So where do you go when your site is out-of-order? Why, you go to the site of your chief competitor(s) of course:
During the outage, the company [i.e. Facebook] took to Twitter to acknowledge the situation and apologize for the inconvenience. [source]
You'd think these people had better things to spend their money on:
Facebook and Google size up takeover of Twitter: report(Reuters) - Google Inc and Facebook Inc, plus others, have held low level takeover talks with Twitter that give the Internet sensation a value as high as $10 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Sites like Twitter come in and out of fashion all the time. $10 billion bucks? Can you say, 'MySpace'?
You know, as someone living in the city who doesn't drive a car, I've been feeling kind of left out lately with all this talk about 'Cash for Clunkers'. Who should run to the rescue but local furniture retailer Walter E. Smithe?
In a pretty funny commercial I just heard on WBBM radio, they announced they were offering cash discounts of several hundred dollars on new purchases if you bring in your old couch or armoire.
As store owner Walter Smithe explained in this comment to Furniture World:
"While not everyone has a clunker car, almost everyone has at least one piece of clunker furniture they'd like to replace with something nicer. This is a great opportunity for consumers to trade their old furniture for new furniture."
The clever company even has a twitter account where the latest tweet is about -- what else -- their 'Cash for Clunkers' deal!
It doesn't get any more ephemeral than this: you pop a sentence about what you're doing at the moment in a box and then go back to whatever you were doing.
Who'd bother, you ask? Even more, who'd bother to read it all?
Well, apparently quite a few people. It's called 'Twitter' and it's really taking off. Ev Williams, original creator of Blogger.com, dumped Odeo just to concentrate on this. Now it seems everyone's doing it. Here's the Twitter account of John Edwards, Democratic Candidate for President.
Over the weekend a guide came out called, "The Several Habits of Wildly Successful Twitter Users".
If being a "wildly successful twitter user" matters to you, I recommend you read the piece. Then get yourself an account and tell us what you're doing in 140 characters or less. Here's my own modest attempt...
