Just arrived at the ocean’s deepest pt. Hitting bottom never felt so good. Can’t wait to share what I’m seeing w/ you

–Director James Cameron tweeted from the deepest part of the ocean floor when he became the first solo explorer to reach the Challenger Deep

Earlier this week, I slogged through the rain in a very dorkish GroupMe plastic poncho at SXSW in Austin to attend what I thought was one of the more interesting sessions, titled “Why Cleanweb Will Beat Cleantech.”

Perhaps because it was not yet another creepy location app (memo to Banjo and Highlight users, please stop attempting to get me to allow you to stalk me, cuz I ain’t!), it was more sparsely attended.

But the presentation by longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sunil Paul was a good one, given his premise that current information technology tools were at the heart of creating solutions around energy conservation.

The founder of Brightmail — and also the first start-up partner of Zynga CEO and founder Mark Pincus at a Washington, D.C., company called Freeloader (where I first met the pair) — thinks that clean technologies like solar can be better leveraged with Cleanweb, which he defined as the “application of information technology to resource constraints.”

In other words, more Airbnb (fewer hotel rooms mean less carbon emissions), more Zappos (fewer stores, less driving to stores, etc.) and more teleconferencing (that’s easy to grok) is evidence that the Cleanweb could be an important contributor to saving the planet.

Quoting a recent tweet he saw, Paul noted that a smartphone today has as much computing power as the computers that put a man on the moon, but all we do with them is launch birds into pigs.

“I am saying we can do something better with the aggressive application of software technology,” he said.

Actually, those Angry Birds are now in space, too.

In any case, here’s Paul’s interesting deck from the talk:

cleanweb_presentation-Sunil-2012-mar-10

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The Artist people were in line in front of me and now I smell like cigarettes and entitlement.

– Kaui Hart Hemmings, author of “The Descendants,” tweeting about her Academy Awards experience. The film adaptation of her book was shut out of the Oscar race, while “The Artist” was the big winner of the night.

This newfound confidence comes as a push for national regulations governing driving and cellphone use — including the suggestion of a total ban — has petered out. With Americans increasingly glued to devices and their constant flow of information, the auto makers are rolling out what they call the “connected car.” These vehicles can do everything from book a restaurant to delivering Twitter feeds — all at 65 miles an hour.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Persistence — even if it is the whiny, likely undeserved, lunkheaded legal version of it — certainly pays off.

But you have to marvel at the bizarre karma going on, given that my favorite matching pair of digital ottomans, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, are poised to collect up to $300 million from the shares they got in a settlement with Facebook and its CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of the social networking giant.

That’s right, folks, the rich do get richer, especially if they pursue their case well past the point of shame.

It’s not clear how many of the 1.2 million shares the Winklevii still have from the settlement they got in 2008, since they wrangled with their own lawyers over it, and the stock has also split.

But let’s assume the Olympic rowers kept a chunk, which will be worth a lot of gold-plated oars if Facebook reaches the upward of $80 billion valuation it is expected to in its upcoming initial public offering.

Facebook filed its long-expected IPO earlier this week.

And here’s a lovely tweet about the IPO from Cameron Winklevoss, who is looking very fetching on his Twitter page, even if it is perhaps about time to lose the rower meme image thing, given he’s on the closer side of 30 years old.

We r excited 4the #FacebookIPO + wish the company + all involved the very best,an amazing accomplishment! cc @tylerwinklevoss @DivyaNarendra

— Cameron Winklevoss (@winklevoss) February 2, 2012

He sent it to his twin brother, Tyler, and also to Divya Narendra, their other partner in the ill-fated ConnectU service.

Without going into all the well-gone-over deets (go see the Aaron Sorkin-penned movie and believe about 26 percent of it), ConnectU was the Harvard University dating site that Zuckerberg allegedly submarined in order to start Facebook.

Well, presumably water under bridge — unless you are talking about the perpetually disgruntled Winklevii.

At the time they finally dropped their seven-year fraud lawsuit this past summer, they then reopened to a different one then pending.

“The Social Network 2: The Overly Compensated Vii Strike Back,” anyone?

