This title could be a more-or-less autobiographical song by the late Wild Man Fischer; or it could be a statement which might be made by Twitter’s little logo bird.

Yes, really. Twitter says so.

Now does this mean that Larry was named for, um, Larry Bird? It’s possible.

(Via Nancy Friedman.)

Turns out the US Army has a Twitter feed. The French army has one too, but they only use it to retweet.

(Linked to this.)

You might have seen this on the Broadway Distention at Memorial earlier today:

The distortions imposed by the lens actually serve as a pretty accurate indicator of how bleary-eyed I was at the time.

Twitter is known for a bird and occasionally a whale. Now it has a phish:

(Click to embiggen.) “You have 3 unread message(s),” indeed.

Steve Lackmeyer spends part of his Oklahoman column today giving a shout-out to two of the guys you need to be reading to keep track of what’s going on downtown: Doug Loudenback and Nick Roberts. They’re both seriously opinionated, and they do their homework before they take a stand. Of course, they’ve both been blogrolled here for rather a long time, in case I need to poach an idea from them.

Worth quoting:

The Oklahoman itself is no stranger to new media, and for the past couple of years my own reporting efforts have included blogging and use of Twitter. And if there’s anything to draw out of this, regardless of one’s thoughts about new media, it’s clear that because of it downtown development is being discussed by far more than just a few insiders at City Hall.

Just in case you were readying an Edwin Starr-like grunt and the complaint, “Blogs! What are they good for?”

I concede that I’ve worried a bit along these lines myself:

The more I see of Twitter and our push toward putting all of our lives on the internet, I wonder if fun moments at bars with friends really matter if they’re not captured on a digital camera and then immediately posted as a Twitpic. Can we really taste how great that pork sandwich is from Ko if we’re so worried about typing in to the hundreds of strangers following us, just how much the line was worth the wait?

What I’m looking for, I think, might be the parameters of this range: at one end, events too mundane or unimportant or uninteresting to tweet, and at the other, events sufficiently transcendent that trying to fit them into 140 characters is sheerest folly. Unfortunately, I have a surplus of the former, and a marked dearth of the latter — unless, of course, I’m completely misreading things, which is always a possibility.

Still, weighing everything on this scale exacts a price of its own:

I can’t help but think that we’re no longer capable of feeling in real-time. Rather, we are so caught up in our own self-importance that we don’t even know how to function without hiding behind our screens. Case in point: what can you really say when you meet someone at a bar who doesn’t take the opportunity to talk to you beyond a casual hello, but then later, (some way, somehow without a name or number), tracks you down on Match.com based on your picture alone and sends the message — “Was that you at the bar on Sunday night? Want to go out sometime?”

The likelihood of something like that happening to me is vanishingly small — if you arranged all the unlikely things I could theoretically find in my inbox someday, “Want to go out sometime?” ranks slightly below “We’re prepared to offer you a book deal” — but I have noticed in myself a tendency to stay behind the screen. One of the reasons I took all those road trips was to force myself out of that hiding place for brief periods.

But given my compulsion to document things as my days presumably wind down, I don’t want to find myself wondering “Did that really happen? I didn’t write anything about it.”

Is Twitter worth a billion dollars?

If it is, then this is the time for some highly-dubious speculation. The last tweet I put up before this post was this one, which is numbered 4132710518. Up to that point, Twitter has presumably had 4.1 billion tweets. I calculate from this that each tweet — what else have they got? — is worth at present about 23 cents, and that I’ve been responsible for a whole $440 of that putative billion.

You’re welcome.

As mentioned before, I use WordTwit to send an update to Twitter whenever there’s a new post; as a bonus, it creates a shortened URL from this very domain, although it can be configured to use, say, bit.ly.

I was noticing that about 10 percent of my Twitter followers actually do click on those new-post links, which got me wondering how much response I get to random stuff I tweet. So I went ahead and got an actual bit.ly account, just to track those links. The result: about 10 percent of my Twitter followers actually do click on those links.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this: the Web site draws maybe 500 a day, and I have a core of about 50 regular commenters.

Maybe I can’t answer that for myself, but this is as good an explanation as I’m likely to steal find:

What am I using Twitter for? Not there to sell anything. Don’t have anything I created that I want you to see. Just want to know what other people out in the world are doing, seeing, eating, creating. I have to stay here and do my own everyday stuff, but my mind would often rather be out exploring.

Then again, she put this on a blog. Go figure.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit much to hope for. But Dr. Ellen Brandt has noticed some encouraging trends:

Equal numbers of Followers and Following: More and more often, we see users whose Follower-Following ratios are just about dead-even, meaning they are shunning the concept of following Celebrities or Big Media pundits and choosing to connect more naturally and equally with potential friends the way they do on Linked In and Facebook. There are now some applications that allow you to see if any Followers have recently dropped you, in which case you can easily drop them, too.

