Cuppacafe

It's pretty hard to make a decent spoof film about Twitter, because everyone already gets the joke. Okay, jokes. There's pretty much just the two jokes about Twitter, and they've been played out.

But just in case you haven't imagined all the possible jokes you can make about people who Twitter, here's two and a half minutes of your life you won't spend Twittering. However, since the YouTube video is two minutes and 45 seconds long, I can imagine what you'll be doing when the video's creator comes onscreen and thanks his mother, his sister... well, I lost interest after that.

Video follows (more...)

I so totally can't believe there is so much coverage of President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize when the news about Miley Cyrus no longer Twittering is so mad-hot!

Love to social network, but MySpace is too busy, Facebook too Farmville, and Twitter too time consuming? well then, perhaps Twitteleh is for you:

No? then perhaps Flutter is the way to go.

Then, of course, there is what our old pal Jon Stewart has to say.

Yeah, we thought so.

The Perfessor

Apparently, as online job boards have grown crowded amid the recession, many big companies, (according to The Wall Street Journal), including Microsoft Corp., Verizon Communications Inc., Raytheon Corp. and Viacom Inc.’s MTV Networks, are now listing some job openings on the Twitter microblogging site.

For employers, Twitter—where users post updates, or "tweets," of no more than 140 characters—offers one more way to find and attract candidates, and a cheaper alternative to big online job boards. It also helps companies target social-media-savvy job hunters and convey an innovative image. For job seekers, Twitter offers the chance to interact one-on-one with companies' recruiters and can be more convenient than job boards.

The article goes on to say:

Indeed, people trolling for jobs on Twitter need to tweet with care—not just when they're interacting with employers, says Cynthia Shapiro, a former human-resources executive and career coach in Woodland Hills, Calif. Hiring managers could use information they find on Twitter, just as on Facebook, to form opinions about an applicant's employability. People sometimes disclose personal things over Twitter, like work-family challenges, that an employer couldn't ask about in an interview but which might color their impression if they knew. For example, if an employer sees on Twitter that a candidate is going through a messy divorce, they might "assume you're going to be distracted," Ms. Shapiro says.

So, perhaps there is a reason to Tweet after all...

The Perfessor

Unless you were living in a cave yesterday you missed the prelude to the end of all things.

I kid you not.

Twitter went down for several hours (and no, that isn’t code for some sexually-deviant thing) Settle down, Walt. What I mean to say is that the self-serving, ego-centric electronic posting service Twitter was unavailable to its subscribers for several hours yesterday.

According to The Financial Times, what might have been no more than a teenage prank completely knocked Twitter offline for over two hours yesterday.

The micro-blogging firm, whose service allows text and web posting of messages of 140 characters or less, said it was hit by a denial-of-service attack, in which thousands of personal computers attempt simultaneous connections, slowing the target site’s response to a virtual standstill.

According to The Wall Street Journal it was more than just Twitter that was hit, but Facebook as well (which jives with this blogger experienced, as I was having some difficulty posting, which ticked me off to no end).

Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. were working together with Google Inc. to investigate what happened, according to a person familiar with the matter. Another person familiar with the attack said it may have been targeted at a single Russian activist blogger with accounts across the impacted services.

The New York Times indicated that Google was also targeted:

Many of Twitter’s 45 million legitimate visitors were unable to use the service for hours. Analysts characterized the disruption as a denial-of-service attack, in which hackers overwhelm a Web site by sending it a deluge of junk requests, and one suggested the attack might have originated in Russia or Georgia.

While it is still not clear where the attack originated, or who was behind the digital assault, it is clear that someone out there was looking to jam the rest of us up.

Oh, and that isn’t even the the worst news; apparently stats confirm that teens don’t tweet:

If you’re under 25 and use Twitter, you’re not the source of the site’s tremendous growth. While we recently questioned the findings of a largely anecdotal report from Morgan Stanley written by a 15 year old, Nielsen has now produced figures that confirm the trend: young people don’t Tweet.

So stay wary my friends.

The Perfessor

The great Twitterpocolpyse continues