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I went all Encyclopedia Brown yesterday after I and many others had been led astray by an account — @wendi_deng — that Twitter had verified with its famous blue check mark over the holiday weekend as that of Wendi Deng Murdoch, the wife of News Corp. head honcho Rupert Murdoch.

(Yes, the Murdoch who bought Dow Jones, which owns this site!)

As it turned out, it was not Wendi Deng Murdoch’s real account, but a fake one created by another person — unlike the one her husband recently opened, which is indeed that of the media mogul.

In the wake of the revelation — which got the kind of attention usually reserved for a major hurricane’s landfall — Twitter was not forthcoming about how that snafu occurred in its verification process or how that process even works now.

So, because I am obsessive complusive about having to make corrections after being told something is true when it is not, I got to sleuthing for the Bugs Meany of the situation.

As it turns out, according to sources close to the situation, it was a crime of punctuation — specifically an underscore that should not have been there.

Let’s back up first: Sources confirm that Wendi Deng Murdoch has indeed had a Twitter account — @wendideng — that was opened last summer. It was mostly used in connection with a movie she was a producer of, “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.” She tweeted from the account, which had the screen name Wendi Murdoch, less than a dozen times.

When her husband recently decided to take up tweeting himself, with some amount of gusto, Twitter co-founder, creator and product guru Jack Dorsey personally helped make sure Rupert Murdoch’s account was verified.

Even though Twitter’s public “verified” program beta — to help battle fake accounts — was phased out, the communications company still does it for high-profile people, mostly celebrities or other brand names.

Murdoch certainly qualified as a famous personage and Dorsey even confirmed the News Corp. head’s arrival in the Twitterverse with his own tweet last Saturday.

As a courtesy, Twitter also moved to verify Murdoch’s spouse’s account and that is when an apparent Internet copy-editing scandal was born.

Since the information exchange was done over a hurried holiday weekend, several sources on both sides said there was a miscommunication and the company mangled the @ address it was told by Deng’s assistant. Mistakenly, Twitter apparently thought that the correct account was the one with the underscore and not the one with no space at all.

Unfortunately, the underscore Wendi account was the faux one created by a British man having some fun spoofing the famous Deng, who still had the no-space one for reals.

It’s kind of like a digital version of one of those switched-at-birth plots, except sillier and even more entertaining.

Thus, carrying the distinctive blue check mark, everyone assumed Twitter had verified the right one, until it was soon pointed out by News Corp. and even the fake Deng that it had not.

Can’t resist this tweet, but all Iowans think about Rick Santorum.Only candidate with genuine big vision for country.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) January 3, 2012

Awkward!

Twitter then released a statement admitting the obvious, the fake Deng enjoyed basking in the worldwide attention and the still-verified Rupert Murdoch had lobbed some much-noticed tweets (as you can see here, in case you are not one of his more than 101,000 followers).

As for the real Deng? She suspended her account.

For now, at least. Sources said she is likely to come back to Twitter and is still a big fan of Dorsey and the service.

Case, um, closed. (I hope.)

Oh joy — my boss is on Twitter. I guess I have to watch myself now.

Or not!

In fact, News Corp. potentate Rupert Murdoch, who happens to own this Web site (and more!), just inexplicably joined Twitter.

And, like any newbie, he has already had to retract a tweet.

The controversial 140-character-or-less utterance from @rupertmurdoch: “Maybe Brits have too many holidays for broke country!”

He quickly deleted the saucy tweet, apparently at the behest of his wife, Wendi Deng, who publicly tweeted to him on her Twitter-verified account, as if she were in private instead of chatting globally: “RUPERT!!! Delete tweet!”

Then, to all, she tweeted: “EVERY1 @rupertmurdoch was only having a joke pROMSIE!!!”

[UPDATE: My mistake: It was confirmed by Twitter that this Wendi Deng Twitter account was a fake one, even though it had been previously verified and marked so prominently by the online communications company. Whoever is writing the tweets also said they were spoofing Deng. I had relied on that verification as accurate, since I had assumed Twitter had confirmed both at the same time. Obviously, I am a dope and should not have.]

