First of all, yes, it is a slow news day. Typically, I don’t take my news queues from Techcrunch, particularly when it has to do with pop-culture reporting. Still, a post there regarding an odd choice by new-Twitterer Conan O’Brien is worthy of note. Conan O’Brien, as you know, was forced out of late night television some time back. We talked here a bit about the prospect of him taking his act online, but we were thinking in terms of an online video show. As it turns out, he’s decided to simply take his act to Twitter. Since then, he hasn’t followed anyone back, despite having amassed well north of half a million followers in a few short days … that is until today. About two hours ago, Conan said: “I've decided to follow so

People like to talk about disruption but sometimes some people misunderstand the power of disruptive technologies. I've had companies tell me: "Yes, we know we are in danger of disruption but we see it, we can adapt, we can change and take advantage of it." Good luck. Even when you can see the train wreck ahead. You will likely slam right into it. Disruptive technologies disrupt. Technologies are not called "disruptive" just for the sake of it. Niki Scevak, a serial entrepreneur, writing over at Bronte Media, has a nice analysis of AOL versus Yahoo. He says that AOL, under Tim Armstrong and his team, has a more realistic understanding of the advertising markets, and where things are headed. Carol Bartz, who I am

When Google discovered it had been hacked it quickly pointed the finger at sophisticated hackers acting on behalf of the Chinese government and vowed to hit back by stopping censoring its search results in China. But was Google really the victim of highly expert Chinese hackers? Nick Farrell, on TechEye, reports that it could have been the work of amateurs. According to a new report from McAfee the Operation Aurora attack targeted the source code management systems of companies, allowing them to siphon source code as well as modify it. ... According to the paper, the hackers gained access to software configuration management systems (SCM), which could have allowed them to steal proprietary source code or surreptitiously make cha

On today, the day of Twitter’s 140th employee, I’m left wondering just how many of them really understand the nature of social media. I just caught Matthew Ingram’s post over at GigaOM on the latest in the “Twitter Epic Tweet scandal.” In case you missed it, the story thus is pretty succinctly summarized by Matthew: Alex Payne, a Twitter engineer, is shutting down his personal blog after a comment he posted on Twitter became the subject of a TechCrunch blog post and caused a minor firestorm among Twitter application developers and others involved with the company. The comment (which has since been deleted from Payne’s stream) referred to “some nifty site features” that had been implemented on the internal version

As we prepare to venture over to Austin for SXSWi I'm prepping my Android HTC Hero with all the latest geo-location apps to help me stay on top of all of the activities. Last year seemed to be about what was coming and this year seems be all about 'where we're at right now.' Yes, Gowalla, Foursquare, britekite, plancast and A/R apps are going to have a big week and be all over the news. Yes, we've seen this coming for awhile but we're here and we should take heed now. The world is closing in around us, our meta-data and our social graphs are getting packed in close. I'm all for discovering hidden communities, great eating establishments and tiny music stores when I'm on the road but I'm getting pulled in too many directions. If we're to s

Here is a letter from Twitter CoFounder Biz Stone.  I'm calling it the 'micro-updates' to communicate to their community.  This is a great sign on top of a good week where Twitter put the stake in the ground and firmly ratifies their commitment to developers. Message microupdate from @biz Biz Stone Hi there, In the early days of Twitter, I used to send out short updates just to keep everyone in the loop since so much was happening. It's been a while, but you signed up for short, monthly updates from Twitter so we thought it was time to start sharing more information. We've had quite a year. If you haven't visited in a while, we'd like to invite you to come have a look at http://twitter.com -- we've been busy! Growing Up In th

The big news of the morning is that Facebook was granted a patent (7,669,123) on their News Feed. Few people, though, have really analyzed what is covered by this patent.  To highlight the ridiculousness that I believe this patent to be (because we all know that Facebook was not the first to do this, nor should this patent have ever been approved), I’d like to go down the list and talk a bit about what it is they’re trying to say they came up with. As the patent, what is claimed to be original Facebook IP, and therefore not obviously implemented anywhere else is: “A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment…” Yes. No one has a news feed like this. Except they do.  Rather than list every feed o

If you're active at all on the location based status update sites like BrightKite or Foursquare, then you've more than likely heard about the Please Rob Me website. A good friend let me know about the site and he's stopped using both sites cold turkey. The gist of the site is that the folks behind the Please Rob Me site take all the updates from Foursquare and post them together in one place. The idea is that along with telling all our friends where we're at, we're also broadcasting to the worldwide public where we're not at that moment… at home. The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a

Irving Wladawsky-Berger has put together a good review of several studies and reports concerning business use of social networks: Why are so many companies reluctant to embrace social networking?  One of the articles in The Economist special report focused on this question - Yammering away at the office: a distraction or a bonus?  “An astonishing amount of time is being wasted on investigating the amount of time being wasted on social networks,” it provocatively starts out saying, and then adds:  “Studies regularly claim that the use of Twitter, Facebook and other such services poses a threat to corporate wealth.” Those worried about the use of social networks in business often mention their fear that staff mig

Can we stop quoting EPIC? I mean completely – just stop publishing anything the “Electronic Privacy Information Center” says, even when it’s a lawsuit against a well known tech giant? I know that the only time I ever bring them up in a post is to talk about how wrong they are.  I’ve never, ever supported a position they’ve held, which puts them in a similar category as Greenpeace and PETA, organizations that hold positions that sound good in theory, but in practice only ever say outrageous and untenable things. The latest bit of news is their strong disapproval (!!) of Google’s “bungled launch of Buzz,” as John Paczkowski at All Things Digital put it. “EPIC urges the Commission to investigate Google, determin