Tag: The Internet

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Why Twitter is Like Times Square, and Why Nike Ads Are Best Shared on Facebook.

In 1999, in an attempt to defeat the morning ratings Cerberus that was Katie Couric, Matt Lauer and Al Roker, ABC countered with an unusual move:

They built a studio in Times Square.

If you’ve been to Times Square in the last decade, you know which one I’m talking about. Other networks have studios there, too — MTV’s ‘TRL’ studio among them — but the ABC studio stands out. Their wrap-around ticker is the reason why.

Around the edges of the building is this wavy, double-deckered contraption that was Disney Imagineered specifically for the studio. Short news bites scroll across the ticker 24 hours a day.

Now I want you to imagine going to Times Square. You’re standing in the middle of the busiest intersection in the busiest city in the world. There are thousands of cars streaming past you, thousands of people walking past you. A giant Coca-Cola bottle is magically refilling and emptying itself, while a dozen Jumbotrons flash ads nearby.

The distractions are endless.

Now look over at that double-decker ticker at the ABC studio, and consider this: you’re standing there, all the world whizzing past, and you’re watching words scroll past you on a screen.

In a way, this is a lot like how Twitter works.

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The problem with the Internet is not a lack of content. In 60 days, according to YouTube’s latest numbers, more video is uploaded to the site than was created by ABC, CBS and NBC in the past 60 years. There are 400 million active Facebook users, and more than 75 million Twitter users.

But that’s before you factor in mainstream media sites, blogs and — most massive of all — e-mail.

All of these sources are creating content [1. Which I’ll simply describe as words, pictures, sounds or some combination of the three.] The problem is — and I am by no means the first person to suggest this — a shortage of filters to sort through all that content.

There are only two filters that most consumers use to find stuff on the Internet:

1. People you know
2. Google

This is kind of a problem.

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Mark Cuban said it well at South by Southwest: it’s not the production of Internet content that’s expensive — it’s the marketing.

If you’re creating something on the web, you’re up against an infinite amount of content.

But that’s not the case with Twitter. On Twitter, it’s even harder to stand out, because the amount of content that Twitter produces each minute is astonishing — the site records more than 50 million tweets per day, at last check — and the filters for Twitter are even less developed.

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What this is all coming back around to is this notion that it’s even possible for a brand to stand out on the Internet.

It is.

But it takes a really impressive effort to pull it off.

So consider the example of Nike. The World Cup starts in exactly 21 days, and Nike’s heavily invested in some of the biggest soccer stars in the world, including Wayne Rooney, Cristiano Ronaldo and Didier Drogba. So Nike did what it always does for a big soccer tournament: they pulled out a massive marketing campaign.

What they came up with — and I’ve embedded it below — features the biggest names in the soccer world. Plus Kobe Bryant, Homer Simpson and Roger Federer. And some awesome footage from around the globe.

This afternoon, over at one of my favorite soccer blogs, I saw the ad for the first time. I clicked through to the YouTube page. The video had only 300 views.

But below the video, there was an unusual note: the video had been “unlisted” on YouTube, which meant that it wouldn’t show up in search results or on Nike’s YouTube channel. The URL was secret; unless someone pointed you to it, you’d never know it was there. It’s the YouTube equivalent of Harry Potter’s Platform 9 3/4. Either you know it’s there and can get to it and experience it, or you can’t. You’re not going to be able to just stumble upon it unless someone else shows it to you.

What Nike was saying when they unlisted the video was, To prove how loyal our fans are, we’re going to make it as hard as possible to find the ad. We’re betting that the video will go viral anyway.

So I tweeted the link to the video and went to take a nap. When I woke up, I saw that my initial tweet had gotten a few retweets. I went back to the YouTube page for the spot to see how it was doing.

It had over 97,000 views.

What the hell happened?

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I went to bit.ly to see if they could offer insight. They did. The link I’d tweeted  — http://bit.ly/czPBdf, which redirected viewers to the YouTube video — had been clicked on over 7,000 times. [2. To be clear: I was not the first person to tweet that specific bit.ly link, though if I was video view no. 300, I must’ve been among the first.] 114 of those clicks came from twitterers, some tweeting in English, Portugese, Spanish and even Korean.

