Twitter: dead or alive, dying or growing?

Okay, I was really torn between going ahead with a very belated entry about this, versus just moving on to the next story. (Aside: I actually have a backlog of stories I wanted to blog, and deleted three draft entries about news articles that looked good when I landed on them in StumbleUpon but which turned out to be rather blah for writing a real blog entry about.)

But, given how much time I have spent on Twitter, I can’t very well just up and delete a draft post concerning a news story about it. Especially when the headline of the original is “Who Killed Twitter?” and the article is still relatively fresh.

I almost have to wonder if the question should be rephrased: Is Twitter dying? If so, who is really behind it?

Some very interesting claims are made. Among them:

Harvard Business School says the average Twitter user tweets once and never again.

I have yet to see any Twitter users give up after only one tweet, most maybe after 5-10. Maybe there are a few out there; I wonder if this study weeded out spam accounts, as most of those would appear to “give up” after one tweet, but their purpose is accomplished once they have tweeted once and followed 2,000 people.

TechCrunch says that the ol’ 80-20 rule is in full effect on Twitter: 20% of Twitter users are creating 80% of the activity. Harvard Business School says it’s even more extreme than that: 10% of Twitter users post 90% of the Tweets.

This is not surprising. I don’t think it’s any different for Twitter than it is for Blogger, Livejournal, or any other major online service. There are people who blog once a month, once a week, all the way up to once–or more–per day. There are people who blog for a few days and then say “this isn’t for me” just as much as there are people who have been blogging since the days before people abbreviated “weblog” to just “blog.”

It’s the same with Facebook. And I’m not going to lie, I almost gave up on Facebook. Heck, I almost gave up on Twitter at one point. I still feel like I have not truly mastered either, but then again I was a very late adopter for Facebook and several other services (Digg, StumbleUpon, and FriendFeed being most notable as I signed up for all three in the closing days of 2008).

A survey from Pace University and the Participatory Media Network found that only 22% of people between the ages of 18 and 24 use Twitter (though nearly all have social networking profiles).

I have to wonder how accurate this is. Maybe it’s too limiting for the under-25 set, though I fail to see how a generation that grew up with text messages can’t wrap their head around something that is, in essence, text messages that can be read by everyone even if they don’t have a phone.

It is entirely possible the non-Twitter users are using one of the other microblogging services such as identi.ca or simply using the status update feature of Facebook as a rather hackish substitute for Twitter. (Several tools exist to populate Twitter updates to Facebook status, and at least one exists that is selective and looks for a “#fb” hashtag.)

Personally, I don’t think Twitter is dying for me. Quite the contrary: I’m now north of 600 followers which is almost where I was a few months ago. I am at the point where I can’t follow everyone back that follows me.

The problem with stories like this, everyone sees them differently. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say almost everyone and their dog is on Twitter–literally.

The important things to remember are:

  • Twitter does not replace your blog. Not everything I say fits neatly in 140 characters.
  • Twitter does not replace Facebook, MySpace, or similar sites.
  • Oprah, Ashton Kutcher, and CNN did not kill Twitter.
  • For that matter, Cracker Barrel did not kill Twitter. (In fact, Cracker Barrel was probably the reason a lot of businesses all of a sudden hopped on Twitter.)

Free speech, old laws, and vibrating objects

(Warning: linked pages contain profanity and obscene gestures. If you are easily offended by adult topic matter, you may wish to skip this post.)

AlterNet recently published an excerpt from a book entitled In Praise of Indecency, entitled “You Still Can’t Buy a Vibrator in Alabama.” The excerpt is a very candid–almost too candid–look at obscenity in the media.

Of particular note is this incident:

In March 2007, on International Women’s Day, a public high school in Westchester, New York suspended three 16-year-old girls for saying the word “vagina” during a reading from The Vagina Monologues. Principal Richard Leprine said the girls were punished for disobeying orders not to say the word, which he referred to on the school’s homepage as “specified material.” Writer Brigitte Schoen suggested calling the play Elastic Muscular Tube Monologues.

I honestly think this goes a bit too far. “Vagina” is, after all, a medical term. It is one thing to discipline kids for gratuitous use of street terms for private parts; it is another entirely to censor the proper, medical term. Heck, Elliott in E.T. uttered the very-famous “penis breath” line and the movie was still rated PG, and probably airs intact on TV.

And, of course, the part for which the excerpt is named:

Which brings us to Sherri Williams, a casualty of the war on pleasure. She was acquitted of the heinous crime of selling non-prescription vibrators. She had violated an Alabama statute, which bans the sale of vibrators and other sex toys. The law prohibited “any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.”

