Twitter seems to be like one of those toy Bozo Bop Bags for cyber-attackers, as it temporarily went down again today.
In a post on its status site titled “Responding to site downtime,” Twitter wrote:
“We’re working to recover from a site outage and will update as we learn more.”
Twitter is now back up, noting that it is “analyzing the traffic data to determine the nature of this attack.”
How much is BoomTown and everyone else in Silicon Valley trying to nab a copy of Ben Mezrich’s likely-to-be-entirely-made-up-but-who-cares tale of dirty doings at Facebook?
Muchety-much! But, so far I have come up peanuts in grabbing an early copy of the work of “fact”-ion–titled “The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal”–which is set to come out July 14, along with a movie later.
Facebook is not pleased, of course, and will likely be challenging Mezrich’s work as specious dreck, but here’s my own list of 10 completely made-up, utterly fabricated, just-call-me-Jayson-Blair facts that should be in the book.
Last week, in anticipation of Facebook’s Press Open House tonight for its spanking new HQ in Palo Alto, Calif., BoomTown hightailed it down there for an early look-see at what the social-networking site is doing with all that dough it collected from Microsoft and the Russians.
Moving into a new crib, for one thing!
I got an extra-special tour of the new 150,000-square-foot building, which brings more than 900 employees together at last, by Facebook’s long-suffering–mostly due to my being annoying, I know!–PR honcho, Brandee Barker.
So, much like the tour I did recently with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone of its San Francisco HQ, here is a video of Facebook’s new digs.
Because a lot of tech’s big shots are converging on our seventh D: All Things Digital conference, BoomTown managed to grab Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Alexander Tamas, one of the key execs of the social-networking site’s newest megainvestor, Digital Sky Technologies.
Here’s my video interview with them about the $200 million that the Moscow- and London-based DST announced today that it had invested in Facebook, at a $10 billion valuation.
This morning, FriendFeed, which is a kind of content delivery version of Twitter, went international, launching in six new languages–German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian and simplified Chinese. Now live, the move is a natural extension for the Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up–founded earlier this year by a small gang of ex-Googlers, who joined together to create a service for super-aggregating updates of all kinds for social-networking and news items in an ongoing feed. Here’s a video interview I did last week with Taylor and Buchheit about a range of topics, including–my favorite–monetization, or lack thereof, of a lot of terrific services like FriendFeed and Twitter.
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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