But Murdoch, already infected with the classic Twitter and-just-one-more-thing disease, then noted: “I’m getting killed for fooling around here and friends frightened what I may really say!”

Oh, joy, indeed — as I am counting on it.

Murdoch, controversies and all, has the kind of socially attuned personality tailor-made for Twitter, even though many point out that he has not been a fan of the Internet and interactive media in the past.

While I am no expert on that, that’s actually not been my experience in my encounters with the mogul at many of our D: All Things Digital conferences and elsewhere. In fact, he seems keen on understanding online media, even if it most certainly is not his first language, which has been print.

In fact, Murdoch’s tweets are listed as coming from his Apple iPad, which I have seen him carry like a precious jewel, another part of what became a truly interesting and complex relationship with Steve Jobs in the years before he died. (And it also appears as if Murdoch took his Twitter profile photo — posted here — from said iPad, judging from the angle.)

So let’s hope he keeps up the lively patter going forward — unlike many Twitter celebs who trail off after an initial burst of activity — as he pokes and prods the Twitterverse. A place, it should be noted, he once famously said would not make a good investment.

Still, so far, he seems to like the product, and will only more so, if he sticks to yet another tweet: “My resolutions, try to maintain humility and always curiosity. And of course diet!”

Because curious is what Twitter is all about — we can only hope the snaps of his dinners are not far behind.

I am here at Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale, Calif., to check out “Product Runway,” which is the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s attempt to show that it can still innovate.

First and foremost is the launch of Livestand, a personalized news reader that is similar to Flipboard and a variety of other rivals, including — soon — Google.

It’s Yahoo’s attempt to present a business-as-usual feel — amidst a long and agonizing and very public strategic overview that might also include the sale of the company (or not!), in the wake of the recent firing of its last CEO, Carol Bartz.

It has caused a lot of trauma inside Yahoo, which can’t help with innovation.

But we press on!

In other words, despite the three-ring circus going on outside, Yahoo wants you to know it is still hard at work.

We begin:

10:35 am: As the strains of U2 die out, Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving takes the stage, which is actually set up in the company’s cafeteria. I can smell lunch being made nearby and I am hungry.

Apt — Yahoo certainly needs to show off a lot of cool stuff or its fate will be cooked.

No pressure, Blake!

“Personally, I am more bullish on Yahoo today,” he said. “What is Yahoo? Simple. It’s the premier digital media company. Period. Stop.”

Oh, if it were only that easy.

10:46 am: Irving pulls out his favorite slide, which looks like a chemistry test. It lists the various elements of the product strategy, with things like personalization, mobile, premium.

Now to Livestand, which is available on the Apple iTunes app store right now.

Don’t all rush at once!

Irving notes that Livestand is more than just an app — it is a platform.

In other words, Yahoo wants to help publishers publish online. Kind of a Facebook of content.

If Yahoo can pull it off, that is. (And, of course, unless Facebook decides to do the same.)

10:50 am: Livestand is an HTML5 “personalized living magazine.”

“This is the way Web pages are going to look,” declares Irving. Which is to say, heavy on photos, swoopy navigation, a television screen-like interface.

Irving uses the example of Surfer magazine, which is a good idea since waves always look pretty. Especially in a video-in-frame with Kelly Slater in Hawaii.

But, in essence, for anyone who has used Flipboard for years now, none of this is entirely different.

10:54 am: The look of what would be the Yahoo News page is actually much more interesting, since it is clearly a whole lot better than the Web page.

Irving also shows off a “living ad” — in this case, an unusually snuggly couple on a couch. It is cool, but creepy.

When launched, the ad has tap points. Irving — naughtily declaring about what is an ad, “I’ll tap that” — taps the lady’s butt, which would also have been my move. We learn about the jeans, of course.

10:58 am: Irving then shows off the ability to add feeds.

Next, something called “Cocktails.” First up, a developer tool called Yahoo Mojito and Yahoo Manhattan, which is a hosting service. The company will open-source both the technologies in 2012.

