Jack Dorsey is no longer a day-to-day executive at Twitter, but he used to be CEO of the microblogging service and is widely credited with coming up with the idea for brokering 140-character status updates. Those updates, in turn, now carry a large amount of local news and commentary of which papers like the Chronicle, which is losing circulation and money most months, were once the main suppliers.

Which is why it's more than a touch ironic that Dorsey is leasing space in the Chronicle building for his new credit-card processing startup Square. Joining him will be two tech "incubators" that promise to nurture technology as disruptive as Twitter. This is sort of like renting space inside your body for one of those creatures from Alien. It will explode out of your stomach and devour you someday. Look out, Chronicle!

[via BayNewser]

(Pic by Esther Dyson)

The most "polite" thing about Rob Thomas' snub of the president was probably the way he tweeted it years later for maximum humiliation.

Tech entrepreneur Jack Dorsey hearts Twitter. Whoever invented that thing deserves mad props.

Jennifer 8. Lee may work for the New York Times, but her sometime Googler-boyfriend Craig Silverstein actually prefers the bagels in Montreal. A lot. Fact checking is called for, clearly.

Judging from this posting at Overheard Newsroom, there's at least one reporter out there whose pitches are WAY more engrossing than yours. Or whose blowjobs are WAY worse. Either way.

Sarah Silverman might be depressed, but at least she started a cool Twitter-tag meme.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

Shown a picture from psychologist Carl Jung's newly unsealed "Red Book," Twitter chairman Jack Dorsey said, according to the Wall Street Journal, that it "made him think of a map. He talked about his childhood fascination with maps, which eventually spurred him to learn about computer programming so that he could create maps on a computer. He later created a company that dispatched taxis and couriers via the Web." (More in the an excerpt from a WSJ video, above, or full video, below.)

An observer, though, might have thought not of maps but of Twitter. Co-founder Biz Stone has repeatedly said the service's text limits give it "low cognitive load" that "lowers the barrier, and it gets people communicating." Sounds a lot like free association, or the free form journal-ing Jung did in his Red Book. Is Twitter a way to tap the collective unconscious and thus unify humanity? Perhaps.

But the results of micoblogging could be more nefarious. Jung warned that his Red Book scribblings contained an ingredient of insanity:

"The reason... [this] looks very much like a psychosis is that the patient is integrating the same fantasy-material to which the insane person has fallen victim because he cannot integrate it but is swallowed up by it."

Perhaps that's a new slogan for Twitter: It's all good fun until you get "swallowed up by it" and turn psychotic from huffing your own fumes.

There was chatter in recent months the bi-coastal Dorsey (pictured) might plant his forthcoming venture in his second home base, New York, or even in his childhood home of St. Louis ("St. Louis will play a very large part in its story," he said of the startup last month).

But we hear Dorsey's been hunting for office space in San Francisco, Twitter's stomping grounds. He's hinted at as much on his Twitter stream: "I think we just found awesome office space," he wrote, just a couple of hours before he was "standing outside the... office" of SF-based Zendesk.

Dorsey's new startup is in "stealth mode." Since that's just Valleyspeak for being coy, we still know plenty about the company: it would enable person-to-person electronic payments via iPhone, MG Siegler wrote in TechCrunch this past spring, and the company has been awaiting regulatory approval, according to the St. Louis Business Journal.



It's a good idea; in fact programmer Max Levchin created the same capability for the Palm Pilot, the iPhone's old ancestor, before he and his co-founders expanded the idea into the financially successful internet-wide payment system PayPal.

So why is Dorsey framing his payments company as a new iteration of his old microblogging startup Twitter, of which he remains chairman? Dorsey told a St. Louis audience his company would have "similar ideas" as Twitter but "in a completely different industry," according to Nick Lucchesi of the Riverfront Times alt weekly. Is Dorsey hinting at additional publishing capabilities no one knows about yet?

More likely, the man who has said he would "never leave Twitter" is just extracting some free hype from a brand that clearly remains his baby, as far as Dorsey is concerned. In this regard, the prototype Twitterer thus remains the quintessential Twitterer: always self promoting.

