Britney, Ashton and Porn Stars: Welcome to the Twitter Age of Celebrity

There was always talk that one day, Twitter would “break”. There was always talk that one day, when the celebrities come on board, that the microblog that could would be too big for its own good.

“Oh, wait till Britney comes over. Wait ’till Paris comes on board. Then we’ll see how it goes. Will it survive then?” was a question often asked by the panelists on the TWiT podcast. This was back in the day when the Fail Whale happened every other week, when 100,000 followers was a singular anomaly, when Internet superstars like Kevin Rose, Leo Laporte and Robert Scoble were vying for a top three position.

Three years on since Twitter was launched, the stars have signed on, and the result is a surprising whimper rather than the big bang-crash. Britney Spears has tweeted in, so has Ashton Kutcher (aplusk) and Demi Moore (mrskutcher). Porn stars have started jumping on it too, but that’s not much of a surprise if you follow the idea that porn is often at the forefront of driving innovation. Paris has yet to report in, but if Twitter is going the way of Facebook, it’s only a matter of time before she tweets in.

So the time has arrived, and Twitter has yet to be “broken”. Why not? To begin with, I’m not sure if celebrities are worth following–if anything else, watching their feeds just exposes how dull their day-to-day lives are. Here’s a few choice tweets coming from Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore:

“Why do those candy hearts with sayings on them taste so bad. Can’t they put words on good candy, like skittles or starburst “be mine” – aplusk.

“Snow is cold! (self)Thank you captain obvious. Shabbat shalom. sharing the bore pre hagefen with my man BW” – aplusk

“On a romantic getaway with my adorable hubby the ex and his great gal emma!”- mrskutcher.

Okay, so the last tweet from Demi was mildly interesting, but then again, most of the world knows what kind of screwy arrangement is going on in that family. For the big ironic laughs, you should see what some pornstars have been tweeting about–they rank as the most mundane tweeterers, more so because slobbering fanboys expect something more — how shall we say — work-related. What you’ll get instead is something less salacious, like this from Stoya (don’t ask me how I know of her. I just do):

“Saki is not supposed to be warm. It is supposed to be cold. Wtf.”

And what about this hard-hitter: “*grumble grumble* I’d rather be in sneakers at a diiiiiiive bar”.

You can almost hear yourself yawn.

2009: The Year Facebook Grows Up

(Pic from ibiblio)

So we’ve started on the New Year, and already some are wishing for a time machine that’ll skip 2009 entirely and straight into 201o–the year, when optimistically the economy starts to recover. For tech startups, 2009 is going to be high and dry, with MarketWatch tech columnist Therese Poletti writing that the Web 2.0 boom is over. “If you are a software entrepreneur working on yet another inane social networking application, perhaps you should switch gears, give up, or keep your day job.”

While the past few years have consistently introduced web-altering free-to-use social applications, it’s highly doubtful that we’re going to have a breakout web service like YouTube in 2005, Facebook in 2006, Twitter in 2007/08. All these services brought the web to a new social level, were free, and are now a part of our everyday lives. Unfortunately, they all had poor monetisation plans, with the rare exception of MySpace, which was bought by Fox and was thus handled in a “Big Media” sorta way.

While “monetisation” did become Web 2.0’s buzzword towards the 2H of the year, the realisation comes too late now that global advertising dollars is expected to drop in 2009. But, as Jason Calacanis constantly iterates, entrepreneurs “build value during downtimes”; so as Web 2.0 (gosh, I hope people will stop using that term) comes to a hushed pop, this is the year Social Networking, especially Facebook, incubates and matures: If Facebook was an anti-social fresh grad in 2008, it’s going to be a suit-and-tie, backslapping corporate man in 2009.

Using Twitter in the Newsroom

(Pic from Geekandpoke)

I hate to harp on again about Twitter, but it’s been heavily on my mind since the Mumbai attacks (This post was delayed for far too long, I know). Once again, Twitter was hailed as the on-the-ground, revolutionary, citizen-journalism breakthrough by the web community. More so this time, when mainstream media paid attention and leveraged on the reporting done through Twitter.

Following Twitter’s success in covering the San Diego fires, Obama’’s presidential campaign, and the China Earthquake, there was little doubt that Twitter would take centrestage during the Mumbai attacks. This time around, however, the question of credibility was raised when the BBC admitted to mistakes made using Twitter coverage, especially in regards to the widely-reported tweet that the Indian government called for an end to Twitter updates from Mumbai.

This drew fiery responses from both sides of the issue: on the side of the traditional media gatekeepers are The Independent’s Tom Sutcliffe, who writes that citizens twittering news side-by-side with professional journalists is “a worrying development.”