Irving brings up Mike Kerns, VP of Personalization & Social, who came to Yahoo when it bought the innovative sports fan site called Citizen Sports.

“We like to ship sh#t,” he notes. I like Mike Kerns immediately.

Kerns intros C.O.R.E. No, it is not a secret government organization that takes out fussy bloggers, who might be more critical than Yahoo execs would like.

In fact, it stands for “content optimization relevance engine.” Of course it does.

Simply put, C.O.R.E. is trying to link the right content or whatever to the right consumers and who likes what. Ladies like this, dudes like this. Apparently, “men of multiple ages” enjoy stories about golden chicken.

11:11 am: Kerns is moving on to social, especially its integration with Facebook. While much touted, sources tell me it has gone slower than expected in terms of use, but that it is improving.

Kerns talks about the idea of matching content to conversations to interests and, well, you know — the now exhausting world of modern media consumption.

The world in which you can no longer simply read an article and enjoy it — you must comment, share, discuss, parse, tweet.

Does anyone remember when you read something cool and just kept it to yourself?

Forget it, pal! It is a full-information society now and you better get on board and start poking your friends about every little thing.

(Personally, I plan on becoming a hermit in 3 … 2 … 1.)

11:18 am: Now Tim Parsey, who is Yahoo’s design head. He is hands down the most delightful exec the company has had in a while, mostly because he loves to smirk adorkably.

He shows off Yahoo’s first original design, which was a dull list. And then another really bad logo. But Parsey loves it! It’s kitschy!

Smirk attack!

Parsey moves into what has to happen now, which is to deliver a much more emotional experience and a much better designed one. He uses words like “humanism.”

Say what? He is right — Yahoo has for too long completely ignored design as an important part of the experience.

That’s why Flipboard was so quickly touted — it was pretty and fun. And it is why everyone is simply forced to love Apple products.

11:22 am: Parsey even has a code for it, called REM — for rational, emotional and meaningful.

He shows off a weather app. People take photos and they can be used in the app. Then Yahoo Mail for the iPad, whic is also handsome with photos and video. Livestand, also pretty.

“Great way to differentiate,” says Parsey. He calls it “one Yahoo!” Indeed.

11:35 am: I’ll admit it. After Parsey-fest, I zoned out for a sec when IntoNow dude, Adam Cahan, comes up.

Donut emergency!

Back to IntoNow, it’s the television indexing service that Yahoo bought in April.

Essentially, more ways to watch the media — in this case, video — and do 53 other things at the very same time. Memo to humanity: We will all be paying continuous partial attention for the rest of eternity.

Like I said: Hermitage!

11:41 am: Product dude Irving is back, making a point that, despite all the public mishegas, Yahoo has been busy at innovating.

A redo of email, better search, social “Facebar” with Facebook, Flickr for Google Android.

Irving is correct — Yahoo’s engineers have been hard at work and deserve kudos for doing so, even with attrition issues, stock declines and questions about the company’s very future being debated daily.

The problem is that too many of these improvements are mostly incremental and essentially table stakes for tech companies, most of whom have introed many more significant innovations in the same time frame as Yahoo has.

Google did Android, Google+ (as well as some notable failures). Microsoft did Kinect, Windows Phone, Windows 8. Amazon did Kindle Fire. Facebook did a range of major updates, as it has grown like a weed.

And there’s Apple. You might have heard of the iPhone and the iPad.

You get my point. Yahoo’s Product Runway today is well done, but what it really needs to be is just the beginning of a take-off.

11:48 am: Now Q&A time.

The first question is what took so long to get Livestand out, the second is why should people use Livestand since Flipboard and others have already been around for a dog’s age.

I ask about design — mostly because I want Parsey to use the word “delicious” a lot — and also about all the turmoil around the company and its impact on product creation. (I decide not to mention that Yahoo blew its acquisition of the bookmarking site, Delicious, and then sold it.)

Parsey delivers on the delicious scale, noting that Yahoo must have one design experience and yet has a lot of different interfaces. In other words, it cannot be Apple, but it can feel a lot more cohesive.

