Desi In Toronto

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Twitter, with its 140 character per message limitation, is no match for the capacity to put a lifetime online the way a member of Facebook can or the ability to watch the Michael Jackson funeral online the way viewers of CNN.com can.

It would probably be hard to get the average user of Twitter to say much about what he or she would lose if the service disappeared. Obviously, research shows that many of these people are Twitter members in name only. Many others seem to use the service infrequently. That leaves some number of “hardcore” people who spend a substantial part of their time sending each other Tweets for the better part of some or, in unfortunate cases, most days. Twitter is for them, a cell phone without a voice. Based on that analogy most of the time spent on Twitter has no redeeming social or economic value, unless it connects the agoraphobic or the desperately lonely.

It may be old fashioned to look at the value of a business based on whether it provides any real service to the people who are its “customers.”  The best way to evaluate that may simply be to ask what would happen if Twitter suddenly went away. In the case of McDonald’s (MCD), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), or Wal-Mart (WMT) a sudden disappearance would be a really big problem for its customers.

If Twitter closes, or ceases to operate because its service is constantly interrupted, no one would be really affected.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Douglas’s article, What If Twitter Folds, is just awful. He basically compares twitter to cellphones and then goes on to explain how twitter is useless except for “the agoraphobic or the desperately lonely”. (I find it fascinating how morons who do not comprehend a technology immediately assume it’s for the losers of the society).

A brief rant about twitter.

The first thing you have to understand is that twitter is not new. It’s been around in the form of IRC (Internet Relay Channels) for quite a while now. Ask enterprising journalists how they got their news during the parliament troubles in USSR in 1991.

I agree that most of what’s on twitter is mindless chatter. But once you see signs of mindless chatter, it is your fault if you encourage it or participate in it. You can easily ignore the mindless chatter and if you do not do so, please don’t complain about being told what your friend had for breakfast. Mindless tweets are something that journalists love to brandish about again and again and I swear, it’s these journalists who encourage idiots to continue broadcasting their life.

What I find fascinating about twitter is the ability to streamline the tweets as per your requirement. I want to hear from some news organisations, from the popular bloggers, from close friends, from people who share my passion for running, passion for tennis, passion for formula 1 racing etc.

The company I work for is following the trends on twitter closely and wants to integrate it within the company platform. How that will work? No clue but the point is that companies are paying attention to this technology and just because 40.5% of tweets are about what one did a few minutes ago, does not mean that MSM dismiss the rest of the tweets which continue to inspire and entertain.

So, to go back to the question, what would happen if twitter folds? I can only answer that question with another question : Dougie boy, did you ask the Iranians that question, Douglas?

……..the State Department asked Twitter not to go down at its original time last night in order to allow Iranians to tweet out what’s happening in their cities. It also seems that U.S. officials are watching the chatter on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and elsewhere to keep up-to-speed with the situation on the ground.

UPDATE : I just noticed the header on the article bashing twitter. FAIL……Hilarious!!!

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Tim Hortons is scrubbing its hands of a Rhode Island event opposing same-sex marriage after an online outcry went viral yesterday.

The iconic Canadian coffee shop was listed as a sponsor for a “Marriage and Family Day” hosted by the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), an organization that campaigns against gay marriage.

Tim Hortons had agreed to provide free coffee for the Aug. 16 event in Warwick, R.I., but pulled out yesterday as the news spread and complaints came flooding in.

Tim Hortons said it would no longer be a sponsor, citing a policy not to sponsor events “representing religious groups, political affiliates or lobby groups.”

Well this is really good news. I was ready to ban Timmies from my life is they had not withdrawn the sponsorship. It would have been difficult but I would have done it. And here is a statement from the organisers :

“We had no idea that we would cause an international incident by having coffee donated,” said Chris Plante, director of the Rhode Island chapter of NOM.

They had planned for 250 cups of coffee, he said.

On the brochure, the iconic “Tim Hortons” signature is printed next to the event’s intended purpose: “To take a stand for marriage as it was created to be.”

“Oooooh, it’s just coffee”. “Why would anyone be offended by having coffee served to gay hating, homophobic people?” I am glad that the TDL corporation nixed in the bud (even though they took their own time to do it).

And for all those twitter naysayers :

News of the sponsorship set off a furious stream of angry “tweets” about what appeared to be the Canadian company’s partisan involvement in a controversial political battle.

Many of the comments, which were coming at a rate of a dozen every minute, were demanding the company pull the sponsorship. But others went further, accusing the company of homophobia and saying they would boycott the company.

Yesterday afternoon, Tim Hortons released a statement saying the sponsorship had been cancelled and that the franchise owner had run afoul of corporate policy. The company does not allow sponsorship of religious, political or lobby groups.

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Lisa MacLeod is a young female politician who commutes to her job at Queen’s Park from Ottawa and leaves her husband, Joe, and four-year-old daughter, Victoria, at home. Mr. Justice Douglas Cunningham of Ontario Superior Court said this is a big distraction for the 34-year-old woman and as a result he felt he could not accept her evidence as corroboration of the Crown’s key witness in the recent high-profile, influence-peddling trial of Ottawa Mayor Larry O’Brien

OK fine, maybe her evidence was incidental to his ruling and what the judge meant to say was, “her testimony is not required so let’s not get her here” but in saying what he said, he has just revealed himself to be a sexist.

What a moron.

1. Indians happier than Americans and British…..Oh please!! What the hell are you talking about? Did you actually visit the millions and millions of destitute living in villages? I don’t believe this survey at all. I am pretty sure that it was done mostly in cities and not the villages.
2. Leaving New York this weekend via LaGuardia airport I got the full brunt of the famous New York attitude. Every employee and every person at the airport was in a bad mood and I got lip from quite a few even though I had two large bags and a 6 year old to take care of…..
3. This is just sad and naysayers say US does not need health care reform.
4. Reason number 1,352 as to why Bill O’Reilly is a douche.
5. I take ‘separating’ the trash very seriously as my family and friends would testify. And when the government started the Green Bin program (separate the organic trash from the rest), I have been diligently doing what was asked of me. So when I hear that my efforts are going to the dumps (literally), it makes me mad!!

Some garbage workers at city transfer stations say they have routinely mixed green bin organics, which are supposed to be composted, with regular trash bound for Michigan dumps. The reason for this is that the green bin waste weighs more than regular garbage, and the extra tonnage is needed to get the Michigan-bound trucks up closer to their maximum weight.

6. Apocalypse might be around the corner!!
   

Yellowstone is a volcano, and not just any volcano. The oldest, most famous national park in the United States sits squarely atop one of the biggest volcanoes on Earth. Doane was wrong, however, in one crucial respect. Yellowstone’s volcano is not extinct. To an unsettling degree, it is very much alive……There are volcanoes, and then there are supervolcanoes…..The last three super-eruptions have been in Yellowstone itself. The most recent, 640,000 years ago, was a thousand times the size of the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980, which killed 57 people in Washington. But numbers do not capture the full scope of the mayhem. Scientists calculate that the pillar of ash from the Yellowstone explosion rose some 100,000 feet, leaving a layer of debris across the West all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Pyroclastic flows—dense, lethal fogs of ash, rocks, and gas, superheated to 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit—rolled across the landscape in towering gray clouds. The clouds filled entire valleys with hundreds of feet of material so hot and heavy that it welded itself like asphalt across the once verdant landscape.