Image via CrunchBase
Twitter has become not only the backchannel but the main channel of public exchange in the technology world. Yet, a tweet is such a personal remark, easily made off the cuff, on the spur of the moment. And then it stays around, in serverland, for eternity.
So, Yahoo bought the pioneering social bookmarking site Delicious in 2005. Last December they decided to can it, or using corporatespeak, to ‘sunset’ it. Smart people commented on many errors of Yahoo’s ways, but what I find curious is the exchange of tweets that took place. Andy Baio is the founder of upcoming.org that was also bought by Yahoo in 2005 and then allowed to wither. When he heard about the plans for Delicious in an internal Yahoo employee meeting he tweeted about it.
Blake Irving, originally a surfer dude from San Diego, was hired in May 2010 as Chief Product Officer (no kidding), to report directly to Yahoo’s newish CEO, Carol Bartz. He got mad about the tweet leak and tweeted that the person will be fired. This may be an attitude he picked-up during his fifteen years at Microsoft, but blasting like that is not PC for a corporate functionary. An ending of sorts came when Kevin Rose, founder of a social news site Digg, tweeted that he’d like to buy Delicious and turn into something great.
In the land of Google, Nokia’s new chief Stephen Elop was hired from Microsoft in September 2010 (is there a theme developing here?) He decided in favor of Windows for Nokia’s new OS, rather than Android. The information was leaked from both companies, as a memo by Nokia and as a tweet by a Google VP Vic Gundotra (oh, no, he was at Microsoft through 2006).
Meanwhile, in the real world, Twitter the company was the only one to push back on Government’s order for release of data from Wikileaks suspects. And Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter’s lawyer, tweeted about Government’s analysis on the matter.
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