Irving talks a little bit around the obvious elephant in the room — the future of Yahoo — noting that the product staff was trying to focus and forget the storm going on outside.

“We have dreams about what this company can be,” says Irving.

You and me both, brother.

12:04 pm: More questions that are too detailed for my tastes, since they have delivered lunch and I can see it and I am ravenous.

As Parsey might say: It looks deliiiiiccccious.

Now, let’s hope Yahoo can do even more tasty stuff.

Do sale rumors make a troubled asset more attractive? Yes — except when more rumors (that those sales rumors might not be true) appear.

Welcome to just another day in the life of Yahoo, which saw its shares drop more than 5.5 percent today. Its stock declined almost a dollar to close at $15.64, after it was reported by various news orgs that Yahoo might be leaning toward no sale and a shareholder dividend, and toward taking control of its own sale of its lucrative Asian assets.

That was counter to the news — from a number of the very same outlets — touting a variety of ever more elaborate and sometimes breathless sale scenarios last week, featuring various configurations of Microsoft, Google and private equity firms like Silver Lake and others.

Silver Lake, in fact, appears to be the most aggressive in the possible bidding for all or parts of Yahoo, and has been noodling such a deal most intently, and for a long time now.

It makes sense, given that Silver Lake was successful in a vaguely similar deal that ultimately saved the Internet telephony service Skype, which it eventually peddled at a high price to Microsoft.

In fact, according to several sources, Yahoo director and co-founder Jerry Yang — also a former CEO of the company, who appears to have seized the ball firmly in the strategy game — met with Silver Lake today for an unspecified little chitchat.

That said, one source told me, “what is deeply uncertain is whether Silver Lake will do something at all.”

This is par for the course in this everything-but-the-kitchen-sink drama. Because — although it makes for a boring post, and the back and forth throat-clearing before an actual event might be entertaining — so far, not very much is actually happening as yet at Yahoo, with regard to its variety of options.

Of course, this could change in an hour. Or tomorrow, or the next day. Most of all, it’s clear that Yahoo’s board has to move in some significant way before the end of the year.

So, yes, the Silicon Valley Internet giant is doing all the sales-oriented stuff it should do with its coterie of pricey bankers (presumably being paid by the hour).

Yes, it has recently hired a talent-search firm, which is eyeing the landscape to find a willing CEO. (Even more adviser costs!)

And, yes, it is still wrangling with its Asian partners — Alibaba Group and SoftBank — over how to do a tax-free transaction (you’d think from all the sweating over it that this deal was harder to solve than the European debt crisis).

And, on schedule, activist shareholders — like hedge-fund agitator Dan Loeb of Third Point — should be attacking again soon, until a deal is done.

But according to many sources both inside and outside Yahoo, what’s happening is pretty much business as usual for this Hamlet of a company, which is lugubriously debating and weighing and pondering its fate.

I suppose it should, given the importance of it all, except it is a conundrum that has been going on for far too long at Yahoo, and under a number of different leaders.

In other words, it’s like “As the World Turns,” except with some new characters and a whole lot more amnesia.

But the slowness of a very real process is also causing deep frustration with all those dealing with Yahoo now — including possible bidders, and definitely its Asian partners.

Their gripes — which are louder than in most deals — are not surprising: They refuse to sign a too-onerous NDA to look at Yahoo’s books; there’s an irksome tone of indecision on the part of the company’s board; and, as always, the incessant leaks about all of this and more are making it worse.

One bidder has likened the company to a “melting iceberg that has a lot less time than the planet has to put its house in order.”

Another bemoaned the variety of trial balloons being floated, and noted that no movement was what Yahoo seems to do best.

That’s not exactly true, of course, so expect to see more leaks about plots and plans and meetings.

But no matter what you hear, keep in mind that having Yahoo’s fate being spun about like a top on a daily basis on Wall Street and in the media is not good for the company itself — or for its employees and shareholders.

Since it makes me dizzy — even though I like a good scoop as much as the next reporter — that’s the reason I have largely stuck to reporting about the actual internal turmoil inside Yahoo, from poor employee morale to various staff rejiggerings to more relentless brain drain.

