time," Kelly said.

"I think that we're in a new era of politics and that that sort of approach just doesn't work the way that it used to," he continued, "but I fully expect that there will be some opponents in this race who will be interested in trying to exploit a misimpression that people have about the way Facebook has acted, and I'm ready for that."

Facebook, along with fellow social network MySpace (owned by News Corp.), eventually reached an agreement with New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo early in 2008 to collaborate on new safety legislation. Cuomo had subpoenaed Facebook several months prior, claiming that it misrepresented how safe it was for minors.

Kelly doesn't have an official endorsement from Facebook and probably won't get one down the line, either: he said the social network has never endorsed a political candidate or initiative and doesn't expect it to do any differently for him. Nor has he made the decision yet to endorse any one of the current Democratic gubernatorial candidates over another--even though San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom made a high-profile visit to Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters right around the time that he announced his candidacy for the state house.

"I like Gavin. I like Jerry Brown. I like Antonio Villaraigosa," Kelly said, naming a few of the Democratic candidates who have thrown their hats in the ring. Incumbent Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, cannot run for re-election due to term limits. "There are quite a number of candidates who are or might be in that race, (Senator) Dianne Feinstein is another possibility, and boy, if that's the field, we've got a lot of great choices."

In a move that some Silicon Valley insiders had anticipated might happen, Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly has announced his exploratory bid for the elected post as attorney general of California.

He has set up the Web site www.kelly2010.com as his online campaign headquarters. Kelly also has an official Facebook fan page for his campaign.

(Credit: Kelly2010.com)

"Over the past year, many people I respect have asked me to run for California Attorney General in 2010. Today, after much consideration, I am announcing that I've launched a committee to further explore the race," Kelly, who is a Democrat, said in a statement. "As the next Attorney General of California, I would utilize my experience to protect California consumers, maintain an open and accountable government, and guarantee an effective legal system."

Kelly's background is in politics. In a video on his Web site, he explains that he got his start as a staffer on Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign and then at the White House, where he focused on establishing public service programs like AmeriCorps. Rumors that he was looking into a run for attorney general began to swirl late last year.

In his campaign, Kelly has indicated that he will run on a platform of high-tech innovation and accountability, particularly in the wake of economic decline and uncertainty.

"(At Facebook) I have dealt first-hand with the complex legal challenges and privacy issues that effect California businesses and consumers," Kelly explained in the video. "We need a strong consumer protection advocate as California's chief law enforcement officer, defending people against unfair practices and schemes. As California faces a budget deficit of more than $41 billion, rising home foreclosure rates, and an uncertain economic future, it is imperative that we prevent consumer fraud and protect California residents from scam artists offering once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for home ownership, phony foreclosure avoidance scams, and any financial fraud."

Among the other issues he mentioned were online safety and privacy for both adults and children, and tech-savvy improvements to law enforcement and border patrol.

Facebook said in a statement that Kelly is not leaving his post to run for attorney general, at least not yet.

"Chris Kelly is a valued member of the Facebook Team and has been for the past several years," the statement read. "Chris is currently exploring a possible run for California Attorney General on his own time and in compliance with all applicable Facebook policies. If, over the next few months, Chris decides to devote himself full-time to campaign, he's indicated that he will take time off or a leave of absence to do so."

As an executive at a social network with over 200 million members that has become a Silicon Valley success stories, Kelly has credibility as a digital-age candidate. Yet under Kelly's watch, Facebook went through a number of embarrassing privacy flubs, most notably the launch of its Beacon advertising program--which some critics charged as intrusive.

Facebook was also at the center of a legal back-and-forth with several states' lawmakers about whether it was doing enough to keep its members safe from known sex offenders. That, however, appears to have ended in agreement and cooperation.

Kelly won't be the only Silicon Valley type running for statewide office. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, a Republican, is running for governor. San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who has appealed to the Valley set with green-tech initiatives and "Second Life" interviews, has also launched an exploratory bid for governor. The state's elections are next fall.

California's current attorney general is Edmund G. Brown, Jr.

This post was expanded at 1:35 p.m. PT.

Liberal news outlet The Huffington Post has announced its latest venture funding round. The upswing: It is $25 million, not $15 million as previously rumored.

The funding comes from the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Oak Venture Partners. No valuation was provided, but AllThingsD's Kara Swisher suggests it's slightly under $100 million. The company has 46 employees.

Fred Harman of Oak Venture partners will join Huffington Post's board. Previous investors include Softbank Capital and Greycroft Partners.

This is the company's Series C funding round. Traffic to its Web site skyrocketed amid the hotly contested presidential election this fall, but The Huffington Post--started by a team led by political pundit and author Arianna Huffington--has been making strides to expand beyond the left-of-center political coverage that made it famous. Political news sites, many critics speculate, may see a significant drop in traffic now that there's no presidential election filling up headlines, and that's not a good thing when ad spending is tightening amid the economic downturn.

