Twitter Tries to Get Real, Trades In CEO

Social networking site has no long-term viability: Friedman

(NEWSER) - Jon Friedman doesn’t really like Twitter, he writes for MarketWatch. He thinks the 140-character cap keeps Tweets superficial—which is why Ashton Kutcher loves it. It proved useful for Iranian protesters, but for those of us in relatively stable countries, Friedman agrees with blogger Jon Taplin: "Twitter has no business model," Taplin said. "It's a fad. They come and go." More»

Winner will live in California, Tweet about wine

(NEWSER) - Hardy Wallace recently lost his job—but he’ll soon be making $10,000 a month promoting Murphy-Goode winery on the Web, as the winner of the much-touted “Really Goode Job,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The Atlantan, who has a wine blog and has taken sommelier education courses, was first in line at the recruitment drive and says, “I was trying to get this job before there was this job.” More»

(NEWSER) - A California winery has a tempting offer for tech-savvy oenophiles, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The Murphy-Goode Winery will set up the right candidate with a $10,000-a-month job at its Sonoma County HQ blogging and Twittering about, well, wine. The 6-month gig includes room and board; the 2-month hiring process is expected to draw 10,000 applicants and is already yielding good PR. More»

From police updates to serializing novel, aficionados find innovative new uses

(NEWSER) - Don't write off Twitter as a mere time-wasting self-promotion toy, David Chartier writes in Ars Technica. Users have adapted the microblogging tool to business, government, and even art, pushing 140-character posts beyond "what I had for lunch today." Some innovative Twitter accounts include Comcast, which tracks customer service issues, and an Arizona police department that reports important bulletins in real time. More»

Like other new media, site beefs up brain if used wisely

(NEWSER) - It's fashionable to cry about how Twitter and other new forms of electronic media are making us intellectually lazy and downright stupid. In fact, the opposite is true, writes Harvard's Steven Pinker. "Don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google," he writes. "It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate." More»