Because while everyone fiddles, Yahoo’s real prospects of maintaining its core business melt a little bit more every day.

Yahoo is on its third CEO in four years, it has lost advertising momentum to Google and Facebook, its engagement levels are dangerously slowing, its social and mobile strategies are unclear and even its powerful email product is under siege.

And in the end, it is only these things that will matter to whoever runs the company in the end.

[Photo from Mat Honan's fantastic tweet here.]

It’s official: Seven billion people are alive in the world at this moment, a high population point of all time.

Births are obviously outstripping deaths by a little more than two to one.

Here is a really cool site called Worldometers that has the countdown and all kinds of other cool stats, accounting for our little and now more crowded world.

The section on society and media is particularly terrific, showing how many cellphones are being sold, emails sent, tweets posted and, of course, blogs created. Like this one, blink and you will definitely miss it.

And note how much slower new book titles published and televisions sold are in comparison to digital stats.

Facebook, by the way, is now closing on one billion users, sources said — although the official number for the huge social networking site here is 800 million.

According to sources close to the situation, Twitter VP of Engineering Mike Abbott has left the company.

He is apparently interested in doing more investing.

[UPDATE: Twitter confirmed the departure in a statement, noting that Abbott was joining Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur in residence. Benchmark’s Peter Fenton is on the Twitter board.

“We can confirm that Mike Abbott is no longer with Twitter. Mike will be available to assist the company in his new role as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital. We thank Mike for his leadership in growing an outstanding team of engineers from 100 to 400 that have successfully taken on the unique challenge of making Twitter reliable and stable. While Mike led the engineering team, Twitter grew from handling 55 million tweets a day to 230 million. Twitter is focused on aggressively moving forward to fulfill the profound opportunities that are in front of us.”

Said Fenton:

“What Mike Abbott accomplished at Twitter is nothing short of heroic, when Benchmark introduced him to the company we felt he had the courage and entrepreneurial drive to build a strong engineering foundation. Today we applaud him for that extraordinary accomplishment. As we continue to work closely with the team at Twitter, we’re delighted to welcome Mike to Benchmark as an entrepreneur in residence. Mike will not only continue to lend his considerable talents to supporting the team at Twitter, but as a true entrepreneur at heart, will undoubtedly be an incredible asset to our entrepreneurs and our portfolio overall.”]

The move feels sudden, but sources said it has been brewing for a while and happened several days ago.

Abbott was a high-profile hire for Twitter a little over a year ago from Palm, where he served as head of its software and services, in charge of its webOS platform.

He was brought in to bring a level of discipline and reliability to the Twitter communications platform and service, which was plagued by persistent outages that made the Fail Whale infamous.

In large part, Abbott has done that, as Twitter has grown significantly. It now has 230 million tweets per day, he said in a recent interview.

Twitter does not have a replacement as yet, sources said.

Apple rolled out a new iPhone today. Sort of.

Except it did not have a bigger, flatter screen. It did not have a sleeker, thinner body. It would not need all new polypropylene sleeves and other fancy accessories.

In other words, it was not an iPhone 5.

Oops, after all the breathless stories about this ideal and groundbreaking new device and predictions — including here — that this was the name of whatever Apple was releasing.

In fact, everyone was using that moniker for it, from local television news to vendors to my mother.

Instead, the tech giant launched the new iPhone 4S, which has a faster processor, an improved camera and Siri voice control feature, at a cheaper price.

Very slick, as usual, and full of cool Apple bells and whistles.

Still. Prolonged sighs could be felt all over the blogosphere and on Twitter, where Steve Brown tweeted me: “Can I be bummed now?!?”

You may.

Better still, Davin Bentti wrote: “The ‘S’ stands for ‘Steve, come back!’”

He was referring to the missing Apple icon Steve Jobs, who recently turned over leadership at the company to new CEO Tim Cook. Jobs’s Apple event performances are legendary.

Wall Street also had its iPhone 5 bubble burst, with investors shunning Apple stock. Shares are down almost five percent now.

