A programmer sold his iPad abroad; a reporter auctioned his mom's iPad on eBay; and a media consultant ceremoniously reboxed his iPad. The Twitterati were saying goodbye to their not-so-magical Apple slates — or watching people who did.
A Twitter engineer said Google's new "Chrome" OS is something you resign yourself to; a CNET writer said it's something you are infected with; and Mediaite might hang out awkwardly on Tumblr with it. The Twitterati were ruthless.
Alex Payne, who manages Twitter's API, posted a thumbsucking essay on Tuesday titled The Internet's on Shaky Ground. Payne seems to have reverse-engineered blowhard New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's formula for a big-picture think piece: Take a self-contradictory slogan like "Worse Is Better." Lay out your case: The glorious past, the beautiful future, the crummy now. Don't advocate a specific solution, though. Say that a question remains. Ask that question. (Payne: "The question remains: What will it take to push us forward?") Then kick back and wait for Vint Cerf to show up and supply the actual details from memory. Did someone say the Internet was built on shaky ground? Cerf rolls his eyes in exasperation, but only two or three times max:
Tim O'Reilly's annual summer camp out on his Sonoma County estate, Foo Camp, is invite-only and a hot ticket in Valley circles. With a temporary helipad being built on the grounds one year for Larry Page to drop in on a gas-guzzling whirlybird, it gets more posh by the year. And according to Twitter's Alex Payne, maybe a little more debauched as well. In other words, it's beginning to sound more and more like the Valley's answer to nearby Bohemian Grove.
Twitter nearly downed Valleywag's liveblog of the Steve Jobs keynote yesterday at Macworld. And apparently we weren't the only ones affected. "We seem to be up at the moment, but we had a flood of traffic around the Macworld Keynote this morning," Twitter developer Alex Payne wrote in a Twitter-dedicated Google group yesterday during the speech.
