Here's how The Twitter World Works, according to Kaus: Twitter needs celebrities on its service to attract millions of new users every month or quarter or whatever. Celebrities, in turn need adoring fans, but (key point) have very fragile egos. So Kaus suspects Twitter of keeping a secret team of interns in a back room somewhere, poring over the massive stream of tweets directed at celebrities, and deleting the mean nasty tweets from search.twitter.com. The offending tweets still appear on Twitter, but won't show up in search results.

Kaus knows this because he tweeted something mean about CNN president Jon Klein, and it never showed up in Twitter search. Plus, in Kaus' experience, searches on celebrity names "almost invariably turn up... pleasant comments." Pretty ironclad. Ahem.

But you know what? The conspiracy might just be real. (Cue sinister music.) Here's a chummy little conversation between Twitter CEO/co-founder Ev Williams (pictured above, left, with celebrity tweeter Michael Stipe) and known celebrity Alyssa Milano talking about Kaus' conspiracy theory. She called it "interesting," followed by Ev's slick — too slick! — non-denial denial of Kaus' allegations.

Williams could have knocked down Kaus' conspiracy allegations by simply saying "that's absurd" or somesuch. But he didn't. Now we're actually kind of intrigued, at Kaus' seemingly crackpot ideas. Tell us it ain't so, Twitter people. Or better yet confirm, preferably with a picture of your secret cabal of celebrity gladhanders.

(Top pic: via Ev Williams)

The Obama administration just announced a new cloud-computing initiative. It claims it merely wants to streamline $75 billion in federal IT spending. So what's with the "mind mapping" component of the plan? And why so cozy with Google?

The "mind mapping" software is listed under "productivity apps" on the cloud computing initiative's website. Glenn Beck, call your office! To paint the president as a socialist big brother, a monster computer "cloud" that centralizes sensitive government information and is deeply interested in your brain is a boon.

Especially when it is tied, however loosely, to that all-seeing corporate eye in Mountain View, California, Google Inc. Google is the leading proponent of cloud computing, in which shrink-wrapped PC software (like, say, Outlook) is replaced with Web applications (like, say, GMail). In fact, NASA Ames CIO Chris Kemp, who is in charge of NASA's cloud computing program, has quoted Google's CEO as an inspiration for it. NASA Ames is where today's federal announcement is being made, so presumably Kemp's work is now spreading.

It seems likely Google will be on hand for the announcement: NASA has announced that "top Silicon Valley information technology leaders are scheduled to attend," and, besides, adjoining Moffett Federal Airfield is where top Googlers park their private jets, per arrangement with NASA. Google cronies at private zeppelin company Airship Ventures are also allowed use of the field. Kemp, in turn, has apparently used a Google jet for NASA "meteor hunting," and heralded the release of high-resolution NASA imagery for use on moon.google.com (see 9/17 entry here). He has also hosted "VIP guests," including from the Silicon Valley tech scene, at a space shuttle launch.

This must all seem, no doubt, perfectly innocent to Kemp, who is steeped in the startup world. The 31-year-old worked as chief architect at Classmates.com before being "pushed aside" as co-founder of vacation rental broker Escapia and detouring into the public sector. But amid the increasingly paranoid partisan rancor of Washington, DC, the Obama Administration's "mind mapping" cloud computing plans and ties to Google will inevitably be re-marketed on the distinctly irrational market that is national politics.

(Top image via, second pic via)

Like the current movie-star governor, the carefully-shellacked San Francisco mayor makes the Golden State's gubernatorial race feel surreal in a "fruits and nuts" way that competitors like ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman and even former hippie governor Jerry Brown just can't. This is the guy whose press secretary jokes merrily about weed, and who recently had the gall to tell the New York Times that his affair with his friend's wife was "much more benign than [things] actually appeared in print."

The blog I Love You Gavin Newsom claims that City Hall and campaign sources say Newsom will quit the governor's race, probably in the fall, since he's anywhere from 9 to 29 points behind Brown in the polls. On the other hand, Newsom is rumored to be getting an endorsement from former president Bill Clinton, and I Love You Gavin Newsom has proven a touch too conspiracy minded in the past (we sympathize!). So let's hope they're wrong on this, if only because we might otherwise have to draft Gary Coleman to run again.

Today in the Washington Post, Howard Kurtz writes that there's an "emerging consensus" that Murdoch and Brill are leading the way to the future, in which people pay to read news on the Web. The only trouble: Whichever publishers are first to charge for content will be first to see their Web traffic drop — like 90% — if they wall off everything to just subscribers. Especially if their competitors don't also erect their own paywalls. It could be catastrophic for smaller brands who wall off their content while everyone stays free.

