Rev2.org

We must live in the 21st Century.  Johnathan Schwartz, now the former CEO of Sun Microsystems, resigned from his post last night by tweeting a Haiku.  His resignation is the final step in the total absorption of Sun into Oracle, which purchased Sun last week.

This is Schwartz’s tweet, the first-ever resignation by Twitter from a Fortune 200 company CEO:

An interesting way to resign, for sure, but some of Sun’s former employees and critics have rebuttals.  Eric Savitz at Barrons found this one from a Yahoo! forum, which is quite funny:

Sorry, Jonathan / Don’t blame the economy / Blame poor leadership

The ponytailed CEO had an interesting career as the leader of Sun.  He was kind of a love or hate figure, with people galvanized on both sides of the spectrum. Most believe that his initiative to move Sun from paid to open source software with revenues focused instead on the hardware around the software is what finally sunk the company into sell-off.  The scheme, while innovative, appears to have not been well thought out or executed.

Schwartz was also very fond of social media, blogging regularly and tweeting often.  In fact, originally his resignation was explained via his blog and the above tweet was sent as his last gesture as Sun’s CEO.  When most chief executives are loathe to expose themselves to any kind of ridicule or possible lawsuits, this one took the opposite approach and welcomed an open style of management.

Whatever you think of his management and leadership style, one thing that Jonathan Schwartz has that has to be respected is his embracing of social media and outreach.  He’s one of the few CEOs to have used it as a public relations tool without it coming off as a stiff-necked marketing stunt.

Amanda Bonnen didn’t mean to tweet her way to anything. In fact, she wasn’t even really a Twitter user, compared to many of us who tweet daily and RT hourly. When she sent the tweet that landed her in a cesspool of litigation, in fact, she had only 20 followers, was following 29 herself, and barely tweeted even once a day.

That didn’t matter to Horizon Realty, however. When Bonnen sent her ill-fated ill-fated tweet to her 20 followers on May 12th, she had no idea that each of those people was worth $2,500 in damages to Horizon. Not long after she’d sent that tweet, she was hit with a $50,000 lawsuit for it.

Given those numbers, I’m potentially worth millions…

Amanda’s tweet in question?

To a friend: “You should just come anyway. Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.”

According to the news item in the Chicago Sun-Times, the realty company filed the $50,000 lawsuit for libel and damages at the Cook County Circuit Court. The now-defunct @abonnen user name was listed as an “alias” for Amanda Bonnen in the suit.

The apartment in question, in case you want to avoid it, is in Chicago. I suspect that by now, it’s the focus of a shrine to Bonnen’s potential losses.  Perhaps it should also be a shrine to the new loss of freedom on Twitter that this could mean. Personally if I didn’t want people to know about the alleged issues in the apartment, I would have avoided a public lawsuit that disclosed the exact location of the apartment in question.  All they did is enable millions around the world to become aware of issues with their properties instead of the few people this tenant told.  They should sue themselves for the billions it probably relates to, in regards to the amount of eyes that have now come to see the address.  Sometimes I wonder if people think things through.  Not only will people avoid the building now, but they will avoid this real estate company, based upon their reactions.

Think about that.  If this company wins the lawsuit, how will that affect how you or I tweet?  Will we be as likely to say things openly?  Could this destroy Twitter as we know it?  Something to think about, anyway.

The whole thing  is summed up in Mr. Michael’s sentiment to the Sun-Times:

“We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization.”

Indeed.

Back in February, TechCrunch published an article titled Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data to the RIAA? That story was the subject of short, but intense debate.  Last.fm vehemently denied the accusation that they’d given up user information to the Recording Industry Association of America.  The core of the debate, however, seemed to center around the inability of CBS and Last.fm to get their stories straight and in synch.

Friday evening, TechCrunch published a follow up titled Deny This, Last.fm in which Michael Arrington claims that another source inside Last.fm has confirmed the handoff of user information from Last.fm to CBS and subsequently to RIAA.  For what the data would be used for is anyone’s guess, but the story has a few holes on both sides of the fence.

TechCrunch chose to publish the story on a Friday, late in the afternoon, before a long, holiday weekend.  Then, on Saturday, posted a second piece to lambast the official response from Last.fm, written by one of their lead developers, Russ Garrett.  The official, hurried, response was not very carefully worded, but given the circumstances, this could be understandable.

The issue is about user privacy, which is a hot-button issue amongst those of us who spend the bulk of our lives online.  This is compounded by the even hotter-button issue of RIAA and how they treat user privacy and the civil litigation system like their own exclusive playground.  With these two issues at hand and the potential to do serious damage to a fledgling company’s reputation, I think a little more tact with the timing of their post would have been in order.

As someone who publishes online myself, I understand the compelling need to “get the scoop” or put the information out there as quickly as possible.  Sometimes, however, this needs to be tempered by some consideration for the situation at hand.  It’s not likely anything would have been lost had TechCrunch waited until Tuesday morning to publish their story.

Another issue is with the source of the story itself: an unnamed employee of Last.fm.  While anonymous sources aren’t unheard of in the journalistic enterprise, they are also too easily fabricated–either by the journalist or the source.  Any reader should be heavy with the salt if the only source for a story is anonymous.  In my mind, this is another reason TechCrunch should have waited to publish.

In the end, the story will play out and probably be very similar to the February brouhaha.  This time, however, it will be exacerbated by the story’s dissemination (largely one-sided) over the long weekend.

As the story plays out, it should be interesting to note two things: how CBS responds to the issue and, more importantly, how the user information that could have (illegally) been transferred to RIAA would be useful to them.  Given that what is purported to have been passed along is actually publically-available on Last.fm already.