I’ve tried one such application, and haven’t been able to get it to work. That said, I’m among those folks with about the same number of followers and following. (Dr. Brandt, last I looked, was literally dead-even, so she manifestly practices what she preaches.) I do follow a handful of celebrities. Then again, I tend to define “celebrity” as “anyone more famous than I am,” which makes for a pretty broad spectrum. And I of course follow Diablo Cody, who is a pretty broad, but that’s neither here nor there.

Reluctance to Retweet — Or Blindly Recommend — Pieces of Information On Somebody’s Say So: As a lifelong member of the Media, I find it absolutely appalling that anyone should agree to Retweet a link to an article, blog, or any other kind of commentary without first reading it themselves and agreeing it is worth recommending. I don’t want people to Retweet my articles and blogs unless they like them and believe they might be informative and enjoyable to others. And I would not consider Retweeting other people’s work I didn’t like and find interesting. Thankfully, more Twitter users are beginning to agree.

I tend to practice the same rule for retweets that I do for long expropriations of other people’s blog material (such as this): when possible, add value. If you had a good one-liner, I may RT it as is, but if there’s room (light editing is a consideration), I’ll tack on something of my own. And I won’t RT a link unless I’ve actually looked at it.

Refusal to Follow Someone Without Making the Choice Oneself: It may be profound heresy to say so, but I think Twitter’s popular Follow Fridays are essentially silly. It’s bad enough that Twitter’s one- or two-sentence profile bios tell you next-to-nothing about candidates you might want to connect with. But at least they tell you something. (Buffy the Cat’s says she’s a astrophysicist who plays the clarinet and reads Proust.) More Twitterers are passing on the chance to add folks to their Following roster because that fella with the beard in Pensacola — how the heck did he get into my network? — says they should.

I’ve picked up a handful of followers on Follow Friday, I think — at least, there are some people out there who have willingly promoted my name — and I appreciate the gesture. But I have the same sort of ambivalence about #followfriday that I have about blog awards and such: I’d almost rather be one person’s absolute favorite than be widely acknowledged as, um, acceptable. But maybe that’s just me.

The 160-character bios, though (and why not 140?), are indeed fairly (read “extremely”) limited.

Shunning the Concept That the More Followers You Have, the Better Off You Are: Not only is Twitter ineffective when viewed as a popularity contest, but networks patched together randomly can easily harm their amassers. Take a look at virtually any politician’s Followers list on Twitter, and you’ll find crowds of Ladies of the Night, Tooth Whitener salesmen, Stock Tip purveyors, and Trump Network groupies. Opposing politicians could have a field day publicizing these lists, if it weren’t for the fact that theirs are probably just as bad.

Indeed. I’ve purged my own list several times. Fortunately, I’m far enough below the radar that I attract relatively few skanks, soi-disant social-media experts, and skanks. (There are a lot of skanks.)

Dr. Brandt, incidentally, deserves kudos for this delightful post title: I Don’t Like What You Wrote. You Should Be Poisoned, Garrotted, Stabbed With Stiletto Heels, Thrown Off A Tall Building, and Have Vultures Eat Your Liver. Some of us can only aspire to incurring that level of wrath.

You may already have your very own stalkers followers:

[T]here were a few people whose Twitter pages, if existent, I would check obsessively. Who am I talking about? I’m referring to those very-not-ugly guys whose names are scrawled all over random papers on my desk. The ones who I daydream about instead of being productive.

Sound creepy and stalker-esque? Probably because it is. And it seems that the only reason anyone would want to know what a specific person was doing at every hour of every day is if they are a creepy stalker who is obsessed with you or really really desperate.

Now I’ve had my fair share of people telling me how dangerous having a Facebook page is and I’ve gotten plenty of stories about random men who stalk women’s Facebook pages. I could care less. My profile is set on private and I don’t add creepers. I think I’ll live. But despite my annoyance at all this stalker preaching, I can’t help but think that Twitter is probably the home page of every stalker in America.

I figure anyone obsessed with me is “really really desperate” by definition, but I’m reasonably certain that no one meeting that description is among my 160 or so Twitter followers, not counting the 50 or so I blocked for reasons of suspected spammage.

If I’m going to get all tweety, I might as well have some implements of construction.

The first thing I installed was WordTwit, which is a WordPress plugin that automagically (as distinguished from Automattically) tweets when a new post comes out here. It comes with its own URL shortener, which helps, given the space limitations.

Second was TweetDeck, which lost points for being an Adobe application, but which met my basic requirement: run in the background and scoop up all the appropriate material, accept anything I might want to send, and not bother me otherwise. Besides, I noticed Trent Reznor was using it, which almost cancels out the Adobitude.

And just to prove a point, to myself if nobody else, I laboriously punched out a text message and sent it up. My cell phone seems to have a dubious function called “Dispredictive Text Entry,” in which you try to guess what word it’s finally going to come up with when you quit thumbing the keys.

