Category Archives: mark my word: twitter will doom us all

Armageddon is here: Twitter is down and Fail Whale is not even there?!

I can’t believe I am saying this, but I wish Fail Whale will come back soon!

We miss you, Fail Whale! We will never been mean to you and call you names again! Just come back!! You are so much better than a lot of other scenarios, we have now realized!

So… by now you have heard, or tweeted, oh, no, NOT tweeted, but left frantic comments on Mashable.com or Techcrunch.com or other websites where Social Media lovers hang out, after they have tweeted and Facebooked their hearts out, but still have something more to say.

Mashable is keeping a tab on the impending doom of humanity through this post:

Facebook Down. Twitter Down. Social Media Meltdown.

Thanks to our friend with the impossibly high cheekbones (I will need to write a blog about these cheekbones one day. I wonder whether it can cut through a piece of tissue? And what’s up with the oh-so-appropriate and I-wish-my-dad-had-the-same last name, CASHMORE? Luck of the draw, I guess. But isn’t illegal in the cosmic sense to be lucky in both the departments of Cheekbones and Family Names?), we have been kept abreast with the development of Armageddon in the making:

Twitter Down Due to Denial of Service Attack (DDoS)

Now, my friend, is the time to panic!!!!!!! The sky is falling. The sky is falling!!

The sudden influx of Twitter refugees to Facebook site, wherelse are we going to post constant updates and complain about our frustrations that Twitter is DOWN, and also to strive to be the first ones to announce the DDoS attack on Twitter? has caused Facebook to go down as well.

The cyber terrorists could not have planned it better.

So now people, with their usual outlets having disappeared, have flocked to Mashable and Techcrunch to share their glib comments. On the one Techcrunch post, there are now more than 400 comments. And several Mashable posts dedicated to “Twitter Down!” have also received hundreds of comments. Most of them are like this:

“Yup. Still down.”

(Thank you very much. Otherwise I would not have been able to find out on my own!!!!)

It has also become a fun sport to ponder who the Cyber attacker(s) may be:

Hugo Chavez? Iran? The Vatican?

My bet is on The Birthers, who are mad as hell because we all made fun of them mercilessly on Twitter. (Even Ann Coulter made fun of them, which made me feel kind of sorry for Birthers…)

But without Twitter as the forum, AND without the appropriate HASHTAGS #TwitterDown #DOS #WHOISBEHINDTHIS #TWITTERDDOS, the “Who Done It” game is just NOT the same…

By now some of us have gotten a rude awakening: Just how much YOU ARE obsessed with Twitter. Like the required cup of morning coffee.

CAN’T — FUNCTION — WITHOUT — IT —

Speaking of coffee, I think I am heading downstairs to Starbucks so I can talk to random strangers about this new social phenomenon called “Life Without Twitter”… And also get myself a cup of coffee while I am at it.

p.s. F*ck it! I knew it! As soon as I clicked on “Publish Post”, Twitter came back. Great. Now I just seem more a dweeb than I actually already am by publishing this AFTER THE EFFECT. Stupid Twitter…

p.p.s. I take it back. I love you Twitter. Don’t ever leave me like that again, ok?

p.p.p.s. Ooops. No. Twitter is STILL down. Yes! … Oh. No. *sobs* Come back!

Wired article struck a cord and so I am copying and pasting the whole thing…

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Ok. I am not really going to do this. But I just want to do something about this article: Scott Brown’s “Gag Reflexes” in Wired (April 2009). The online edition has a longer title: “Scott Brown on Stand-Up Comedy, Lingua Franca of the Wired World” which sums up Mr. Brown’s theory.

Maybe crumple up the page and eat it. But I already promised my husband that I will refrain from wrinkling up any magazine pages before he’s done with them. (Ok. I am attempting to be funny here. If you read Mr. Brown article, you would understand why I feel exposed, caught in the act of trying to be funny. To earn more currency in this new economy…)

Is it wrong to want to quote an entire article really? Ok. Maybe not 100%. I don’t really care for the examples Mr. Brown gave to support his argument. But the insights sprinkled in-between, those struck a cord.

I am no writer, and I am too tired (not to mention lazy), and here is my journal (i.e. I will do what I damn please), so I am going to jott down sentences that particularly resonate with me, and be done with it: (Thank goodness for Ctrl + C & Ctrl + V !!)

“… everything is ‘material,’ and life is one big writer’s room, a massive clusterchuckle of witty one-upsmanship”

“More than that: Everyone must be funny. Because ‘funny’ is becoming a language unto itself, the lingua franca of the wired world.”

Always feel this way since I got hooked on Twitter. Sometimes it feels almost like a comedy show writers’ room, the pressure is on to be the next funniest. hence wisest, person in the Twitter stream that you can see.

“Humor saturates the infosphere, for at least two reasons: First, a successful joke implies insight, and insight, especially if it’s pithy and self-explanatory, is the basic currency of a high-speed information economy. Second, the fundamental tools and techniques of that economy—memory, annotation, contrast, collage—are also the fundamental tools of comedy.”