But 5,700 people had shared the link on Facebook. Another 1,100 had “liked” the link on Facebook.

So I followed the trail of links.

Nike has only 8,000 followers on Twitter. On Facebook, they’ve got over 600,000 fans.

And how did Nike mobilize that Facebook audience to action? They’d invited them onto the virtual red carpet.

On May 15, they announced that they’d be screening the video on May 20 at 6 p.m. They invited their fans to watch.

On May 19, 80,000 people had RSVPed on Facebook to watch. On the morning of May 20, that number was 108,000. At launch time, 120,203 fans had confirmed themselves as guests.

So what happened? Nike leaked the video at the appointed time. People showed up to watch it. And then people starting sharing it. And sharing it.

And suddenly, an invisible link on YouTube had 100,000 views in a matter of minutes. [3. Some 48 hours later, the video is closing in on 4 million views. As for the initial link I tweeted: the number of times it’s been tweeted hasn’t changed. But an additional 125,000 people have shared the video on Facebook, and another 70,000 have liked it.]

And the best part for Nike: these were people who actively wanted to watch the video — a video that, I should add, is actually a paid endorsement for shoes and soccer balls. These were people who, technically, were going out of their way to share the video with their friends.

But it didn’t feel like those people were going out of their way. When the barriers to sharing are as low as a click, how could you?

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A few months ago, my dad was asking me about something I had written. He thought more people deserved to read it.

“But I thought you put it out on Twitter,” he said.

I did, I explained. To my 200+ followers. A few clicked; a few retweeted it. And that was it.

“Doesn’t being on Twitter doesn’t make something viral?” he asked.

No, I told him.

But I don’t think my dad’s alone in his confusion about how something gets exposure on the web. He’ll notice content when it rises to the top. He’s rarely aware of that content’s journey to that point.

So here’s the takeaway:

Twitter works best in tandem with an actual event. An election, an inauguration or a big Congressional vote. The Super Bowl. A conference or a class. Anything, really, in which there are large amounts of people gathered and discussing/watching/listening/reacting to a single thing. That’s when you really get to see Twitter at it’s best, because that’s when great discussion is happening in real time.

But when it comes to sharing content, Facebook is still tops. Facebook taps deeper into those Dunbar circles. Twitter tends to hit the outer edges.

If you’re standing in Times Square, Facebook’s that friend from New York who says, “Hey, see that thing over there? That’s what you’re supposed to be looking at.”

Until Twitter creates the filters to replicate that experience, people will still turn to Facebook first to share.

But they are sharing. And for any brand, that is very, very good news.

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You Are Not a Supernetworker. (Sorry.)


About a month ago, I started writing a blog post that I never finished. It was about Dunbar’s Number, which explains a simple human limitation: we can only really care about so many people. Dunbar puts a limit on it: 150.

But thanks to Facebook and Twitter, we’re more easily connected to others than ever before. You don’t need a giant Rolodex anymore, just an active news feed and the latest version of TweetDeck. So I started wondering: I’ve got a few hundred Facebook fans and a few hundred Twitter followers. And that’s on top of my normal, Dunbar-defined circle.

I may not be a Supertasker, but could I be some sort of Supernetworker?

The résumé-deflating answer I came up with was, No, I’m not a Supernetworker, and neither are you. See, Dunbar’s theory creates circles, starting with your innermost circle of friends and expanding until you reach that outer circle of passive acquaintances.

Think of it this way: the inner circles will end up at your wedding. The outer circles might get a Christmas card (or maybe a Facebook birthday wall post). Social networking might bring you a few hundred or a few thousand additional connections, but the majority will remain in that outer circle — or beyond.

The irony is, you might engage them regularly — but you can’t really care about them on the level that Dunbar’s describing. [1. The closest thing I’ve heard of to a Supernetworker is Politico’s Mike Allen — who the New York Times describes as a one-man networking machine. He engages a huge network of contacts on a regular basis. But his closest friends also apparently don’t even know where Allen lives. So I’m not sure he’s the healthiest example of a normal human.]

