ParisLemon

On his 2/5 B.S. Report podcast, ESPN/Grantland's Bill Simmons discussed pulling a prank on Dick Costello during the Super Bowl. The two were in box together at the game when Simmons pulled out his phone, turned to Costello, and said, "Oh, so Twitter's down?" He said Costello freaked out and almost had a heart attack. Then got really upset when he found out it was a joke. The story starts at the 37:30 mark of the podcast. Tried to add a link, but it won't let me. Thought you'd enjoy listening.

Asked by melfi

Awesome. Love the BS Report almost as much as I love Twitter (and pranks on Dick Costolo). Will have to listen. As will anyone reading this :)

Now showing: Older Tweets in search results

Ladies and gentleman, the future is here.

The AP Is Selling Its Twitter Feed

John Herrman for BuzzFeed:

During the Consumer Electronics Show, the Associated Press’s 1.5 million followers will see tweets about Samsung’s new products. Some will be organic — Samsung is one of the largest exhibitors at the show, and the AP has reporters there. But two a day will come directly from Samsung, in the form of ads.

This is the beginning of what I imagine will be an inevitable next battle for Twitter. The key is that Samsung is partnering with the AP on this and Twitter isn’t seeing a dime.

Twitter could easily make this a TOS violation (as they’ve done with automatically injected tweet ads by third-parties), but it’s a very gray area. You could argue that a lot of the content on Twitter is not-so-thinly disguised (and not disclosed) advertising for something.

This could also be an opportunity for Twitter though. Imagine a AdWords-like self-serve way to monetize your Twitter feed. The problem, of course, is not destroying the Twitter experience in the process. Hard problem.

Also no surprise to see the AP, the arbiters of scumbaggery, take the lead here.

The engagement level for both your FB and G+ posts are the similar.. (Similar number of likes and comments.) However what does not make sense is you have 265K subscribers in FB and 1.5M in G+. 6 times the followers in G+ but the same level of engagement !! I can think of only 2 explanations.. Huge Fake/Spam followers and a poor G+ engagement. !! ~ Arun

Asked by Anonymous

Right. And also the fact that very few people relative to Twitter and Facebook actually click through on links to read the content being shared. There’s some lightweight social activity basically masking a network that isn’t there.

Your Twitter archive

Finally. Finally. Finally. Finally. Finally. Finally.

Searchable too!

I can’t wait to go back though my 6 years of tweets and point out all the times I was right about things while ignoring all the times I was wrong about things.

As The World Tweets

Nielsen:

Nielsen, a leading global provider of information and insights into what consumers watch and buy, and Twitter today announced an exclusive multi-year agreement to create the “Nielsen Twitter TV Rating” for the US market. Under this agreement, Nielsen and Twitter will deliver a syndicated-standard metric around the reach of the TV conversation on Twitter, slated for commercial availability at the start of the fall 2013 TV season.

This is huge for Twitter. And very smart for Nielsen. Their audience measuring techniques are decidedly 20th century — and not even really late 20th century. In an age of everything being connected to the internet, this badly needed a revamp and Twitter data is a fascinating step towards that.

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I Love The Smell Of Sepia Tone In The Morning

The Shills

Russell Brandom of The Verge:

But smartphone shills have a bigger enemy: metadata. Twitter knows what app you’re using to tweet. After a few design tweaks in August, you won’t find that information anywhere on Twitter.com, but it’s still readily available in many third-party clients like TweetDeck (which is what we used for the purposes of this article).

It’s amusing (though fairly meaningless) how many celebrities that get paid to endorse one product actually use another for personal means. Also amusing is how obvious this all is thanks to Twitter — see: Oprah, for example.

More interesting may be the people at companies that make one product, but have employees that use another in their own time. See: Microsoft and Google employees that use iPhones. On one hand, it’s great that they’re not stuck in the bubble of their own companies. On the other, what does it mean if your company’s product isn’t good enough that you want to use it on your own time?

Dick Costolo Talks Twitter At The Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy

Good, long talk by Twitter CEO Dick Costolo at my (and his) alma mater, the University of Michigan, earlier this month.

Of note, he once again promises that by the end of this year, users will be able to download their entire tweet archive. Can’t wait.

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Alex Wilhelm of TheNextWeb:

Yes, this is amateur hour.

I have a feeling she couldn’t send that tweet from Surface because it’s in the trashcan, right next to mine.

Tweetbot for Mac

Amidst all the Twitter vs. developers hoopla, Tapbots has made another brilliant app. With Twitter itself stopping support for their Mac client, there’s no doubt that this is the best way to use Twitter natively on a Mac.

Yes, it’s $19.99, but if you use Twitter as much as I do, it’s well worth it. And Tapbots actually pushes the native client forward with retina display support and get this, syncing of DM read statuses over iCloud (amazingly, Twitter itself still has no way to do this).

John's Tumblr: Fear & Loathing in Nerdtown: Apple Maps & Twitter Shutoffs

lilly:

My Twitter feed is full of people bitching about the new Apple Maps in iOS6 today, plus IFTTT shutting down pushing tweets into other places because of Twitter’s new TOS. Pretty different things, but in my part of the Twittersphere, similar sense of outrage.

For my part on Apple Maps in iOS6,…

Agree 100% on both topics.