But the not-guilty verdict in her case was overturned by a 2-1 decision. In the Court of Appeals, the state’s attorney general defended the statute, arguing that, “a ban on the sale of sexual devices and related orgasm-stimulating paraphernalia is rationally related to a legitimate interest in discouraging prurient interests in autonomous sex.” Rationally related? Moreover, he said, “There is no constitutional right to purchase a product to use in pursuit of having an orgasm.” There isn’t?

I think Texas still has a similar law on the books; why, I don’t know. Such is the nature of laws; once passed, they tend to stick around until legislators find time to repeal them. I think these laws, if they ever served a legitimate purpose (big if), do not serve a purpose today. As stated later in the article, Sherri is not giving up, and plans another lawsuit on First Amendment free speech grounds. Which is pretty daring, given some of the past case law on the First Amendment versus pornography.

But I cannot honestly blame Sherri for continuing to fight the good fight. The article ends with this stirringly defiant quote from Sherri, which is great inspiration to us all:

“My motto,” she says, “has been they are going to have to pry this vibrator from my cold, dead hand. I refuse to give up.”

The plight of Numerama and the future of copyright

Torrentfreak reports on a story involving the French P2P news site Numerama and the French courts. The courts have ordered Numerama to publish extracts of convictions of 27 copyright violators.

Although the court is compensating Numerama to the tune of €10,000 (about US$14,000), it is not surprising that Numerana is a bit worried about taking money from the pro-copyright lobby, even if it is indirectly. Some creative uses for the money have been proposed, and they run the gamut from buying servers for a file-sharing network to a donation to the (unfortunately named) Swedish Pirate Party.

This order comes even though Numerama is not involved in any of the cases. Such appears to be the quirkiness of French law. I question the wisdom of the move, and would still question it even if I believed the draconian copyright enforcement we face today is justified (which I don’t). For one, Numerama’s readers will probably see these people as martyrs or even heroes. With this in mind it is not clear at all just what the copyright holders, through their trade organizations, intend to accomplish.

We live in an age where the previous scarcity of recorded media no longer exists because of the advance of technology. Records, tapes, even CDs in the early years cost what they did because it was expensive and difficult to make copies. Now, all one has to do to make a copy is frequently no more than dragging icons from one window to another, or even typing in a command like cp -a music /media/travel5. That’s still a lot easier and faster than hooking up a tape deck to a record player ever was.

What has been the response of trade organizations like the MPAA and RIAA? Higher prices, and vicious attempts to restrict the freedom of the users. Everything is bits, and bits can be copied over and over again with no loss of quality; rather than embrace this, the companies which make up the MPAA and RIAA have tried to layer scarcity on top of it via Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). This is doomed to failure (already, the RIAA has admitted this by allowing Apple and Amazon to sell MP3 files without DRM).

Let’s define what copying, recording, and playback are, fundamentally (this is really as simple as it gets):

  • Copying is reading bits from a storage device (CD, DVD, hard drive, SD card) and writing the same bits again to another storage device.
  • Recording is reading bits from an input device (camera or microphone) and writing those bits to a storage device.
  • Playback is reading bits from a storage device and writing those same bits to an output device (video monitor or speakers).

All three are fundamentally the same operation. The only differences are where the bits come from and where they go.

The RIAA (and similar music/audio recording trade organizations) may finally be realizing this; when will the MPAA and television producers follow suit?

Bad cop: officer wrote something he shouldn’t on ticket

A 17-year old New Zealender who got a ticket for unauthorized passengers that could cost her NZ$400–but the profane insult that came with it is free.

Stuff.co.nz has the original report (warning: profanity) on the experience of Taliah Butters who claims she told the officer she was a “kitchen hand and part-time chef.” The cop, however, wrote a profane and insulting version on the ticket–think a nastier version of “kitchen dog.”

My take? As the bumper sticker says: “Bad cop–no donut.”

China gives Google the boot

The Financial Times reports on China’s latest censorship move: telling Google to shutdown its google.cn site for Chinese residents.

With the rise of technologies like Tor, Freenet, GNUnet, Mixmaster, and OpenPGP (including GNU Privacy Guard), censorship as a whole is unsustainable in the personal computing realm.

China is trying to hang onto a fasicst-communist regime similar to the USSR’s. The USSR broke up 20 years ago. How dumb can you be to not know this, unless you are intentionally ignoring all references to it?

Censorship, the way China is doing it, is doomed, and in fact, has already been circumvented. As John Gilmore said: “The Net interpets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

The Internet is about a lot more than the physical wires and the computers across the world. The Internet is about the people that use it. The Internet is about freedom of speech. More importantly, not just free speech for those in Western countries, not just free speech in the US where we damn near take the First Amendment right of free speech for granted–the Internet is about free speech everywhere.

The sooner they figure that out in China, the better.