But I was hugely impressed to see a media outlet finally discuss the ramifications of social networking on Dunbar’s Number. It came in a Guardian piece that actually asked Robin Dunbar what he thought of his number’s role in the world of social networks.

I asked Dunbar if he saw anything in the evolution of online networks to suggest that the next stage might extend our social horizons in any meaningful way.

“The question really is,” he said, “does the technology open up the quality of your social interaction to any great extent, and the answer to that question is, so far: not really.”

Exactly. But that doesn’t mean these connections are worthless. As Clay Shirky points out in the same piece:

“What these games and applications do,” he says, “is extend and churn the edges of our network, which is often how new ideas are brought into it.”

So add those friends on Facebook. Connect with others on Twitter. They probably won’t be coming to your wedding, and they might not even end up on your Christmas card list.

But if you’re smart, those fringe circles might just help you create something that your circle of 150 never would have thought of.

You don’t have to be a Supernetworker. You just have to be a good listener.

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My Generation is Totally Screwed, and It’s All the iPhone’s Fault.

There is a very good chance that my generation is totally screwed.

Certain jobs are disappearing, and that’s a shame. It’s a shame that copy editors at newspapers are being fired. It’s a shame that accountants are being replaced by inexpensive computer software. It’s a shame that elevator operators are out of jobs (and have been for quite some time).

It’s a shame, but that’s all it is.

What’s terrifying — and maybe even dangerous — isn’t the loss of those jobs but the loss of certain skills. Technology has given us a wonderful ability to streamline our lives by pushing us past our cognitive limits. We have brains, yes, and when you sync that brain to an iPhone, you’ve got a tandem that’s capable of sorting through infinite amounts of hard data while freeing up space to make the difficult rational and emotional choices in our lives.

But what happens when we allow the machines to wholly replace certain skills? [1. The answer — as it concerns taxpayer dollars — is debated at great length in P.W. Singer’s “Wired for War,” a wise read about the future of technology in the military.]

This isn’t the first time that someone’s raised concerns about the loss of basic human skills, and it won’t be the last. Consider the classroom, where teachers worry about the impact of calculators on students. Who needs long division when a TI-83+ can do it for you? Who needs to master proper spelling when spell check will fix your mistakes?

Technology is evolving faster than we are. It will, I believe, come to a point where it overwhelms us.

The only question left is, What do we do when we get there?

I think of poor orientation skills due to GPS technology, poor researching skills due to Google and poor handwriting skills due to computers. I wonder how my brain will hold up under an inundation of information. On a daily basis, I multi-task while monitoring cable news (including the ticker at the bottom of the screen) and a cascade of news and links via Twitter. There’s no way my brain’s capable of processing it all.

Then I think a bit deeper: I wonder what will happen to our interpersonal skills now that Facebook is the link connecting friends. Chivalry is dead, but text messaging has taken communication to an instantaneous level that humans have never before experienced.

There’s one more level, and it’s the one that worries me the most. Maybe our brains will be able to evolve with technology. Maybe my fears will go unrealized. But what if — in 20 or 30 years — we find out that technology has come at a human cost?

As I write this, I’m sitting in a window seat on an airplane. It’s a prop plane, and the blades are whirring with remarkable noise. I can barely hear my friend, who is sitting in the seat next to mine.

Two rows in front of us, on the other side of the aisle, a man is listening to his iPod at what must be an incredible volume. He’s seven feet away, but I can hear every drum snare and every bass line escaping out of his headphones.

I’d like him to turn the music down, not as much for my sake but for his. I cannot imagine how many decibels must be pumping into his ears, but I know it cannot be a healthy number. At this volume, this man is literally listening himself deaf.

So I wonder: what will my generation do if iPod use wreaks permanent hearing damage upon us? And what will we do if we find that cell phones have been pumping cancerous waves of radiation into our brains?

In previous generations, health risks were slightly less complicated. Cigarette use was linked to disease and early death, and smoking rates have declined steadily since. But cigarettes were just a tool to relax the mind; they weren’t rewiring it. Even if we find out that certain forms of technology are detrimental to our health, putting down the smartphone might be a tough task, especially as we grow dependent on it as the brain we keep in our pocket.

