Twitter Makes Dad a Star, Son Fields Book Deals

It involves whining about a sandwich

(NEWSER) - How to be an ace tweeter? Megan Garber at the Atlantic pores over a new study and starts her lesson with what not to do. This would be "The Most Annoying Tweet Imaginable":

• "BREAKING: Last week I had a #sandwich that was SO HORRIBLE, it made me want to #scream. Seriously, why can't they make better #sandwiches?"

It's up to parents to insist on civil disagreement: Ruth Marcus

(NEWSER) - There's something wrong with a world in which Emma Sullivan , the 18-year-old high school student who refused to apologize to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback after tweeting that he "sucked," is turned into a "heroine of the liberal blogosphere," writes Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post —adding that Sullivan should be glad she's not Marcus' daughter, because Marcus would have made her apologize and taken away her smartphone. Sure, Sullivan has First Amendment rights, but "parents are not bound by constitutional constraints." More»

You can't have 'meaningful interaction' in 140 characters

(NEWSER) - Call him a rebel, but Farhad Manjoo wants Twitter to double the number of characters allowed in a tweet. To many users, that’s sacrilege. But on Twitter’s fifth anniversary, “the 140-character limit feels less like a feature than a big, obvious bug,” Manjoo writes on Slate . “Forcing people to shrink their updates to 140 characters prevents meaningful interaction between users, short-circuits conversations, and turns otherwise straightforward thoughts into a bewildering jumble of txtese.” More»

Twitter tries and fails to take down another celebrity

(NEWSER) - Bill Cosby is not dead, despite what you might have read on the Internet this afternoon. In fact, the 73-year-old comedy legend is alive, well, and making up words on Twitter, reports WPIX . Using a term he created after a similar false alarm in February, he tweeted today, "Again, I'm rebutalling rumors about my demise." He added , "Emotional friends have called about this misinformation. To the people behind the foolishness, I’m not sure you see how upsetting this is." To learn more about things the web has actually killed, click here . More»

Observer pokes fun at Times ' Twitter story

(NEWSER) - The New York Times forbids the word "tweet" (in the Twitter sense) from its pages, as the Awl noted a while back. So when the paper wrote a story about LeBron James' doings on Twitter, the New York Observer wondered how in the world it would manage. Here are some tweet euphemisms it found in the story: "added a post," "chimed in," "wrote," "posted," "added his opinion," "had a question," and "professed great insight." But nobody at any point actually "tweeted." More»