I absolutely agree with #1. Feeling grateful that someone actually voiced this murky concept so clearly in one single sentence. Everyone is a guru of life, and the shallow shall be deep again. Not so sure about #2 since those are the fundamental tools of storytelling, upon which human history has been, and will be, passed on. What we don’t see in the histories in the past is IRONY and self-awareness, imo, which, well, make intelligent comedies.

Moreover, it has always been my one belief that a great sense of humor indicates a great presence of intellect and tolerance.

And this final quote may sound like an accusation “Gotcha!”

“If the references are flying over your head, no worries: You can zip over to Wikipedia and be back in time for the punch line.”

Like I said, Google is Your Friend! Raise your hand if you have NEVER done this… Thankfully Mr. Brown provided hyperlinks to all the references he cited for the article.

There has been NO way for us common denizens to converse with celebrities. That is, until Twitter opened the door…

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This is Twitter’s stated mission (or designed usage) on its homepage:

“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

Here is my observation: most of the people are using Twitter, not to keep their social network updated with what they are doing, how boring would that be? but to keep track of what celebrities are doing in real life.

Because they are famous, anything they say seems to carry so much more significance. A one-word Tweet becomes some sort of cypher waiting for you to discover its higher meaning. Their random observations of life are so much more hilarious simply because they are famous — on the Internet, you cannot argue that it is funny because of the delivery. This is NOT Seinfeld. “Newman!”

(Speaking of Jerry Seinfeld. Did you hear that he is going to do a reality TV show about marriage? I bet he and his wife are happier than the lot of us because they have a 24-hour nanny…! So what would his advice be? Become really wealthy and then your marriage life would not be bogged down by arguments about who does more when and what…)

Rainn Wilson. MC Hammer. Luke Wilson. Elizabeth Banks. Jimmy Fallon. Neil Gaiman (he WAS already a celebrity in my household, now with the movie Coraline, he IS a celebrity…), LeVar Burton (of Star Trek fame, Yes, the cool blind dude!, and of Reading Rainbow, eh, fame), Shaq (yes, THE Shaq, under the moniker, The Real Shaq), and I am sure I probably miss quite a few. With some of them tweeting constantly. One cannot help but imagine Rainn Wilson tweeting on his BB in between takes of The Office. Does he show his Twitter stream to his co-stars? Do they suggest to him what he should tweet next? Do they laugh at clever responses back to @RainnWilson?

Yes, responses!

In the Twitterverse, you, apparently, are allowed to “Reply to” these celebrities’ Tweets. And if you are lucky, if your star shines on you, THEY may actually Tweet back @ you. This stuff is what dreams are made of. And the real stuff that the wet dreams are made of? That is when the stars FOLLOW you back.

Then you will be a made man (or woman). You have arrived in the Twitterverse.

Here is my brush with fame today with a 10-foot pole:

Wil Wheaton, Gordi in Stand by Me, and also of Star Trek fame, although he probably prefers to be known as one of the Geek gods, a published writer, and a celebrated blogger (see: The Geek Gods), lives in the Twitterverse (again, see: The Geek Gods).

In one of his hundreds’ of Tweets today, he gushes about The Onion:

“I love the Onion so much, I want to marry it!”

After I alerted The Onion about the raging endorsement, The Onion responded with a ringing rejection:

“America’s Finest News Source Politely Turns Down Marriage Proposal From @wilw”

(My seminal role in this comedic exchange can be proven by the timeline shown in the search result, and of course, this picture).

God, I am a loser…

Crowd sourcing to beat the market: the new tag “$” on Twitter

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Thanks to Wired, I know now what “$” and “#” mean in Twitter-nese. Yes, I am a N00b…

The enigmatic title “On Twitter, $ Is the New #” serves as a test: If you have to ask, I guess this is not meant for you…

I am ashamed to admit that I didn’t know about the search.twitter URL until I read the Wired blog. How handy. Now I know why so many Tweets had a “#” within them. Duh.

Vanity search-ers now have a new venue and new obsession also, I guess.

I like how Twitter is explained as a distributed social network rooter in SMS, yet larger than SMS:

“Though Twitter has roots in the world of text messaging, it’s a distributed network. Your tweets are broadcast, and what may feel like a one-to-one communication is actually one-to-many. This enormity of scale has made it easy for individual tweets to blossom into wide-reaching conversations, but it’s also made those conversations much more difficult to follow.”

So if you want to talk about a particular publicly traded company on Twitter, just add “$” in front of the company’s ticker, e.g. $GOOG. And a company is already utilizing this, or at least attempting to. The idea that Piqqem has is intriguing to say the least:

They have “urged Twitter users to adopt the dollar sign tag in order to help it keep track of how people on the web are feeling about a particular company’s stock. The plan is to use that data to beat the market and give more informed trading advice.” Sourcing the wisdom of the crowd.

It is going to be a very interesting experiment: stuff that researches and dissertations are made of, IF they survive long enough to get enough attention.

In addition, I am curious to see how many Twitter followers Piqqem has. As the writing of the Wired blog, there were 185. Now there are 190. No, 191, since I just followed them also.