What I’m saying is this: if technology doesn’t leave us behind, we still might have to find a way to leave it behind.

That might just be the scariest thought of all.

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Read This, and Every Time You See the Word “DVR,” Insert “The Internet” Instead.

The New York Times has an interesting article today about the DVR and its impact on TV viewing. The article notes that TV execs once feared the DVR. Now, they love it.

What happened? It’s a cycle that happens with any revolutionary technology:

1. The technology is created and released to the public.

2. The technology gains widespread adoption.

3. Everything else works to catch up to the technology.

We created cars, and paved roads came later. We created sliced bread, and toasters came later. We created the slap shot, and — 50 years ago today — goalies started wearing masks. Ever heard the phrase “safety first”? In hockey, quite literally, safety came second.

But TV is just starting to adapt to the DVR, even though the TiVo was introduced more than a decade ago.

The original problem with the DVR was pretty simple: TV stations need money. They sell advertising to make money. But the DVR gave the consumers the power to skip past those ads.

The secondary problem was with TVs complicated ratings system. The ratings are measured in — and I’ll put this politely — an esoteric way. TV people don’t like the Nielsen ratings system. But it’s the only measure that counts when it comes to deciding whether or not a television program is successful.

When the DVR was introduced, it allowed viewers to record a show and watch it later. But Nielsen didn’t account for these viewers. If you weren’t watching the show live, it didn’t count in the ratings.

So it took a few years for the ratings system to catch up. Explains The Times:

Two years ago, in a seismic change from past practice, Nielsen started measuring television consumption by the so-called commercial-plus-three ratings, which measure viewing for the commercials in shows that are watched either live or played back on digital video recorders within three days. This replaced the use of program ratings.

With the new system, ratings are up — way up. Thanks to the plus-three system, Fox has added about 600,00 viewers per show. Even NBC, which has seen the smallest gains with plus-three, has added an average of 140,00 viewers per show.

Here’s the crucial thought: for eight years of the DVR’s existence, television stations were improperly valuing their own assets. Thousands of people were watching TV shows, but those viewers weren’t being counted.

The same is happening with internet advertising. Ads are sold using a CPM valuation that doesn’t work. Today, the clickthrough is the key to increasing your CPM and raising your advertising rates. But it’s not particularly effective.

Why? For one, humans aren’t nearly as impulsive on the Internet as you’d expect. The clickthrough method works well for products that can be delivered on demand, which is why iTunes’ store is so effective, why porn sells on the web and why watching movies with the touch of a mouse is the next big thing. But say you see an ad on Yahoo!’s homepage for Chick-Fil-A. Even if you click through to the company’s website to read or see more, is that really any indicator that you’re heading out for a chicken sandwich at lunch?

The real money will be made when internet advertising measures — much like the Nielsen plus-three method — user engagement. DVR viewers are actively choosing to record and watch their favorite shows. For internet ads to be successful, those ads will have to demand a similar level of interaction with users.

Whatever the new version of CPM is, it has to measure that consumer’s desire for a particular product. A clickthrough simply doesn’t measure up.

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A Thought About Lifestreaming

The chart above is from Steve Rubel’s blog, and I think it’s a monumentally important step in terms of defining the scope of all this new media. [1. Which would include technology like: Tweeting, Facebooking, Flickring, texting, livestreaming, liveblogging, livechatting or any other verb that didn’t exist at the start of this millenium.]

I’ll let Mr. Rubel explain what the chart means in terms of his blog:

How would you feel about a structure like this where I theme the content based on the day of the week? Monday we tackle models and/or mindmaps, Tuesday we talk trends, etc. I want to post more often and more creatively than just writing.

This gets to a thought that I’ve been working through for some months now. My blog has become much more targeted: I write about journalism, with a few anecdotes from my life thrown in. But my Twitter feed is all over the place. It’s essentially a link dump; I see an interesting article, and I post it to Twitter. The thing is, the links have no common theme, except for the fact that I find them interesting. So basically, I’ve got a Del.icio.us page that’s targeted to friends.