Antitrust law prohibits the dying newspaper industry from coordinating pricing, so publishers must trust one another's public pronouncements on payment policies. Right now that means taking Murdoch and Brill at their word, a prospect that should send chills up publishers' spines. We'll be no more surprised when Murdoch reverses himself on this than we were when he broke his promises to the Bancroft family after taking over their Wall Street Journal.

In a blog post, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone writes that the attacks are ongoing and "massively coordinated," but declined to elaborate, because then he'd have to kill you. Actually no, it's because he didn't want to "engage in speculative discussion." But a Georgian blogger is happy to speculate; he says it's totally the Russian regime.

The blogger, known as "Cyxymu," has been outspoken in his criticism of Russian tactics in the war over the disputed region of South Ossetia. Facebook's chief of security tells CNET (via Business Insider) that Cyxymu is the target of the denial of service attack on Facebook and Twitter yesterday and today. The blogger has accounts on both services, as well as on LiveJournal, Blogger and YouTube. Google, which operates the latter two, told CNET its systems "prevented substantive impact to our services," so we still have the keyboard cat.

First the subs off our coast, now Twitter attacks. How will the Russians vaguely annoy us next? Satellite TV jamming? Attack the iPhone app store?

(Pics via)

After leaving Microsoft, Myhrvold went into the patent business. His Intellectual Ventures works like this: Buy up patents, then use them to bludgeon large tech companies into forking over fees or making investments in Intellectual Ventures.

In the course of his short career, Zuckerberg, as a tipster reminded us, has accumulated a nice array of patents. They're related, as you might guess, to social networking and digital media. Could he use them against his rivals via Myhrvold, raising some money for Facebook in the process?

Given the interlocking web of interests a young Silicon Valley company like Facebook must weigh, the answer is likely to sound familiar to any user of the social network: It's complicated.

Twitter, while much smaller than Facebook, competes with the social network in encouraging users to post short "status updates," no matter how banal and meaningless. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg loves Twitter. In fact, he loves Twitter so much he tried to marry it. After Twitter rejected a $500 million offer, he set about copying its look. That effort led to a disastrous redesign about which Facebook users (and employees) are still griping.

Hence the conspiracy theories. Facebook has a Twitter app which takes updates from the service and reposts them on users' profiles, and numerous third-party software applications post updates simultaneously to Facebook and Twitter. Some mechanism responsible for the crossposting seems to be broken, however. A tipster writes:

Rumors on Facebook that Facebook intentionally killed its Twitter application late last night, so that Twitter now doesn't show up in anyone's Profile or Home Page. Jealousy? Revenge?

How about human error? The systems behind these simple-looking sites are increasingly complicated, and at Facebook, almost any engineer can release new code to the site in as little as an hour. If Facebook is trying to displace Twitter, then it has every interest in coaxing Twitter users to share their updates on Facebook, too, rather than driving them away. Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

Update: Actually, Twitter says it's all its fault, maybe! Aw, that's no fun.

Every time Zuckerberg skips town, bad things happen at Facebook. Is it because he doesn't want to be seen as the bad guy as his former comrades in arms leave the company? We're not saying Facebook employees should worry every time they see the boss surfing Expedia. But we are wondering if this isn't a trend.

Tip to the Z-Man: don't go overboard at Oktoberfest.

(Photo by cpthook)

Microsoft flirted with acquiring Overture, but Bill Gates ultimately nixed the deal. Instead, Yahoo CEO Terry Semel bought the company, launching it into the paid-search business in competition with Google, which had been contesting Overture's patent. The companies ultimately settled and Google agreed to license the patent, but the terms of the settlement were murky. Tellingly, Google's SEC filings mentioned that the license was "fully paid" and "perpetual", but not, as is usually done in such licenses, irrevocable.

Could Yahoo — or Microsoft, if it succeeds in acquiring Yahoo or Yahoo's search business — revoke Google's license, and thereby put billions of dollars at risk? Unless the companies reveal the terms of the agreement, we won't know. It doesn't seem plausible that Google executives would risk massive fraud lawsuits by hiding such a big vulnerability.

But it certainly explains why Microsoft keeps making a run at Yahoo — and why Yahoo insists it's undervalued. But would Steve Ballmer really offer $45 billion of Microsoft shareholders' money to destroy a rival? That's the one part of this outré theory that really fits.

(Photo by emigh)