Yesterday might have been worth writing on the Twitter calendar as the worst day in Twitstory.  So far, anyway.  With the way this company faux’s like Biden at a press conference, it’s only a matter of time and opportunity for it to happen again.

Here’s the run-down on events: Twitter takes away a feature, the Twitterverse goes ballistic and hashes like #bringbacktheat and #fixittwit get popular, then Twitter brings a halfway solution for the feature back, the press has a field day ripping Twitter apart, and then Twitter posts a blog to make it all better.  All while the service has its usual up-and-down time throughout the day.

Honestly, we’re getting used to spotty service connections from Twitter now–it’s part of the little app’s ambiance. Nothing says “Twitaholic” like sending a Tweet to say that Twitter is down.  Really, the lag and spotty down-time is sort of like Twitter’s Marilyn Monroe beauty mark.  Think about it.

Anyway, back on subject.  So the change that caused all this grief was the way replies were handled.  Before the change, everything you typed into Twitter and sent went to everyone on your list (unless it was a direct message).  So if someone sent you something and you replied, your reply (along with that person’s @ddress) went out to all of your followers.

Twitter changed that so that those not following the person you replied to wouldn’t receive the reply.  In an obvious way, this makes sense.  Threaded conversations are already a problem on Twitter and seeing only half of one makes life difficult if you hope to keep up with what’s being said.  On the other hand, it turns out, a lot of people used those replies to click and check out the person they don’t know (the @name).  This lead to community networking.

Here’s the really strange part: you had the option in your Twitter settings to set this for yourself and the auto-seeing of replies to people you don’t follow was just the default.  Twitter was really removing an option.  Nobody likes that.

Any Web developer with any experience will tell you: people love options and if you take away their choices, they get angry.  Twitter has now learned that the hard way.

On Twitter’s side of the story, though, the questions get tougher.  First, they claim that the change was because of some technical reasons that the setting had to be rebuilt or scrapped.  This, after the company had waffled about the situation to start with.  The final blog post from Twitter on the subject was a capitulation to angry Tweeps.

TechCrunch makes a lot of good points on why this was handled badly, how it should have (probably) been handled, and what Twitter should have known from recent events involving Facebook and others.  I agree with them.

Definitely one of the worst 24 hours in Twitter’s history… so far.  One thing about Twitter is for sure: they’ve certainly proven themselves to be capable of dropping the bowling ball on their own foot repeatedly.  Usually in public too.

Two weeks ago, MySpace’s owner, the News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch), dropped Myspace founder Chris DeWolfe and brought in Owen Van Natta of Facebook fame. This was a move meant to revamp the company and restore its popularity.

You see, Van Natta’s former employer is growing by leaps and bounds, adding new users at a breakneck rate. MySpace, meanwhile, is losing users nearly as fast as Facebook is gaining them. Most of the readers here at Rev2 probably realize why: MySpace has become the hangout for little kids, brainless “adults,” and plugin game freaks. If you currently have a Myspace profile, it’s probably as vacant as the Kmart parking lot.

So what’s the problem with MySpace?

Well, according to Stelter and Arango of the New York Times, it’s slow innovation and a failure to meet Murdoch’s revenue goals. This despite 130 million users globally every month.

Fox Interactive Media, which controls MySpace for News Corp, showed losses accross the board last year, so maybe blaming MySpace for all of it is a little extreme.

It appears to me that the reason MySpace is getting the negative attention here is two-fold: most of us could care less if MySpace goes under and Facebook has surpassed MySpace as King of the Social Network Mountain. The fact that MySpace users are disappearing is obvious to anyone who watches these things.

Source: TechCrunch.com

Trend analysts are also showing that most of MySpace’s users are teenagers under 25 with an annual income under $25,000. For websites seeking ad revenue, that’s almost bottom of the barrel there.

Whatever the plans over at MySpace, Van Natta is keeping mum on them (so far). My guess would be better targeting towards their primary user base: so expect to see MySpace get heavier with ads for bands, music, and gaming gear.

At least they stopped running those crappy weight loss ads.

Times, they are a changin’ for Mac users.  Fans of Mac systems have been relatively virus and trojan-free, since most malicious programmers usually aim their sights on PCs and Windows.  Symantec’s Kevin Haley, director of security response, says, “The bad guys generally go toward the biggest target, what will get them the biggest bang for their buck.”  CNN points out “Mac computers are known for their near-immunity to malicious computer programs that plague PCs.”

Apple enjoyed relative obscurity, with the number of personal computer systems being predominantly PCs.  That seems to have changed now, though, with small, but growing numbers of malware targeting Macs.

The big one in the news now is a trojan horse program called iBotnet, which has infected only a few thousand Mac machines so far.  It’s a relatively benign trojan, though, but represents a growing trend of Mac-specific viruses, trojans, and worms.

Symantec detailed iBotnet in Virus Bulletin’s January edition.  The company still promotes that Macs are generally not threatened by malicious software, so long as reasonable precautions are taken. iBotnet itself is a part of a pirated download of iWork.

Obviously, your Macintosh isn’t immune to malware and attack–nothing is.  But your Apple is a lot less likely to get a bite taken out of it by someone with evil intent than someone else’s Window will get broken by a virus.

Conversely, more limited, but direct attacks such as trojans and identity theft tools like keyloggers aimed at Mac users will occur more often than they have before, according to McAfee’s Cyberbrime and Online Threats assessment for 2009.  This is because users of Macs are generally more affluent, on average, than PC users.

So threats against Mac users are probably going to be on the rise.  If you aren’t using protection, most experts agree, you’re putting too much faith in the hope that your Mac won’t be a target.