Local news, more video, and a fund for investigative journalism are next on the plate for Huffington Post, according to a press release, in addition to possible acquisitions. There is also a "world news" page in the works, hinted a source close to the company, who added that other coverage areas such as sports are discussed but are further from a launch.

NEW YORK--Solar panels clusters in New Mexico, wind farms dotting the Great Plains? That's all very nice. But that railroad tunnel in Baltimore is important, too.

On a gray and rainy Thursday, I went to Time Inc.'s midtown Manhattan headquarters for what was supposed to be a panel about the company's flagship magazine's annual "Person of the Year" honor. But amid consistently grave economic news, not to mention the fact that everyone in attendance seemed to agree that President-elect Barack Obama eclipses any other options for the award, the conversation was less about a magazine headline and more about the future of the country.

After a hefty fall season of digital-media and Web conferences, I was surprised to witness that outside the culture of think-big tech pundits, "the future" is a lot more mundane.

"This is what President Obama's going to face," said panelist Elizabeth Edwards, Center for American Progress senior fellow and wife of former presidential candidate John Edwards. The road out of the economic crisis is "not a refund check" encouraging more consumption, "not more houses with more flat-screen TVs...(but) bridges that work and schools that inspire students."

The panelist lineup was impressive: in addition to Edwards, there was NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams; Mad Men actor John Slattery; personal-finance talking head Suze Orman; Saturday Night Live head writer Seth Meyers; and congressional Rep. Artur Davis (D-Alabama). None of them were the sorts of people whom I'd seen onstage in the past two months of tech industry events, from the Web 2.0 Expo in New York to the Future of Web Apps in London to last week's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco (which featured Intel CEO Paul Otellini, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and former Vice President Al Gore, among others).

To be sure, the Techmeme set talks a whole lot about recession and recovery these days. Al Gore has urged us to move beyond "the gee-whiz stuff." Back in April, Tim O'Reilly expressed mild disgust at the fact that some of the U.S.' best and sharpest minds were busy building new ways to throw virtual hamburgers at each other on Facebook.

The problem is that some of these digital thought leaders' "real-world solutions" are still painted with that wide-eyed, change-the-world Valley sparkle. There is a distinct soldier-on, innovation-won't stop attitude, even as dozens of tech companies slice off a fifth, a quarter, a third of their workforces. Tech innovation will change the world in big ways, but it will change the world in small and unglamorous ways, too, and we're not hearing a whole lot of that.

At the Web 2.0 Summit, Gore suggested that in ten years we can build a "unified national smart grid" of sustainable electricity, a plan that would create thousands of jobs but which critics say might not even work. Paul Otellini excitedly showed off an Intel prototype of a camera-like gadget that could do language translations in seconds. Other panels at the same conference were all about consumer solar equipment retail, home DNA tests, and $100,000 electric sports cars.

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams

(Credit: NBC)

There was none of that on Thursday at Time Inc.'s headquarters. Williams suggested that perhaps President Obama's priorities should, FDR-style, putting people to work repairing a national infrastructure that's in bad disrepair. "Would it be that bad if we had a big jobs program?" Williams posed.

He asked why New York's LaGuardia Airport is in disrepair, why some of the city's infrastructure hasn't been touched since the days of controversial public works czar Robert Moses, and why it was possible that a bridge collapsed in Minneapolis last year. He asked why the U.S.' only high-speed train line, Amtrak's Acela Express, has to slow to 25 miles per hour to get through a tunnel outside Baltimore that dates back to the 1930s.

If people were put to work repairing it, Williams said, "you could get to Washington 20 minutes earlier."

The nifty smart-camera gadget that Otellini showed off at the Web 2.0 Summit might as well have been a flying car on The Jetsons in comparison.

SAN FRANCISCO--There wasn't much time for Current Media, the cable news network co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, to recover from last week's election and its marathon live broadcast, infused with content from Digg, Twitter, and countless video bloggers.

On Friday, Gore was giving the final address of the Web 2.0 Summit, a few blocks to the west of Current's offices, at the Palace Hotel, and plenty of advertising and marketing types were in town for the occasion.

Since it's a media company partially dependent on ad and sponsorship revenues, Current seized the opportunity, inviting a selection of visiting Madison Avenue types over to its offices for a meet-and-greet lunch with a special appearance by Gore, who famously went from losing the 2000 presidential election to winning an Academy Award and a Nobel Peace Prize.