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In the forefront of everyone’s mind covering the Apple event today, there is probably a fervent little wish that at some point its legendary co-founder and chairman Steve Jobs will saunter on out to take a much-deserved bow.

That seems unlikely for a variety of reasons — most especially because it would take the focus off Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook and also the new products being featured.

It certainly would be something to see, even if it would be difficult, in one stage moment, to encapsulate the profound impact of Jobs on Apple and on the tech world in general.

But it seems unlike Jobs to do that, mostly because it would be too obvious, too rote and too much of a Hollywood wrap-it-all-up cliche.

And, most of all, because it’s not different — a guiding idea that has always been at the heart of Apple and its best motto ever.

I thought a lot about that today, looking over all the frantic speculation about exactly what Apple would release this morning, and all the piles and piles of news stories, tweets and more about it all.

That has become typical around any Apple announcement, of course, and it can become more than a little wearying at times.

That said, when you take a moment to step back and think about it, all the hubbub is perhaps a good thing, given that a lot of it is about what could be done, what might be made, what people really hope for in technology.

That’s because — unlike other, more prosaic tech companies, who all make a lot of cool stuff, too — much of the crazy swirl around Apple seems to be about what’s possible and what could be.

And that is at the heart of the most important “one more thing” that Steve Jobs has given to Silicon Valley and beyond.

Which is to say, the impetus to think different.

In fact, it’s hard to say just how critical it is in this world today to zig in an opposite way from the safe norm, and to do it with a confidence that belies the difficulty of that shift.

In small tech ways, Jobs has done that again and again, dumping everything from removable batteries to Flash to internal disk drives to whatever he thought needed the heave-ho.

These are not easy decisions for a big tech company to make. But they are ones that are often muddled through by too many executives, to little effect and no definitive change, leaving a mushy pile of nothing.

As I like to say about a lot of big companies I cover — they think small, and then, well, think smaller.

For all its pros and cons, that has never been Apple under Jobs, and I hope that continues.

Jobs sounded a lot of the same arguments in his famous 2005 speech at Stanford University, in which he famously said: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

So in honor of his massive contribution: Let’s.

It reminds me of a poem by Shel Silverstein that I always read to my kids — so much so that they are more than a bit tired of hearing it, even if I never am:

Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child,
Listen to the DON’Ts
Listen to the SHOULDN’TS
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON’TS
Listen to the NEVER HAVES
Then listen close to me –
Anything can happen, child,
ANYTHING can be.

And while it is perhaps just another iPhone or whatever doodad Apple whips out today, the real point of it — and what Jobs has taught tech — is that it can be anything.

Enjoy:

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The first terse tweets also outpaced the U.S. Geological Survey’s conventional seismometers, which normally can take from two to 20 minutes to generate an alert. The agency is now experimenting with Twitter as a faster and cheaper way to track earthquakes.

Never have scientists had so much readily accessible, real-time data about what people say. Twitter, the service that allows users to send text updates of up to 140 characters out to the public, publishes more than 200 million messages, or tweets, a day. Compared with information from cellphone records and social-media sites, Twitter texts are as timely as a pulse beat and, taken together, automatically compile the raw material of social history.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Certainly in the context of Twitter there are memorable tweets that reflect the drama of a particular moment, but the dilemma for Twitter, which is to some extent the challenge for all of us in this information revolution, is how do you discern meaning from this overwhelming array of information that we are now exposed to?

Former State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, an avid Twitter user, on the long-term value of tweets

One of the quotes I always keep pinned to the side of my computer monitor is by my favorite writer, Joan Didion, from her terrific essay, “On Keeping a Notebook”:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

Yesterday, Facebook took Didion’s elegant and poignant concept about memories a little too literally (and, of course, nerdily) with its introduction of Timeline, which the social networking giant is calling “The Story of Your Life.”

Oh dear. (And it hopefully will not include the part about that fantastically dysfunctional break-up in a ratty hotel room by the sea.)

Moving on!

You could look at this new offering from Facebook in a lot of ways, from a new super-sized version of its existing profiles to a digital scrapbook of memories to a geek version of a daily planner.

