Archive for March, 2009

Mar

Today’s idea: Brevity has a noble line …

Today’s idea: Brevity has a noble lineage, from the aphorisms of the ancient Greeks to “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White. So why bemoan the rise of Twitter?

Language | People are giving the micro-blogging service Twitter a hard time “for attention-span erosion that will hasten our descent into duh, stupidness,” writes Ryan Bigge at The Smart Set. For example, Samantha Bee of “The Daily Show” mocked Twitter’s 140-character limit with “Grunter” — since “not all my followers have time to read my entire tweet.”

Very funny. But concision has a “long, proud history,” Bigge notes, from the koans paradoxical sayings of Asian antiquity to the telegraphic wit of the New Yorker humorist Robert Benchley on a visit to Venice: “STREETS FULL OF WATER. PLEASE ADVISE.”

True, brevity can limit range of thought. But just as the sitcom has not replaced opera, Twitter will not replace the paragraph, the writer contends, “only publicly demonstrate concision’s vices and virtues.” [Smart Set]

via Reading the Web – Idea of the Day Blog – NYTimes.com.

Twitter Confirms Paid Pro Accounts On The Way

More revenue for Twitter on the way: The company confirms — for the first time weve seen, at least — age-old theories that theyll sell commercial accounts to power users or companies using Twitter.

In exchange for a fee, companies could get “more features” on Twitter, the WSJ reports. Twitter cofounder Biz Stone tells the WSJ that the company recently hired a product manager to help develop those accounts, but doesnt specify what the extra features will be or when the accounts will launch.

This makes perfect sense. Theres a lot of stuff companies would pay Twitter for, such as a way to verify the company reps legitimacy; to more analytics and information about who is reading their Twitter page; to better tracking features to see what people are saying about their company.

What would you pay for an account like this? We could see a lot of companies paying $10 or $20 a month for the service, even for simple tools. But we could also see many companies — Comcast, JetBlue, Starbucks, etc. — paying more than one hundred dollars per month for really good, insightful tools.

via Twitter Confirms Paid Pro Accounts On The Way.