That morning, things were bustling, as maintenance staff was streaming in and out the front door, filling the downstairs lobby with dining tables and potted plants unloaded from two trucks parked outside. At so many of the Bay Area's tech brands that had launched election coverage, promotions, or other tie-ins, the attitude was the same: Nice job. Now let's keep moving.

"I was even joking the other day that I kind of felt like I have a bit of postpartum depression," said Randi Zuckerberg, who, as Facebook's marketing director, handles the social network's political-outreach efforts. "It was such a long, drawn-out, exciting election, and now it's just over."

But even for Facebook, at the top of Silicon Valley's pecking order, there is a sense that a quick turnaround is needed. "I'm definitely looking forward to jumping right into some of the international politics, international elections," Zuckerberg said, reflecting the company's dramatic overseas expansion and hope to tap into the same election fever abroad through voting-outreach initiatives. Its efforts proved successful in the United States, with 15 million people over the age of 18 logging into the site last Tuesday.

What's current at Current Media
The story is different at a company like Current, which was dismissed by some at its 2005 launch as a long-shot experiment. For Gore's company, the 2008 election posed an important street cred test.

Current's office looks more like a perky dot-com circa 1997 than a news media network. The space hosted a coffee beanery in the city's manufacturing era and a finance start-up during the tech boom, it's now a cavernous, servers-and-wires-filled space with exposed brick walls, post-industrial pipes, and blaring monitors. For Election Night, the office was transformed into "an election nerve center," Current's resident digital guru, Robin Sloan, told CNET News on Friday morning. "We had the Twitter room, the Digg room, the election control room," Sloan explained in a bubbly staccato. "It was totally electric. I mean, manic."

Current's ambitious election coverage came with plenty of risks: the potential awkwardness of working with Digg, which Current had unsuccessfully tried to acquire in 2006, and Twitter, which has had problems just keeping its servers running properly. The coverage had been planned in a matter of weeks, too.

"The idea to plug in the Twitters didn't really occur to us until we saw the way that people were using Twitter during the (Democratic and Republican parties') conventions," Sloan said. "We ended up getting a sponsor for this Election Day thing three days before it actually went on TV--from Microsoft."

But he says the company considers it to have been a great success, despite some critics' revulsion at Current's decision to use turquoise and magenta for its electoral map instead of red and blue. "This was like transplanting Web DNA into a Web-slash-TV project. To me, that was one of the big successes."

Like Facebook, Current plans to keep up the momentum and use it elsewhere.

"The question is, as we sort of recover, what is the next cool live event that we can construct something around?" Sloan suggested, adding that Inauguration Day is an easy pick but that it would be nice to choose something nonpolitical. Current, a 400-person operation, doesn't currently do much live coverage, and it was not yet able to provide concrete statistics on viewership or Web traffic.

The aftermath at Twitter and Digg
The election left both Digg and Twitter, meanwhile, at an inflection point: for Twitter, the political frenzy was its biggest chance yet to jump from digerati cult fame into the mainstream; Digg needed to prove to some that it's a potential media industry powerhouse rather than merely a hub of nerdy boys voting up and down on Apple rumors and wacky top-10 lists.

They're still, for the most part, in Barack mode. Several days after the election, Digg founder Kevin Rose taped a "Digg Dialogg" interview with Gore, who also signed up for a Twitter account that week. On Thursday, Twitter's blog highlighted a video clip of talk show hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert talking about the start-up.

That frenzy will die down sooner rather than later. And it goes without saying that in these economic conditions, regardless of President-elect Obama's potential, pre-revenue companies like Digg and Twitter need to get cracking on the money issue. That's another reason why there just isn't much time to relish a post-election hangover.

Some start-ups that were heavily reliant on election-related traffic or contracts have been hedging their bets. Liberal news outlet The Huffington Post, for example, spent the past year not only churning out a firestorm of election coverage but also launching new areas of coverage that wouldn't see a big drop in visits after Election Day. And representatives from a number of Web application makers that were commissioned to make spiffy election widgets for big media companies told CNET News late last month that they have their fingers crossed that those contracts and connections will lead to more high-profile deals after the election.

But onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit on Friday, a few hours after he met with potential advertisers and marketers at Current's offices, Al Gore put forth a different argument for maintaining momentum: the election was a stellar demonstration of how the likes of Digg, Twitter, and Facebook can be used for social change, and these times are too pressing to step back and return to that blissful age of zombie-biting apps and snotty Digg comments on wacky news stories.

"I do think that it's worth looking at the advantages of redesigning and rearchitecturing the context within which the activities take place--in other words, World 2.0," Gore said. "When there are changes that are needed, there's no timidity about going out and trying to make them happen."

That post-election, mid-November vacation getaway? Sorry. Maybe there'll be better luck after the 2010 midterms.

