Hasta La Creative!

Ian Schafer has figured out a way to monetize his Twitter feed.

He’s conducting an eBay auction, where the winning bidder will co-opt graphic ad space on his Twitter page.

This one-month sponsorship includes replacing of the existing background image with the image(s) of your choice, as well as replacement of my handsome photo with another image of your choice (ie. brand logo).

I average about 8-10 outbound ‘tweets’ a day, and your brand would be represented in each.

The current bid is $405.

The amount paid by the winning bidder will go as a donation to The David Wright Foundation.

Ariel Waldman has a problem with Twitter.

The reality of Twitter is that they refuse to warn and/or ban people who use their service to “abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users” (to quote their forth line item on their TOS page). What does this mean? In short, anyone can use Twitter to consistently harass you and ruin search results for your identity and Twitter won’t execute any means of community management.

In June 2007, I unfortunately found myself on the receiving end of multiple accounts of harassment from a user on Twitter.

Caroline McCarthy, who writes The Social on c|net says Waldman is hardly the average Twitter user.

Well-known in geek circles, she’s a “social media insights consultant” who contributes to tech blog Engadget and runs her own site, Shake Well Before Use, about “art, advertising, sex and technology.” In other words, in the bubble-like culture of Web 2.0, Waldman is a sort of celebrity–and with celebrity comes scrutiny and often ugly commentary.

Waldman, who could not immediately be reached for comment, also works as the community manager at Pownce, one of Twitter’s few rivals in the microblogging space, giving her a bit of a conflict of interest in the issue.

Biz Stone of Twitter says, “Twitter recognizes that it is not skilled at judging content disputes between individuals. Determining the line between update and insult is not something that Twitter nor a crowd would do well.”

IsTwitterDown.com is a site with a singular purpose—to tell Twitterholics whether the service is down, or not. Right now, the answer is, “Yes,” Twitter’s down.

David Burn is the editor of AdPulp, and a writer with a plethora of caustic tales to tell.

Andy Stanford-Clark is a master inventor at IBM. His house, which sends automated messages regarding its energy use to Twitter, is located in Isle of Wight, UK.

[via Earth2Tech]

Hugh Macleod is writing a book about creativity in Alpine, Texas.

Facebook is a pain in the ass (or whichever body part it comes into contact with).

Paul Isakson is a planner working in Minneapolis. His tweet is in response to Joseph Jaffe’s talk last night at the Fine Line.

For the record, Steve Hall sees social media and conversational marketing as “two entirely different things.”

Zappos currently stocks more than 3 million shoes, handbags, clothing items and accessories from over 1,100 brands.

[via Armano]

I appreciate that Misha Cornes of Organic has stuck her neck out by declaring that she’s “over Twitter.”

Her reasoning is sound:

Most people are not that interesting.

There, I said it. Overall, the culture of self-promotion embedded in most social media applications bothers me. I know that listening to “life between blogs post and emails” is supposed to bring me closer to my Twitter friends, but I don’t want to hear about their minutiae any more than I want to report on my own. The time you spend away from people is what allows you to be interesting to each other again.

Twitter takes bite-sized content about three bites too far.

Have you ever read the transcript of a Twitter conversation? It’s like reading the notes that get passed back and forth in class. If blogs are bite-sized versions of newspaper-length articles, tweets are one-liners. And as Gertrude Stein quipped, “literature is not remarks”. I like to get the benefit of people’s reasoned opinions, not their spontaneous outbursts.

Twitter feels distancing even as it connects me to others.

I think the main positive benefit of Twitter – promoting weak social bonds between loosely connected groups- actually allows people to maintain their space and reduces real intimacy. In this great article about the parallels between behaviors like friending and more ancient forms of oral communication, cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch notes that there’s a “fundamental distance” to social networks. “That distance makes it safe for people to connect through weak ties where they can have the appearance of a connection because it’s safe.”

With Twitter, each of us shouts into the void to the community at large, rather than taking the risk of speaking directly to one another. Tweets, if you can consider them personal communications at all, are a declaration of existence rather than an invitation to engage in a conversation.

If we are to buy into Wesch’s “fundamental distance” theory of social networks and Cornes’ three-part analysis, the game’s up. I know I’m tempted to buy it. Where are you in this debate?

courtesy of Twumble

BTW, I started “playing around” with Tumblr last week. Like Ning, it’s an impressive offering. I just don’t know how much more active I need to be online. Not much more, is what I’m thinking.