Twitter today announced it will prompt users to post by asking "What's happening?" rather than the old "What are you doing?" We asked a prominent linguist if this means anything. Turns out it does: Twitterers are no longer such loners.
Google finally dropped the "beta" label from GMail. A bit hasty, no? The product launched just half a decade ago; its inventor left Google barely 18 months back. Why the rush to commit?
The open secret about Google's forthcoming product "Wave" is that no one knows what the hell it does. Here's the tech gibberish the Guardian used to describe the software after talking to Google co-founder Sergey Brin:
Slate — never heard of it, I asked Paul and he says it's an online magazine for the Olds — is trying to figure out why Internet people like to say "fail." It's because they like to "express [their] schadenfreude out loud," and it's one syllable shorter than "failure." And here I was thinking it's because 4chan kiddies…
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — "That is not my presentation, although it would be very sexy if it were," said Ning CEO Gina Bianchini, as she took the stage at MIT's EmTech conference here, with someone else's Windows desktop blown up on a screen behind her. Alas, her presentation, a canned version of Ning's stump speech, was not…
Connected Ventures cofounder Zach Klein — the guy who spread a rumor that the Mormons were trying to buy Facebook — continues his stay in San Francisco. The latest phrase he's learned from the natives: "vesting in peace."
Yahoo's Aikido and Judo projects, briefly mentioned in a New York Times story, "are, in fact, yet another round of navel-gazing strategy overview efforts," Kara Swisher reports. Translation: more layoffs to come. [BoomTown]
When she's not boring shareholders silly, Yahoo president Sue Decker has been trying to beguile advertisers to buy a new form of online advertising: "nonguaranteed" ads. Her campaign started in earnest at an Internet Advertising Bureau conference in February; it continued in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.…
Back in March, very special correspondent Paul Boutin revealed that the Olds were derisively referring to the insular San Francisco clique of Web hipsters — the sort of people who Twitter about how they wish FriendFeed had a better Plurk API — as "the 250." After learning that 806 people tuned in to watch Kevin Rose…
Not long ago, an "unpublished" work was one that had never been published. Boing Boing comments moderator Teresa Nielsen Hayden unintentionally popularized a new meaning of the word when she used it to describe posts the Boingers had erased from their site: "We unpublished our own work. There's a big difference…
In what seems like another age, my predecessor once wrote about companies' "blogger appeasement groups" — units dedicated to generating buzz, not bucks. With Chad Dickerson leaving Yahoo Brickhouse, the troubled company's troubled incubator for new ideas, I think we can declare the delusion of blogger appeasement…
Last year, the lexicographers at dictionary maker Merriam-Webster proclaimed w00t its Word of the Year. For 2008, they've added fanboy, webinar, netroots, and pretexting to the lexicon. Who cares? I do, because I find Merriam's online dictionary, more consistent, more focused, and better written than its wikified open…
Yahoo is about to perform that dreaded big-tech-company maneuver, the "reorg." For you young-uns who don't get why reorg is such a scary word: Think massive layoffs, lost mortgages, and people like your parents with no back-to-school money for brats like you. Multiply by 10,000-plus. I can only wish a soft landing…
Metcalfe's Law, first forumlated by Robert Metcalfe, states that "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system." The problem is, that as actual humans connect, the number of people you can connect to instantly swells far past Dunbar's Number, or "The Rule…
"Tumblr is totally estrogen-y," blogger Jessica Gold Haralson told Silicon Alley Insider, explaining the heavy female presence at a party for the blogging startup. "If anything, it's a complete donutfest." "Donutfest" is the opposite of the far more common "sausagefest," which describes a heavily male event, such as…
CollegeHumor cofounder Ricky Van Veen has decided to short the word "douche."
The original is ok, but this edit is the best.
Commenter Matthew O'Ryan is on to us. He's noticed how a throwaway line has become our new catchphrase: "That seems easier." In an industry full of people who claim to be obsessed with efficiency, why do we have to keep explaining over and over the simple way to do things? Because Valley denizens secretly love doing…
From the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami: "Leah Culver is trying to coin the term 'social messaging' as a way to describe Pownce." I suppose that's better than "social massaging."
A tipster writes of the cuts at Yahoo: "Maria Hinge, the VP for emerging European markets, got laid off on Friday. She's credited with rolling out services in Turkey, Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic. However, her reports always thought she was more adept at 'rolling' with the European management team." Come on,…