(Pic by Esther Dyson)

Jack Dorsey, the nominal (read: unemployed) chairman of Twitter, posted about meeting with Iraqi president Jalal Talabani in his palace — which would give anyone opposed to changing the world 140 characters at a time a good bead on his location. Dorsey posted a photograph of Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman, who in turn lensed Wired scribe Steven Levy in protective gear. Meanwhile, Howcast CEO Jason Liebman boosted international relations by misspelling Talabani's name.

Perhaps to stay in the good graces of their State Department protectors, they've also started to assiduously suck up to their official hosts. Anyone who wants to monitor their Twitter transmissions can do so by using their official "iraqtech" tag. Way to make it convenient for the bad guys to keep tabs on you, Web 2.0 dudes!

Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman:

Wired writer Steven Levy:

(Photos by rbc, jack, and heif )

The State Department has released the list of minor players traveling to the country to share their thoughts on "how new technologies can be used to build local capacity, foster greater transparency and accountability, build upon anti-corruption efforts, promote critical thinking in the classroom, scale-up civil society, and further empower local entities and individuals by providing the tools for network building":

• Jason Liebman, CEO-Founder, Howcast
• David Nassar, VP, Blue State Digital
• Scott Heiferman, CEO, MeetUp
• Raanan Bar-Cohen, VP, Automattic/WordPress
• Richard Robbins, Director of Social Innovation, AT&T
• Jack Dorsey, Chairman-Founder, Twitter
• Kannan Pashupathy, Director of International Engineering Operations, Google
• Ahmad Hamzawi, Head of Engineering, Middle East/North Africa, Google
• Hunter Walk, Head of Product Development, YouTube
• Steven Levy, Senior Writer, Wired Magazine

Is this a joke? It sounds like the State Department rounded up all the people who couldn't even qualify to go to Social Web Foo Camp in the woods of Sebastopol, Calif. last weekend. (For example: Jack Dorsey, Twitter's "chairman," has time on his hands after being fired as the comapny's CEO.) In other words, we're hardly sending our best and brightest. Save for the misplaced Levy, a talented writer whose job we do not envy. How will he turn this gang of second stringers into the heroes of a Wired feature?

(Photo by AP)

The house news came as an afterthought in a first-person New York Times profile of how Williams came to run the fast-growing Internet message-broadcasting service, which some 6 million people use to blurt out 140-character updates to anonymous strangers online.

Also shortchanged in the profile: His spouse, who has gone by the unduly drab name of Sara Williams since they wed in 2007. The two met at Google, and one could argue that she's been far more important to his subsequent success than the Google shares he got. All that we're told about her:

My wife, Sara, a designer, keeps me balanced. We're building a modern house that we hope will be done by 2010. The design is a challenge - that's why she's in charge.

The cliché is that opposites attract, and the Williamses certainly fit the part: Awkward Midwestern farm boy meets chic Mexican-Japanese-Chinese designer; scatterbrained nerd meets detail-oriented perfectionist.

Read how Williams describes his first company:

We figured out how to create Web sites, but I didn't want to work on other people's projects. I had no business running a company at that time because I hadn't worked at a real company. I didn't know how to deal with people, I lacked focus, and I had no discipline. I'd start new projects without finishing old ones, and I didn't keep track of money. I lost a lot of it, including what my father had invested, and I ended up owing the I.R.S. because I hadn't paid payroll taxes. I made a lot of employees mad.

His second company, Pyra Labs, which gave birth to Blogger, was no better. In the wake of the dotcom bust, Williams ended up running Blogger by himself, with a trail of exasperated employees left behind him. That he managed to rebuild it, hire more people, and sell the mess to Google was a miracle.

Twitter, too, suffered because of a bad management decision Williams made: Appointing bike-messenger fanboy Jack Dorsey as the service's CEO.

Not that we're convinced Williams, who fired Dorsey and took his post last year, is a better choice. The company still has no source of revenues. Investors wink and tell the business press that they know exactly how Twitter will make money. (What they really mean, but will never say: By selling itself to Facebook, Google, or some other sucker.)

We have a better idea for who should run Twitter, if it has any hopes of being a serious business: Sara Morishige Williams. Her sole public involvement with the company was an eight-month stint designing Twitter's new office. But her professional background is in human resources, an area where Twitter could obviously use help. (Remember the incident where a clueless Twitter employee broadcasted the names of 186 rejected job applicants?) As Williams himself admits, he can barely cope with email. Sara's LinkedIn profile details how she scheduled 45 interviews a week, and a former coworker gushes:

She is dedicated, commited, detail-oriented, pro-active and fun to work with. She easily commands the respect of peers and is able to communicate effectively senior management.

