"VC qanon" and the radicalization of the tech tycoons Today, in the New York Times, Paul Krugman shares a key insight that his headline editor summarizes as The Rich Are Crazier Than You and Me . While this is tr...
The tech tycoon martyrdom charade I've been saying this for a few years now, but it's worth recording here for the record: It's impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech CEOs an...
How you could build a search that the fediverse would welcome Mastodon and the fediverse are clearly taking off, bringing in millions of new users, and also organically inspiring a wave of technical innovation that dwarfs...
The content moderation battle is a failure of innovation If a company is debating whether a user's account should be suspended, they've already failed to build a modern platform that follows best practices. Why are t...
Community Safety and Ignoring the World Security reports from other sites are welcome. Why aren’t safety reports? One of the most fundamental triumphs of the last few decades of open source culture...
Verifiably True After a pause of a few years, Twitter announced today that they're going to resume allowing any user to request the blue verification checkmark for their acc...
Every Day is a Follow Friday In the early days of Twitter, there was a pleasingly low-tech tradition called "follow friday" (which people later denoted with the #FF hashtag), whe...
A Personal Digital Reset About once a year, I do a little digital reset to help make my online life a little more pleasant. I’m not advocating that anybody do the same as me, but I h...
A Federal Blue Checkmark, and Not Learning Lessons People are wrong on the Internet every day; generally I don’t try to fuss about that too much. But when Sam Lessin, a former VP of Product Management at Facebo...
Unfollowing Everybody At this point, there's nothing novel about noticing that social media is often toxic and stressful. But even aside from those concerns, our social networks are...
A billion dollar gift for Twitter Jack asked us for ideas on how to fix Twitter. A coherent plan for fixing Twitter would make millions of people happier, and pick up a billion dollars in marke...
The lost infrastructure of social media. More than a decade ago, the earliest era of blogging provided a set of separate but related technologies that helped the nascent form thrive. Today, most have...
The Internet of Tweets Everybody’s got advice on what Twitter needs to do at its current crossroads. The answer might lie in revisiting the moment they first broke geeks’ hearts....
Nobody Famous What it’s like to have the social network of a celebrity, without actually being famous I’ve got more Twitter followers than you. I’ve got more Twitter follo...
"The goal is to make you act like less of a jerk online." There’s an oddness to working on a project that most people don’t (yet) understand. And the last year (or years!) of working on ThinkUp has definitely been p...
(Twitter) Famous! What a delight to be interviewed by Bijan Stephens for Vanity Fair , especially as so much of the focus was on me as a dad and a person, rather than just the...
A checklist of stupid things men will say when they find out I only retweet women I wrote a bit about why I only retweet women . As an exercise, let’s guess what stupid things I’ll hear in response! If we check off all these items, then we’...
What I Learned From Twitter's Leaders [This piece was originally written for CNN on the occasion of Twitter’s IPO.] The Internet is buzzing with news of Twitter’s initial public offering on Thu...
ThinkUp and What the Web Can Be I spend so much time writing, and thinking, about technology and tech companies. And so much of it’s critical. I point the finger at how the apps and sites we...
What It's Like Being Verified on Twitter Update: After this post was published, I had a chance to talk about Twitter verification at a live show of the Untitled Kondabolu Brothers Project, with Hari...
All Dashboards Should be Feeds Last week, we announced the new beta release of ThinkUp (if you’re a geek or developer, try it out!) and one of the reasons I was most excited to talk about...
Monument of Self-Regard and Links I sure do like talking to people! Here’s some recent conversations: MIT Tech Review offered up A Twitter Tweak or a Revolution in Online Discourse? as a...
Temple of Ego and Links Oh, hello there! I didn’t see you come in. Well, as long as you’re here, let’s look at some links around the web that I’ve found to be related to what we’ve be...
What Twitter's API Announcement Could Have Said A few years ago, I wrote about the Law of Fail : Once a web community has decided to dislike a person, topic, or idea, the conversation will shift from critic...
Why Your Complaint About Twitter Is Wrong I know I usually try to be a thoughtful tech writer, but sometimes, holy shit you guys. Twitter, because of their API, actually was a real-time protocol to...
Expert Labs Ends and ThinkUp Begins Back in 2009, I founded Expert Labs based on the idea that technology could help all of us better engage with our government and encourage policy makers to l...
Bootstrap Rising Twitter’s Bootstrap framework for creating web sites and apps is the culmination of half a decade’s work by the web design community in creating CSS resets,...
If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault We’re twenty years in to this world wide web thing. Today, I myself celebrate twelve years of writing this blog. And yet those of us who love this medium, who’...
All In Favor By request , a bit of explanation of how and why I favorite things on the internet. (Or favor them. Or like them. Whatever.) First, where do I favorite? On...
Apple's Twitter I’ve been waiting a year for someone to write about this, but my laziness has not yet paid off, so here are a few things that we all know about everybody’s fav...
Your Twitter Ranking Article Is Wrong Here are some articles that have recently gotten attention amongst media obsessives. They are all fundamentally flawed: A list of the Top 25 newspapers on...
Your Whole Life In One Tweet There’s an odd tendency in web culture to see all features as obvious, even inevitable. While most of the artifacts of our computing experience have been inven...
My Media, It Is So Rich In my blog here, I’m mostly a textual dude. I’ve made a few little video clips or animated .gifs over the years, but basically, I’m a writer. But today, today!...
Twitter, Transclusion and Trust The new Twitter is here! The new Twitter is here! Besides sowing discontent in our household by giving me access to the new user interface before my wife’s acc...
Know Your Shit: Ten Years of Twitter Ads Last week, Twitter announced its new advertising system , called promoted tweets. I was at Twitter’s Chirp conference as a speaker, so I got an up-close loo...
Suggested User List Ideas A few weeks ago when I started writing about what it’s like to be on Twitter’s suggested user list and the fact that nobody has a million followers on Twitt...
Nobody Has A Million Twitter Followers Last week, I wrote a bit about what it’s like to be on Twitter’s suggested user list . The response to that post has been really gratifying, and I wanted to s...
The Twitter API is Finished. Now What? Update: We’ve got some results already! Joseph Scott at Automattic mentions in the comments that he’s added RSD support for the Twitter API to WordPress.co...
Yo Mama's So Fat... I’ve long been a fan of playing the dozens , as is to be expected from anyone who loves language. Last night, in a fit of my usual insanity, I thought it’d be...
Consider Twitter The sign of success in social software is when your community does something you didn’t expect. It’s easy to be cynical about new sites, especially when...