As Liz Gannes wrote today in a cogent analysis of Timeline:

“On one end, Facebook’s platform update will channel every little thing people do around the Web in real time. Meanwhile, the new timelines in user profiles are an acknowledgment and glorification of the past.”

All true, of course, but to my mind the whole idea of a life on display in pixels like some never-ending comic book — with photos and text and video and smiley faces (and frowns, too!) — is, well, more than a little creepy.

It’s not Facebook’s fault at all, because it is just doing better what it already does, born from its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s central notion that being able to share everything online is the sacred goal.

It’s always been his mantra and the young and decidedly visionary entrepreneur visibly bounced around the stage of Facebook’s f8 developers conference yesterday at the idea of it.

His Timeline had a lot about his longtime girlfriend and his dog, Beast. Has there ever been a more over-sharing canine? I think not!

(Actually, as longtime privacy activist Lori Fena tweeted to me today: “Internet Anthropology: 90’s Internet — Nobody knows you’re a dog. 2011 FB Timeline — Everyone knows you’re a dog.”)

But what struck me the most was a video Zuckerberg showed about Timeline, which depicted the life of a (fictional?) Facebook employee named Andy Sparks, from his birth on August 14, 1974 onward.

Maybe it was just me, but as it proceeded through Andy’s awkward teens to his wedding to his own kids and the years flipped by, I got a sinking feeling that it would not stop until we ended up with a crepe-lined profile page and a digital tombstone.

Here lies Andy — if you have any questions about his entire life, please back-click!

Thankfully, the video stopped at middle-age (Andy would be 37 years old now), but like I said: Creepy!

Then again, it also might be a bad idea to digitize everything in sight in the first place, well beyond such concerns, as Maura Johnston concluded in a smart essay about Timeline:

I think there’s something to be said about the idea of personality development over time that makes me quite uneasy about Facebook’s exuberance over being able to chronicle one’s whole life on the service. What does that do to the notion of memory, the fuzziness of which can have helpful functions at times? … And I feel like so many of the innovations involving technology and persona being put forth right now are being fashioned by people with myopic “everything is great right now and will be that way forever” outlooks, and that they don’t really have any sense of what life beyond their VC-funded Silicon Valley privileged existences might be like.

In other words, who we were may not be, in the end, who we really are.

Or perhaps instead, it is what Didion so eloquently wrote:

“Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”

Well, we’ll see — but, until then, here’s the Timeline video and, below it, Didion’s must-read essay:

didion

Joe Marini, who was a principal program manager for the Windows Phone team, raised a number of eyebrows two weeks ago when he tweeted his impressions of the device. Despite the posts, Marini delivered his scheduled talk at last week’s Build developer conference in Anaheim, Calif. That, however, appears to have been his swan song as a Microsoft employee.

“We routinely do not discuss personnel matters, but I can confirm that Joe Marini no longer works at Microsoft,” a Microsoft representative told AllThingsD. Seattle-area tech site GeekWire, which broke news of his ouster, said that Marini stepped down after being informed that he would have been let go for violating the company’s social media policy.

Marini did not immediately return requests for comment.

Marini’s free flow of tweets — which are still online — began with this Sept. 7 post.

“I just got a chance to try out one of the slickest looking #Nokia phones I have ever seen,” he wrote. “Soon, you will too!” Then, in case anyone missed the point, he added the Windows Phone 7 hashtag.

But Marini wasn’t done. He then followed up with tweets giving the phone a rating of “8,” (presumably out of 10) adding that “the camera was good, but I didn’t have optimal lighting.”

“I’d like a larger screen too,” he said.

Hint: If you are going to tweet about your company’s key partner’s unreleased products, you might want to give them a “9” or a “10.”

In any case, Nokia has said it is aiming to release its first Windows Phone-based devices this year. So the rest of us shouldn’t have to wait too much longer to find out what had Marini so excited.

I don’t keep up with Twitter all day long. I am just a beginner. My kids tell me how terrible my tweets are. They give me a Twitter [grade of] F.

Jill Abramson, New York Times executive editor, at a media mixer last Thursday