If not CEO, why not make her chief operating officer at least? Let her mind the details Williams is so obviously loathe to handle while he hobnobs with Ivanka Trump at the White House. In perfect seriousness, it makes no sense to have her spending time designing the couple's house when Williams's business so obviously — no, desperately — requires a ground-up rebuild.

(Photo by evhead)

'Twas always thus. Twitter was never really a company; it was a feature invented at another forgotten startup, spun off into its own venture. The programmer who came up with the idea for Twitter, Jack Dorsey, was named CEO, while Twitter's better-known backer, Ev Williams, a Webhead who struck it rich by selling Blogger to Google five years ago, dithered about how much he wanted to be involved.

Despite Williams' seeming indifference, Twitter took off — so much so that a crush of new users strained its servers, to the point that the service became famous for its technical incompetence. (The "fail whale," a cheery cetacean icon displayed when Twitter's website was unavailable, now appears on T-shirts in San Francisco and Brooklyn.)

In its business affairs, too, Twitter is proving incompetent. Most Web 2.0 startups run cheaply, but Twitter faces large bills from cell-phone companies which charge it for forwarding text messages to cell phones; the more it grows, the more it pays. And it has yet to announce publicly a way to make money.

That's not to say it doesn't have a scheme. The latest one we've heard floated: Twitter would charge companies to have verified Twitter feeds, so users would know that a message from, say, ExxonMobil really came from the oil company. (It's not as hypothetical as it sounds; a Twitter user inexplicably impersonated ExxonMobil this summer.) Verified accounts might then pay Twitter for every message they send, and also get prominent listing in a Twitter directory.

If that sounds like utter nonsense, the fever-dream imaginings of a desperate business-development executive high on whiteboard-marker fumes, that's because it is.

With no real hope of making money on its own, Twitter's best hope is a buyout. But its executives have handled that poorly, too. Dorsey botched talks with Yahoo and then Facebook; he didn't even tell his own board of directors he was talking to Facebook about a proposed $500 million acquisition. After that, he was fired as CEO and replaced by Williams, but stayed on as chairman, a nominal job which doesn't require his presence at the Twitter office. One prominent Silicon Valley investor is fuming that Dorsey is still on the payroll at all.

This Mickey Mouse operation is the future of news? That's not the most frightening prospect. Even if Twitter were competently run and profitable, the end result is an unreadable jumble. Look closely at the coverage, if you can call it that, of the Mumbai attacks on Twitter. Sitting at their desks in the U.S., most people had nothing to add except to observe that Mumbai used to be called Bombay — the kind of message that makes you wish Twitter's length limit was zero characters, not 140.

As more users join, the Twitter feed becomes filled with more and more noise; repetitive retweetings, back-scratching praise, and self-congratulation. A set of amateurs celebrating each other not for the quality or insight of their reporting, but its brevity, swiftness, and modish form of delivery. You read it here on first. Unless you heard about it on Twitter.

For example, it doesn't even allude to the company's office drama; cofounder Biz Stone subs in as spokesman for new CEO Ev Williams. It also skips over Twitter's latest privacy violation, which even affected the author of the piece.

But it does, in a roundabout way, get at the heart of Twitter's problem: The tool for posting short text updates can be useful for businesses — just not Twitter itself. Cofounder Biz Stone suggests the company may find a way to charge business customers for "premium services." A great idea. If only it had tried it a year ago, before the market crisis made such a move look desperate, rather than a bold experiment. (Photo by Getty Images)

"This has nothing to do with the economy," Fred Wilson, a partner at Twitter investor Union Square Ventures, told The Deal. True enough — but it does have to do with Dorsey's incompetence. One industry insider says he botched several acquisition offers — one by nattering on about his original idea for Twitter as a messaging service for ambulance drivers and bicycle couriers, an idea he still wanted to pursue after a Twitter acquisition.

Williams is the guy who sold Blogger to Google. Everyone wants to hear from him, not some software engineer he hired. Dorsey is now "chairman," which is Valleyspeak for "founder we don't know what to do with."