I know I’m not the only one with such a problem. Take the Twitter feed for the San Antonio daily newspaper, The Express-News. Follow @mysa on a day-to-day basis, and you’ll find that their tweets are very strange. One minute, they’re tweeting the daily pollen count. The next, they’ve got photos from a crime scene. And minutes later, they’ll have the lotto numbers, or the score of a high school football game, or maybe a column about tacos. Point is: I’ve followed them for months, and I have no idea why they tweet the way they do.

That’s a problem. If I follow you on Twitter or subscribe to an RSS feed of your blog, or even if I read/watch/listen to your media outlet’s news on a regular basis, I want to know the answer to two questions:

  1. What do you write/talk about?
  2. Why do you write/talk about it?

I like Rubel’s idea of defining days of the week, especially for new media that tends to span a variety of topics. It could be an interesting way to keep readers engaged.

As for my Twitter feed, I’d like it to be a bit more focused. The only question is: when I see a link or a topic that’s outside my scope, what should I do with it then?

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No Matter What You May Have Been Led to Believe, I Do Not Have a Rabbinically-Related Bacon Sex Obsession

A serious, actual warning: this blog post contains material that is mildly pornographic. If you are my parents or anyone who is seriously considering hiring me — with the exception of the fine editorial board over at the Adult Video News family of publications — I advise that you just click here to read my more, uh, kosher material.

End of warning.

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I am writing today because I am concerned — as many of you are, I imagine — that millions of American men are under the impression that Jewish youths fantasize not of Catholic schoolgirls or slightly-submissive cheerleaders but of bacon-wielding Rabbinical scholars.

Perhaps I should explain.

Where to start is a hard question 1.. When I was a kid — in the clean, wholesome 1990s — companies were in the business of using sex to sell Pepsi or Chris Rock albums instead of, well, sex.

Even when the President decided to let the other zipper drop, all the American people got were a few Slick Willy jokes. Those were simpler times.

But as Y2K closed in, something changed: doctors at Pfizer realized that their new blood pressure medication wasn’t doing what they they thought it would do. And now they needed a megaphone to tell everyone of the side effects they’d discovered. Meanwhile, the NFL needed a new sponsor; those 1-800-COLLECT ads weren’t going to survive. So if you’re looking for a moment when Americans became weirdly okay with talking about sex in public, I’d nominate Viagra’s first TV ad campaign as the tipping point.

A decade later, we’re completely unimpressed by overt displays of sexuality on television. If you watched the NFL Draft this weekend, you were probably exposed to equal amounts of Cialis advertising and draft analysis 2.. If you watched on a satellite provider, like Dish Network, you saw an additional dose of ads for something that’s called — with all irony intended — Extenze. And may I remind you: in 2004, a famous entertainer exposed herself to nearly a hundred million Americans. It is no coincidence that the incident took place at halftime of a football game.

Lately, we’ve been channeling our sex obsession towards pornography. Two weeks ago, an obituary for an adult film actress was featured on the front page of The New York Times’ website. The Washington Post ran a multi-part series about the Maryland state senate’s quest to squash a public showing of a pornographic film titled “Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge.” Porn isn’t taboo anymore; it’s actually headline news.

Even today’s sex advertisers are evolving with these social changes. They’ve actually started to — and I cannot believe I am typing this — microtarget to consumers.

Microtargeting is a technique that only slightly predates Viagra. Give much of the credit to Mark J. Penn — a political consultant for the Clintons, among others — who coined the term “soccer moms.” He started a movement among political-types in which society is fragmented until you’re left with only homogeneous groups of people. Those people — soccer moms, NASCAR dads, Rednecks for Obama, or whomever — are then sent as many political mailings as the USPS will legally allow.

Then there’s another side of microtargeting: localization. Specific advertisers — say, supermarkets — want to be able to advertise to the people who live within a few miles of their store. So they’ll mictrotarget their ads only to those consumers. It’s easy to figure out who those consumers are, too: your Internet IP address is basically a Lo-Jack for your computer.

What’s frightening about today’s sex advertisers is that they’re microtargeting to both specific demographics and local markets; they’re actually customizing their smutty ads to your liking and locale.

On a theoretical level, microtargeting makes sense. If you can gather information about an Internet user — Dan, age 21, Jewish, enjoys baked goods — and can pinpoint his location — Columbia, Mo. — then you can deliver an ad that cuts directly to what I like and where I can buy some of it.