Former Vice President Al Gore onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit.

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News)

SAN FRANCISCO--The central theme of former Vice President Al Gore's speech, concluding the Web 2.0 Summit on Friday afternoon, was electricity.

He spoke of "the electrifying redemption of America's revolutionary declaration that all human beings are created equal," as emphasized through Barack Obama's election victory on Tuesday, and how it "would not have been possible without the additional empowerment of individuals to use knowledge as a source of power that has come with the Internet."

Gore reiterated what so many people have said before--that the Obama campaign was a vindication for how the new tools of the Internet can be used toward legitimate change.

"What happened in the election opens up a full new range of possibilities, and now is the time to really move swiftly to use these new possibilities," he said. "I made a talk earlier today about how the early uses of electricity 100 years ago were aimed at sort of specialized applications and gimmicks and do-dads and whiz-bangs that demonstrated the special qualities of this new conveyor of power."

He meant, essentially, throwing an electric sheep. (Apologies to Philip K. Dick.)

"Now we just take electricity for granted as everywhere, and it has empowered a whole civilization," he said. Gore said the analogy stands for Web 2.0 as well. "When people are displaying interactivity or user-generated content or social networking, that's kind of the gee-whiz stuff...We need to move past that."

Electricity, too, is key to Gore's urgent call to action, which he detailed with an immediacy that was needed at a conference where some panels drifted a little too far into the speculative future. America needs a "unified national smart grid" distributing renewable solar energy across the country, something he estimates would cost $400 billion in a decade. But it would create thousands of jobs, Gore said, and it would pay for itself within three years.

When Obama takes office in January, Gore said the new president ought to set "a national goal of getting 100 percent of America's electricity from renewable and noncarbon sources within 10 years. We can do that."

He continued: "The declaration from President Kennedy that we would land a man on the moon and bring him back safely was thought by many to be impossible."

Gore had come onstage at the conference to a standing ovation and so much applause that he had to tell the audience to quiet down. His story is familiar: he famously won the popular vote for the presidency in 2000 but lost the electoral vote to George W. Bush, and he went on to win both an Academy Award for his environmental-awareness documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

In 2005, Gore founded Current TV, a cable news network that he created with Joel Hyatt in response to his dissatisfaction with the television industry. "One of the main reasons why our political system has not been operating very well until this election is the deadening influence of the television medium as it has been operated," he said.

Gore encouraged the digerati in the audience to keep pushing forward as they face what he says is the most pressing struggle of our time, climate change--the subject matter of An Inconvenient Truth. The fact that the Web's candidate of choice won this time is no reason to rest easy, he said. Media democratization needs to continue evolving.

"Just as Barack Obama's election would've been impossible without the new dialogue and new ways of interacting--the Web--the only way (climate change) is going to be solved is by addressing the democracy crisis, and the country hit a great blow for victory this week, but we have to take this issue and raise it in the awareness of everyone," Gore said. "I think that it is very much in its infancy, barely beginning, and I think that we are not many years away from television sort of sinking into the digital world and becoming a part of it."

Cynics might say Gore, who calls himself a "recovering politician," is still bitter at a sterilized news media that didn't sufficiently back his calling in the 2000 presidential election. Needless to say, his views remain controversial. But onstage, Gore seemed plenty comfortable in his new role as a thought leader rather than an elected official.

"Who knew that you were the guru of Web 2.0, as well as global warming?" conference organizer Tim O'Reilly asked Gore jokingly after the former vice president had illustrated an analogy involving "crowdsourced" information and cloud computing, two of the decade's most buzzworthy digital talking points.

If the audience was any indication, Gore has gained resounding acceptance as an information-age guru, a bit of an irony, considering that 10 years ago, erroneous reports circulated that he had once claimed to have invented the Internet.

"When we have really had these great leaps forward has been when new information ecoystems have made it possible for individuals who are thinking and processing information, and who have aspirations and hopes...to connect easily with lots of voters around core ideas," Gore explained. His preferred analogy was the invention of the printing press five centuries ago, in which he connected general historical events to the rise of literacy and eventually the creation of democratic governments.

"The installation of a new sovereign, the rule of reason, and the emergence of a marketplace of ideas that was accessible to individuals--that really empowered this kind of collective intelligence," Gore said. "And the American constitution could be, by analogy, a brilliant piece of software that regularly harvested the results of that."

An audience member asked Gore how much he thought governments should regulate Internet use, and Gore fired back, "As little as possible." There was more applause, and as he left the stage, there was yet another standing ovation.

Gore might not have invented the Internet (or even claimed to do so). But if the Web 2.0 Summit was any indication, plenty of Silicon Valley's most loyal are more than happy to have him help reinvent it.