1. Robert Scoble
2. Michael Arrington
3. Jack Dorsey
4. Biz Stone
5. Matt Cutts
6. Pete Cashmore
7. Dave Winer
8. Guy Kawasaki
9. Loïc Le Meur
10. Kevin Rose
11. Merlin Mann
12. Stowe Boyd
13. Jeff Atwood
14. Jeremiah Owyang
15. Veronica Belmont
16. Kara Swisher
17. Scott Beale
18. Marc Andreessen
19. Ryan Block
20. David Sifry
21. Emily Chang
22. Om Malik
23. Timothy Ferriss
24. Nick Douglas
25. John Battelle
26. David Cohn
27. Louis Gray
28. Tom Foremski
29. Tim O'Reilly
30. Ariel Waldman
31. Matt Mullenweg
32. Dean Takahashi
33. Philip Kaplan
34. JD Lasica
35. Sarah Lacy
36. Brian Solis
37. Charlene Li
38. Rafe Needleman
39. Dan Farber
40. Howard Rheingold
41. David McClure
42. Margaret Mason
43. Jason Goldman
44. Leah Culver
45. Chris Shipley
46. Jackson West
47. Liz Gannes
48. Owen Thomas
49. Adeo Ressi
50. Max Levchin

(Photo from Michael Arrington)

But it's clear they're talking about Cook, who they identify, rather insultingly, as "a former systems administrator." The post brags about "a recently enhanced staff of amazing systems engineers formerly of Google, IBM, and other high-profile technology companies." That, too, is an obvious dig at Cook, who's mostly worked at startups.

But the friend of Blaine who emailed us about Twitter's outage puts the blame on an "operations guy" at Twitter, whom he describes as a "fucking moron." He writes:

The whole story is that it takes more than just Blaine to keep Twitter up and running and whether servers are up, properly configured and not running hot definitely doesn't fall under the developers' responsibilities.

The other part of the dispute was whether Twitter needed to be rewritten in another programming language. Perhaps, but that wasn't the real issue in scaling, according to the Cook camp.

We're utterly unqualified to evaluate the technical arguments here. But the back-channel badmouthing that's going on here? We're experts at that, and we rate it utterly delicious. As fingerpointing goes, this Twitter battle takes the prize.

Waldman's complaint: Using a (now-offline) anonymous Twitter account, @confess, a user called Waldman a "crack-whore," and mockingly congratulated her for having "graduated to soft-core lesbian porn!" When Waldman asked Twitter's team to warn or remove the user, founder Jack Dorsey declined, on the grounds that "we've reviewed the matter and decided it's not in our best interest to get involved." Waldman believes Twitter owes it to their community to do just that, and got them involved instead.

She took the dispute to her blog, instantly become a cause célèbre — with 700 comments, 2,000 Diggs, and a raging debate on customer-service discussion board Get Satisfaction.

As CNET's Caroline McCarthy observed, "in the bubble-like culture of Web 2.0, Waldman is a sort of celebrity — and with celebrity comes scrutiny and often ugly commentary." Attention magnifies attention. Now Waldman's an even larger public figure, and therefore target — and sure enough, she's been called a whore a whole lot more after the incident than before.

Being called a "whore" online is one thing, but being called one in connection with one's search results? This may be Waldman's deeper gripe. "Anyone can use Twitter to consistently harass you and ruin search results for your identity," she writes. Twitter enjoys a stratospheric rank in Google's search results, making it a favorite in the world of social media marketers — the world in which Waldman works. But the spat has only strengthened the associations between Waldman's good name and the bad ones she's been called, from the all-powerful Google algorithm's point of view.

For a few, this reporter included, getting the mantle of "whore" tossed atop one's search results might be a value add, but for most, it's a detractor from the business at hand. What hurts Waldman as much as the misogynist namecalling is that potential business partners will see a social-media expert who's bad-mouthing a rival service to shame it into managing her online reputation for her.

(Photo by adactio)

Payne and company fixed the problem, the developer wrote, by increased the API rate limit and disallowing unauthenticated requests to the API. Which means they widened the door into Twitter's database, but installed a more careful bouncer to review who wanted in. Eventually, Twitter got a bit faster. Perhaps it's a good thing Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey never made it into this year's keynote. He might have gotten booed off the stage.