This morning, in a blog post, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone gave more of an explanation for the outage that the microblogging service endured due to a denial-of-service attack.
Fortunately, BoomTown can read between the lines in order to decipher the secret message herein!
Biz wrote: The Adventure Continues.
Translation: By “adventure,” I mean yet-another-friggin’-Twitter-birdie-crisis.
Finally, the kind of response this whole increasingly silly circus around TechCrunch publishing the Twitter stolen documents deserves.
Funny, rude and pretty much the only good way to excuse it all, via expletives deleted, courtesy of 1938 Media.
Now, BoomTown can go back to real issues, such as obsessing about when the Yahoo deal with Microsoft will drop, if ever!
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone took the stage at Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm Tech conference late this afternoon and was greeted by that old chestnut:
When is Twitter going to make some simoleons?
Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky posted a poll about that and a few other topics, and then asked a question he said was on the minds of many in Silicon Valley:
“Why the hell aren’t you guys making money?”
Here’s what Stone had to say.
Microsoft just announced in a blog post that it was “integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres.”
Microsoft said it is not indexing all of Twitter in its new Bing search service–not yet, that is–nor has it made any kind of exclusive deal with Twitter to add this real-time feed.
The software giant is the first major search service to do this on a regular basis, using public APIs from Twitter–and it is an aggressive move, which seems to be part of its major push by Bing.
Earlier today, there was an odd little news kerfuffle around the status of MySpace international head Travis Katz, as the troubled social-networking site laid off 300 of its non-U.S. employees.
Last week, MySpace announced it was reducing its U.S. staff by 420 workers in what has been a major restructuring for the News Corp. unit.
Well, to clear up the is-he-is-or-is-he-ain’t question, it turns out Katz is definitely not leaving in the current shake-up.
BoomTown liveblogged Yahoo’s “chalk talk” about search earlier today, which was an update of what the Internet giant is up to in the competitive space that includes Google and Microsoft.
Presenting at the event were Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs and Yahoo Search Strategy; Larry Cornett, VP of Consumer Products; and Marc Davis, chief scientist of Yahoo Mobile.
In summary: Kill the blue links! Intent! Objects! Open! Mobile! And, most of all, WOO!
While the “news” that Google was in “late-stage” talks to acquire Twitter, which TechCrunch reported last night, certainly sounds exciting, it isn’t accurate in any way, according to a number of sources BoomTown spoke to close to the situation.
In fact, Twitter and Google have simply been engaged in “some product-related discussions,” according to one source, around real-time search and the search giant better crawling the microblogging service.
More importantly, said another source about the idea of an imminent acquisition or serious acquisition or even early talks: “Seriously, no negotiations, no deal, nada.”
So for all those Twitterers madly typing 140 characters and caught up in the grand idea of Twoogle, we return you to your regularly scheduled tweeting.
Pure Digital, the maker of the popular Flip digital video cameras, has sold itself to Cisco (CSCO) for $590 million in stock.
The deal, which had been rumored last week, was announced this morning by Cisco.
The simplicity of Pure Digital’s line of relatively inexpensive cameras has made it a huge consumer success, which is no easy task in the devices arena.
And Cisco has been trying to turbocharge its consumer-focused business and the move is a clear step in that direction.
This past weekend, BoomTown revved up the Mini and headed out in the pouring rain to a Peets Coffee in Fremont, Calif., to the exact spot where Demo Executive Producer Chris Shipley proposed that VentureBeat founder and Editor-in-Chief Matt Marshall take over the longtime bi-annual conference where several dozen start-ups strut their stuff in front of an industry crowd.
Shipley will still be running the show at Demo09, starting Sunday in Palm Desert, as well as the next Demo this fall, with Marshall working alongside until he takes over fully in 2010.
Here’s a video of the pair talking about the changeover.
Yesterday, TechCrunch’s U.K. blogger Mike Butcher spun the tale of buyer’s remorse run amok with a report that Time Warner online unit AOL was “seriously considering selling Bebo, the social network it acquired for $850 million only a year ago,” citing poor performance and a bad advertising market.
Later, AOL went on the record saying “there is no truth to this rumor,” although Butcher insisted otherwise from his sources.
Well, actually, no. While Time Warner was crazy to pay that much for Bebo, it is not quite that nuts to sell it for bupkis.
How can BoomTown put it plainly?
The alleged deal being cooked up by a group of Silicon Valley investors to take a run at Yahoo, using money raised from Microsoft, is little more than what we used to call a “trial balloon” when I worked at the Washington Post.
That did not stop Silicon Valley from jabbering about the latest plot twist all day, in which the TechCrunch report named no names, but carried an awful lot of water for someone looking to see the reaction to such an idea.
Because when you actually talk to sources at the wallet itself–that would be the money-laden Microsoft–they scoff at the notion that they would help others buy Yahoo in order to get at its search business.
Yesterday, the one-man-band of a tech blogger, Michael Arrington, let loose with yet another outrageously indignant diatribe–this time that he and his TechCrunch site would forthwith break all news embargoes. Not content with the traffic generated last week by his obviously faked Wrestlemania bout with French entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur about the lazy-lunching Europeans, he moved on to a riff on PR people versus journalists. (What next for the Geraldo Rivera of investigative tech blogging? A withering prosecution of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang in the HOV lane on Highway 101 in Sunnyvale without a hybrid? Quelle scandale!)
Only 24 hours to go in the DonorsChoose.org’s Blogger Challenge 2008 and I am now forced to bring in the big guns.
That would be the angrily arched eyebrows of Digital Daily’s John “Patches” Paczkowski, along some of the AllThingsD.com staff, begging mightily for your donations.
Uh-oh!
As the economy continues its very drastic downward slide–part of a binge and purge cycle that is almost classic in its psychology–it is, of course, no surprise to see Web 2.0 finally wise up.
While the quarter-dropping-in-the-slot was a bit slow, I think no one now doubts the impact of the tech and Internet business, going forward.
Of course, this change in tone is a good thing and much needed, given how frothy things had become in Silicon Valley over the last two years.
In other words, the recent excess is not the culprit, although its departure is a very good thing.
Back in the first season of “Saturday Night Live,” one running catchphrase uttered by Chevy Chase would always crack the then-12-year-old BoomTown right up: “This breaking news just in: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.”
It’s that same kind of extreme déjà vu I feel with the continuing drip-drip-drip of the news-less news that Time Warner’s AOL and Yahoo are still talking about a merger.
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.
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