Weekly @sol archive, 2008-12-15

You don’t want Twitter to be profitible

Have you really thought about this? You don’t really want Twitter to make money. Debate on this usually makes me cringe because arguments typically stem from fandom without thought for what happens later.

If you’re a diehard fan of the Twitter service, rooting for their profitibility is counter-productive. You should realize a move towards real revenue is going to affect the Twitter experience, and almost certainly in a negative way.

Or at least in a way that will affect Twitter’s value to you.

Personally, as someone in technology and media, I want @biz to bring in the green and prove web companies can rake in cash. But I understand that when this happens, the value proposition of Twitter for my needs will negatively change.

Average Twitter Age – Demographics

Age Demographics from Quantcast – Twitter.com

On Wednesday my wife and I were out at Flavor by Thai Pepper, enjoying some insanely good food and drink. Two conversations took place in adjacent booths, too loud to ignore.

In the booth behind Galina a group of late-twenty-somethings laughed loudly about replacing the contents of a box of chocolates with rocks and giving it as a gift (WTF?!) Behind me, a senior couple dropped the “T” word.

You don’t usually hear random people, especially outside of the tech community, drop Twitter in conversation. However, that’s been changing

“Twitter? What’s that?” she asked, laughing.

“It’s this web site where you answer a question, ‘What are you doing right NOW?’ – You send a message on your phone, ‘I’m standing in line for a latte’ to everyone.” he described, emphasizing NOW.

She said she was fearful of a greater and greater generational gap forming, to which he disagreed and assured her they could keep up.

Their convo reminded me of a post by Zena Weist, in which she unscientifically found the average age to be ~37. My own findings were similar but I didn’t keep track of demographics.

Most folks on Twitter are not in the high-school contingent, and judging by more scientific methods the average age is indeed in the mid-thirties. 48% fall in to the 18-34 range, but 21% are over 50. That’s a huge difference compared to Facebook and MySpace having only 8% being over 50.

Don’t let age come between you and your tweets…

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Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools, a WordPress plugin by Alex King, blew up my blog last night. For those of you following my RSS or Twitter updates, this meant you got 45 copies of a weekly Twitter update (and you would have gotten 8 more that were in the queue to be published if I hadn’t caught it and shut it off – thanks @evantravers for the RSS heads up).

I like Twitter Tools very much. It’s the first WordPress Twitter integration I used, and it’s still my preferred way to go. It automatically sends a tweet when I write a new blog entry. A good, clean, way to let people know you wrote something you’d like them to check out. I used to use it for a list of my more recent tweets, but I’ve replaced that with a FriendFeed plugin.

In one of Twitter Tools more recent versions the feature of weekly digest posts of one’s tweets was added. I wasn’t hot on the idea of a daily digest since it would be too often and would ultimately just be a daily barf of one’s tweets and wouldn’t involve actual thought. The weekly was worth checking out so I played around with the settings (above pic).

If the setting for “Create a weekly digest…” is Yes, you are given a choice of day and time for your post. During my trial of the settings, I chose 11:59pm on Sunday night.

This was last week. I’d forgotten about it. This morning however, it blew up with the 45 posts. Pretty ugly bug!

Weekly @sol archive, 2008-12-08

  • My sister is in labor as of last night! New family member on the way! Yay Em! #
  • Hopping a Hamilton train to NYC. Off to Apple’s iPhone tech talks. http://loopt.us/oOlTmg #
  • Walking up Broadway to the millenium. @ Klockner Rd & Sloan Ave http://loopt.us/ZQRd4w #
  • The thing I will remember most from this Tech Talk: the need to state, “please silence your key taps” to iPhone note takers. [NYC Tech Talk] #
  • Why didn’t I know about this!? http://marketshare.hitslink.com/ For all the browser and OS marketshare info you’ve been dying for. #
  • @braverydanger 2.2 brought us the callbacks and controls we wanted. It’ll blow your mind. in reply to braverydanger #
  • Kind of hard to concentrate on the tech talk… Parents, brother, brother-in-law, gathered in the waiting room. #
  • Err… Brother-in-law is in the delivery room. #
  • @braverydanger callbacks between QuickTime and javascript. Playback controls. Locally cache yer files, etc :) in reply to braverydanger #
  • @cart working on it! in reply to cart #
  • @borismsilver I wish I could have seen your presentations. Anything recorded? in reply to borismsilver #
  • Sitting in the last Tech Talk session of the day – Submitting to the App Store – 1/2 of the folks are curious. 1/2 of the folks are furious. #
  • Times Square, walking to Penn Station. – http://snaptweet.com/c8dcd #
  • iPhone app lifecycle: release alpha, make fixes, release beta 1.1, make fixes, label them features, release 1.2. #
  • Writing WiX installation code on the train… Code -> XML -> MSI installation DB. #
  • @willie Mail.app+Entourage… Daily fingers-in-the-car-door experience. TNEF for winmail.dat blood_blisters++. in reply to willie #
  • @willie – it’s been going around – http://tinyurl.com/5kpsxf in reply to willie #
  • @willie Gmail? Oh, nm. in reply to willie #
  • R5 departing 30th St station – reading news (shared here: http://is.gd/a7Z6) and still bashing the WiX installer. #
  • The pride of New Jersey… Cardboard figure kept police at bay for 90 minutes http://is.gd/abQs #
  • Left my iPhone at home. For those who have dialed and missed, either hit my other line or wait for me to hit you back in a couple hours. #
  • Arriving in Paoli in 10-15 minutes… @uzbechka, see ya at Starbucks! #
  • On the express line at sunrise. Trains are the best place for email… No calls, no meetings, just 3G and me. #
  • CNNMoney has a good read on the distribution of auto-workers in the USA http://is.gd/alic letting Detroit fail isn’t just about Detroit. #
  • 533,000 more unemployed in November. US Pop is 301,139,947… 0.18% lost their jobs. #
  • ZDNet had a good story yesterday on floss and cloud computing dominance by 2020 http://is.gd/alsQ #
  • @peterbromberg Good point. I’m not for Detroit being bailed out. I prefer bankruptcy and a strict judge. Worthwhile to know the connections. in reply to peterbromberg #
  • @cart Take pics of the new office – Might drop in this afternoon with Ki… Let ’em know. in reply to cart #
  • Performing my manly duties… Dishes, laundry, vacuuming. #
  • New electrical wiring in a bathroom, framing a ceiling, trimming doors, new lights, doorknobs, etc. Construction day. #
  • After a full day of construction, the rewarding smell of brownies in the oven and Remi Martin under the nose is heaven. #
  • Just watched 30 Rock for the first time. IQ dropped 30 points. [wasted time]. #

UPDATE: I saved the above post for posterity… Something blew up in my blog settings and tons of weekly Twitter blog posts were submitted.