But this really only works well if you’re looking to get me a good deal on hamantaschen in mid-Missouri. It does not work as well when you’re trying to sell sex.

Which, finally, brings me back to the matter at hand: a disturbing new series of Internet advertorials that have brought together Jimmy Dean breakfast meats and shiksas in a way I never thought was possible.

(N.B.: The following screenshots have been reproduced directly. With the PG-aged in mind, I have edited in leavened distractions to block any unsightly parts of the photo. Other images have been slightly Photoshopped to blur out 3. what matzah could not.)

The advertisement features a number of slides that progress every few seconds. I’ll start with the first slide:

Initial thought: what’s with the fake beards? And I don’t even want to guess what they’re trying to sell. To the next slide:

First things first: I belong to a synagogue in Washington, D.C., that’s lucky enough to have not one but two excellent female rabbis. So I’m not entirely sure what this ad is getting at by asking “if.” But to answer the question at hand: no, even as a young Jewish man, no, I have not had that fantasy.

Also noteworthy: I still have no idea what’s being sold here. Next slide:


Now’s the point where I start to really wonder how customized this ad is for me. I mean, ass-slapping? With pork products? And it’s not like the Google search that led me to this ad was “Lesbian rabbis AND ass-slapping AND the other white meat.”

And I’m completely clueless as to what’s being sold here. From what I can gather, it appears that Johnsonville may have finally gotten into the kosher breakfast meat/sex toy industry 4.. Still, there’s no way I’m clicking away now. To the final slide:

Now here’s where microtargeting can go really wrong. Sure, I suppose that there’s enough Jewish stuff about me on the web to figure out that I like Tu Bishvat as much as the next guy. Yeah, I’ve written one blog post too many about matzah, I suppose. And I’ve managed to slide a Shabbat mention into my work before.

But there are ZERO Jewish women in Columbia, Mo. Trust me: I’ve been looking for them. And now some smut advertisement is telling me that there’s a cult of slutty, Rabbinically-dressing girls 5. somewhere in this town?

I’ll believe that the day someone convinces me that Catholics guilt their children better.

Now, the ads turned out to be for a website that’s kind of a Match/eHarmony/J-Date-gone-smutty. I wasn’t previously aware that such a service existed. I suppose it would make for an unusual answer to the “So, how’d you meet?” question at the wedding, though.

Regardless, there is a lesson here for advertisers: be careful with microtargeting. You can’t always be sure that you’re actually reaching your target audience. Personally speaking, I prefer pastrami to ham.

And another thing: are there really that many Jewish-taboo-breaking-ham-lovers to even warrant such a targeted ad?

I’l leave you with a final thought: this ad could’ve taken a page from the 1990s. This decade, we’ve been using sex to sell sex. I think that’s the wrong tack.

Sex sells others things pretty well. Had I been shown the above ad — and then been asked to click through to buy a honey-baked ham — I think I just might have considered.

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1.) Yes, that’s what she said. And if you get bored of that, add the words “in bed” to the end of a sentence. That also works well with fortune cookies. >back to article

2.). Why it seems like a good idea to mix Mel Kiper, Jr., with subliminal sex advertising doesn’t fully make sense to me. His mustache must have something to do with it. >back to article

3.) I do not think it is a coincidence that when blurring out the less suitable parts of these photos, I used a Photoshop tool that measures the strength of the blur in something called “hardness.” Hey, it wasn’t my idea. >back to article

4.) And if there ever was a company to get into the breakfast meat/sex toy industry, you’d want it to be named Johnsonville. >back to article

5.) Also: I really cannot imagine how the company solicited actors for this ad. “Wanted: 36-24-36 non-vegan for photo shoot. Experience working with large, salted meats preferred.” >back to article

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Twitter Has Killed Small Talk. (Or: Why We Are Less Interesting Than Ever.)

If you are like the majority of Americans — and I suspect that you are — you suffer from a severe condition that scientists typically refer to as “not being interesting.” I, myself, have more than two decades in the field, and after extensive research, I feel compelled to note that only a small percentage of Americans have anything useful to say.