I promised myself I wouldn’t hang out on Twitter unless I came up with ten good reasons to justify it. I’m still not so sure about “good,” but here are ten reasons:

10. Tired of fluttering back and forth between other people’s streams
9. Wanted to see if anyone had had the temerity to swipe the name
8. Fear of becoming long-winded in my old age
7. How hard can it be if Ashton Kutcher can do it?
6. Heard there was going to be a prize for Fewest Followers
5. Consistency demonstrated in being once again several years behind the cool kids
4. No other hope of snagging a girlfriend in Argentina
3. Free extraneous links to the blogstuff
2. Thought “hashtag” was something you played at Cracker Barrel
1. Trini’s out of town for the weekend

So be it, then.

How much more can the national attention span shrink? This much:

I just really have to wonder, what’s next? Soon there will be a website where you write everything you ate that day or maybe you’ll have to write the first word that pops into your mind every 30 seconds. I’m being ridiculous, I know, or am I? I could be right and then we’ll see who gets the last laugh.

Of course, if she is right, the elapsed time between first and last laughs is likely to be only a minute or so.

What can you say about a 25-year-old computer that isn’t dead? There is now a Twitter client for the Commodore 64.

It’s called Breadbox64, and it does require a hardware mod: this expansion cartridge, which supports a network card.

You can read the inventor’s tweets here.

(Via Fark.)

It’s a bright cold day in May, and Winston Smith has been busy:

Given the widespread belief that Obama invented the Internet, many will scoff at the idea that the Bush White House had a Twitter account. But it did — and the administration handed over twitter.com/thewhitehouse at noon on Inauguration Day, just like it did with the whitehouse.gov website. Google still has the old account, with Obama’s tweets, in its cache.

Valleywag alum Paul Boutin suggests on Gadgetwise that this is a simple rationalization of accounts, matching the definite-article-free “whitehouse” username the Obama team uses on Flickr and YouTube. But Obama’s Twitterers didn’t just change the username on the account; they started fresh, wiping out all of the White House’s existing Twitter followers, and the entire archive of messages.

In fact, they did more than that. Forget the Google cache:

Actually the Google cache just points to the now-blank pages where the tweets used to be. The actual content has been permanently erased. So if you’re a Communication scholar or historian studying early Presidential uses of social media technologies, you’re screwed.

Not to worry. No matter what you heard, we have always been at war with Eurasia.

(Via HeatherRadish.)

I’ll have you know, I was a twit before twits were cool.

Suddenly I have an idea, based on this perfectly-rational musing: try to come up with the maximum-length Twitter tweet (not to be confused with Swisher Sweets) with the fewest number of actual words but which still makes some sort of grammatical sense. (For instance: if you come up with ten 13-letter words, plus closing punctuation, you have 130 + 9 spaces + stop = 140.)

Please don’t floccinaucinihilipilify this idea until you give it some thought. (And “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” falls short, alas.)

It began with Milwaukee Bucks forward Charlie Villanueva, who posted to Twitter from the locker room during halftime of a Bucks-Celtics game. (Here’s the tweet.) Bucks coach Scott Skiles was not amused, and ordered CV31 to cease and desist, at least during actual game hours.

Not all the NBA brass are aware of this sort of thing, it appears. For example, here’s Timberwolves coach Kevin McHale:

“I heard someone say Charlie Villanueva was tweeting,” McHale said, “and I thought it meant he went in to take a leak at halftime. I guess that wasn’t it. I have no idea what they’re doing these days. I’m just glad I can get my computer to five or six sites, one political and four sports ones.”

McHale, for the record, is four years younger than I.

So saith Steve Lackmeyer:

[T]here are those in this community who are talking about Twitter and online social networking as if … they are a religion.

Sorry, I’m not buying it. But the truth is there are more people out there than not who will never Twitter, who will never have a Facebook, Linked-In or MySpace page. I’ve dabbled in some of this and found much of it to be a waste of my time.

But let me spend time in a downtown coffee shop and I’m guaranteed to meet interesting new people and hear about the latest developments and scoops. Let me spend time mixing with business leaders and shop owners and I’ll get a better understanding of what’s going on in today’s economy than through Twitter and online social networking.

Then again, Steve Lackmeyer works the downtown Oklahoma City beat for the Oklahoman: he’s a reporter of the Old School. Twitter and such are just fine for those of us in the pundit/gasbag community, who need only react to things as they are reported; those who actually have to report those things in the first place need a different skill set and a different set of tools.

Disclosure: I dabble in some of this stuff, specifically to keep in touch with people I won’t necessarily be able to keep in touch with otherwise. (For instance: my children have presences on MySpace, where they’re reachable; for all I know, they may also have Facebook pages, but I don’t go there. In fact, my not going there may actually encourage them to have Facebook pages.)