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Quote of the day: 'Social media is like teen sex'

Every once in a while, you read something on Twitter that's just pitch-perfect, despite (or maybe because of) the microblogging service's 140-character limit.

Today's honor is bestowed upon numbers guru and "Web Analytics: An Hour A Day" author Avinash Kaushik, currently employed as Google's analytics evangelist.

On Monday, he posted a total zinger, framing it as an "OH," or overheard, indicating that he wasn't the one who actually came up with the contents of the Twitter message (or "tweet") but didn't want to openly quote the person who … Read more

Max Levchin envisions an Alcoholics Anonymous app on Facebook

SAN FRANCISCO--Max Levchin made a name for himself as the co-founder of transaction system PayPal, one of the Web's foremost utilitarian services. Then he made a name for himself again at the helm of Slide, which isn't exactly in the same space. Its flagship product, "SuperPoke," has become the poster child--er, poster sheep--for criticism of social-networking developer applications as a silly fad.

On Wednesday, after his keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I asked Levchin if he thought there were actually a chance for some social applications to emerge that … Read more

Quotably threads Twitter chat

Webware readers know I like Twitter. It's my little perpetual chat room. I ask for feedback on my blog posts, complain about my car and my laptop, and kvell over my son. Twitter is great for all of that. (Follow me here.) But one thing it sucks at is tracking conversations.

That's partly because Twitter is based on a very strange communications protocol: Users have to intentionally subscribe to all parties engaged in a discussion to see the full thread. Otherwise, watching a Twitter discussion can be like listening to one side of a telephone call. And a … Read more