A slightly larger percentage of these uninteresting Americans are, however, entertaining. But I should note: this condition is not the same as being interesting. This is the reason why people who become stars on YouTube are infrequently consulted when it comes to matters of national importance.

The problem is that we, as Americans, are quickly becoming less interesting. Naturally, I would like to blame Twitter for this decline.

Research shows that blaming Twitter for things is now the number one media pastime in America, just surpassing “baseball metaphors used in a political context” and “finding new excuses to subtly insult that woman on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ for her looks.” We, the media, love to blame Twitter, because those articles will soon be Twittered by potentially millions of people, which, in turn, should exponentially increase the size of our Twitter followings. There is a good reason why the number one most re-tweeted article yesterday was about the rise of narcissism.

Now, I have been using Twitter since the fall 1. I liked my first tweet — “attempting brevity,” I wrote — and little else. I’ve surpassed 1,000 tweets. I have potentially read thousands more. I cannot say that my life has improved as a result.

However, I do feel comfortable saying that I am less interesting than ever. There is a good reason for this: Twitter is killing small talk.

No longer do I have those go-to questions to ask friends; instead, I’m finding out the answers in real time via Twitter. And we, as humans, are not interesting enough to maintain small talk if you take away our most inane questions. Now that I don’t need to ask the basics — “So, how are the roommates?” or “Did the test go well?” or “Was that you I saw passed out face down in a pool of nacho cheese on 9th Street Tuesday night?” — I’ve been left with the cold realization that I’m not that interesting 2.

And the Twitterati will say, “Shouldn’t you have more to talk about now that you have access to regular snippets of information about friends?” Hypothetically, yes. Sadly, few of my Twitter friends are tweeting about topics such as the search for absolute zero. And even if they were, their tweets would just get lost among the avatars on my screen. Imagine that a formula along the lines of “E=mc2” was discovered today. Sure, it’d get re-tweeted 3, but only if Lindsay Lohan wasn’t currently trending on the site.

Look, I understand why Twitter users are so fanatical about the service. Information delivered on-demand from whomever you want is a pretty good deal.

But may I remind you: we are a nation — to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld — built on nothing. Now that we’re microblogging our nothingness, we’re emptier than ever before.

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1.) I use Twitter as a personal news ticker to monitor what’s happening right now (or what happened in the last 15 seconds). I don’t scroll down to see old tweets. Anything that’s far enough down the page has probably been written about in a space that’s measured in inches, not individual characters. >back to article

2.) Completely unrelated tangent: Ashton Kutcher has a million online followers (though, for the sake of this comparison, I’ll add these words: “per month”). The New York Times has 20 million monthly followers. So why does Kutcher get more publicity? Maybe if The New York Times had a “followers” or “articles published” counter on their homepage, people would take notice. >back to article

3.) “RT @aeinstein: OMG this is WAY bigger than relativity!” >back to article

UPDATE: Jason Kottke defends Twitter for its banality.

H/T to Robert Scobie for the image.

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If Newspapers Had Flight Attendants (or: Keep your tray table in the upright and panic position.)

Hello, I’m Dan, and on behalf of your newsroom-based crew, I’d like to welcome you onboard Media Conglomerate Airlines. As we may continue to lose money rapidly during this flight, I would like to remind you of the safety features onboard.

There are two exits onboard this aircraft: buyouts and layoffs. Caution: the nearest layoffs may be directly behind you.

In case of emergency, newsprint will drop from the compartment above you. Though advertising will not be flowing smoothly through its pages, we’ll still continue to search for ways to inflate our revenues.

We have loaded overwhelming debts and rising printing costs onto this aircraft. Our pilot has also informed us that we may be experiencing some Google-related turbulence. So please: keep your seat belts fastened. Things will be getting bumpy.

We no longer serve bonuses or 401(k)s on this flight. However, peanuts are still available as a sign of gratitude for your years of service.

We remind you to please be careful when opening overhead bins. Your department may have been shifted to India during our flight.

So sit back and try to enjoy this Media Conglomerate flight. Even if we don’t crash, you’ll probably feel nauseous anyway.

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