microblog

As a follow-up to its free, 50-user microblogging product, Socialtext is launching a new paid service for large to enterprise-sized companies that lets them run the Twitter-like service behind the firewall, and with many more users.

Companies that want it can pay $1 per user, per month, alongside a monthly fee that pays for Socialtext's server appliance. This hardware runs the microblogging software locally, and can be connected to a company's backup systems for if something goes wrong, although it makes nightly backups of its own. The appliance fee also covers monthly software updates that will fix bugs … Read more

Given that Generation Y is often pegged as narcissistic, lazy, having high expectations, craving the limelight, and other such flattering characterizations, one might expect we'd be Twittering as if it were breathing. After all, Twitter is known as a place where people expose the most minute details of their lives--missing the bus, stubbing a toe, toasting an English muffin.

But a recent survey from Pace University and the Participatory Media Network shows that only 22 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds use Twitter, while 99 percent have profiles on social networks.

This may seem surprising on the face of it, but as a member of the Millennial Generation myself, I have some theories as to why it might be true. To see why we're not into Twitter, I'll have to revisit the start of the social-networking timeline: MySpace.

We Gen Yers spent hours on MySpace customizing our profiles and making them perfect representations of us (or rather, who we wanted to be). We couldn't wait for our friends to comment a new photo: "New pic, please comment!" MySpace made many of us feel popular, or even famous. I remember posting a new profile picture and refreshing the page in anticipation of responses.

Jean Twenge, psychologist and author of "The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement," calls this phenomenon "self-branding." People use MySpace as a portal for creating their own personal brand, Twenge says, complete with photos, custom banners, gossip, and fans (friends). One of the most successful self-branders is Tila Tequila, who tactfully used MySpace to achieve status as one of the users with the most friends on the site, and later parlayed that fame into a career as an MTV reality star.

Though we weren't international superstars, my friends and I were content on MySpace. But fast-forward a couple years to Facebook. It proved to be a difficult transition: where were all the flashing graphics, purple fonts, and exhaustive, multimedia-laden About Me sections? Why weren't the number of photo comments shown? Every user's profile looks the same, and at a glance, it seems self-branding is not easily attained.

The clean design of Facebook deemed decked-out profiles and artsy photos passe, but the site provided us with a new form of self-expression--"What are you doing?" status updates, which became the new platform for what Twenge describes as my generation's narcissistic need for attention.

What Facebook intends as a forum for sharing, Gen Yers see as a game of show-off. A quick look at my news feed and I see "Melissa" (name changed to protect the innocent) is having "one of the funnest nights of her life," and "beer and vodka make a interesting combination oww." 'Nuff said.

Brendon Nemeth, a 22-year-old San Franciscan whom I met this spring, says he updates his status to "keep family and friends informed on what's going on that's interesting in my life."

We no longer impress our friends with profiles that represent us through our creative flourishes, but rather with profiles that spell out what we're doing. (Out of fairness, our status updates don't always revolve around happenings at the local bar; plenty of us want to share our work promotions or volunteer activities, too.)

When Facebook implemented its news feed, users formed groups to oppose the feature. Now our status updates are… Read more

Memo to Twitter: If you're really going to be making money with sponsored direct messages, as a New York Times article hints, please make sure it doesn't get annoying.

Twitter investor Todd Chaffee of Institutional Venture Partners told the Times that "e-commerce, including links to products and turnkey payment mechanisms, is a likely revenue stream for Twitter." That's not too surprising. Some companies have touted real success with Twitter-only deals: electronics manufacturer Dell, for example, says it's racked up a few million in sales. Airlines JetBlue and Southwest sometimes advertise special fares on Twitter. … Read more

About a month after saying it was taking real-time search seriously, Google seems to be preparing a microblogging search tool.

Google Operating System discovered a hint that such a feature could be in the works while traipsing through the Google In Your Language site, where Google enlists speakers of languages other than English to help come up with a translation of Google's Web copy that makes the most sense. One of those languages is apparently "Hacker," and one of the phrases that Google asked the Hacker-speaking community to help translate was: "Recent updates about QUERY," … Read more

They're here--sort of. Twitter has launched the early beta phase of its "verified accounts" program, a background-check for celebrities and other prominent users of the service to weed out impersonators and fake accounts. If they pass the test, they get a graphic "badge" much like a PayPal verified account's.

"We're starting with well-known accounts that have had problems with impersonation or identity confusion," an explanation from Twitter read. "We may verify more accounts in the future, but because of the cost and time required, we're only testing this feature … Read more

I thought Twitter hype had reached a fever pitch with the big Oprah appearance. Boy, was I ever wrong.

If it isn't Time magazine's "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live" cover story, it's the widely-circulated Comedy Central clips of co-founder Biz Stone's April appearance on "The Colbert Report," or it's chairman Jack Dorsey, in New York for this week's Internet Week festivities, showing up in society-blog photos from the sidelines of a Diane von Furstenberg fashion show. (OMG!) When I was joking about Twitter's executives reaching pop-idol ubiquity, … Read more

NEW YORK--Twitter executive Jack Dorsey says he's looking forward to the day when the world stops talking so much about the company he co-founded.

"I think Twitter's a success for us when people stop talking about it, when we stop doing these panels and people just use it as a utility, use it like electricity," said Dorsey, who was on a "Future of Media" panel here Wednesday as part of Internet Week New York. "It fades into the background, something that's just a part of communication. We put it on the same … Read more

Google co-founder Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt have admitted that when it comes to the public's thirst for real-time, up-to-the-minute news and conversation, Twitter's beating them.

This was reported by the U.K.'s Guardian, as the two executives took the stage at Google's Zeitgeist conference in London.

"People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it," the Guardian quoted Page as saying. "I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis."… Read more

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said at the Reuters Technology Summit on Monday that the ubiquitous microblogging start-up isn't considering an advertising-based business model at all.

The whole "we'll make money by offering corporate accounts of some sort" mantra has been talked about by Twitter's founders quite a bit recently. But until this point, Stone and co-founder Evan Williams haven't been quite this explicit in ruling out advertising altogether.

"There are a few reasons why we're not pursuing advertising--one is, it's just not quite as interesting to us," Stone said at … Read more