What if you were a criminal President? 

President Bush wants to give the phone companies immunity.

Who would you like to give immunity to?

What crimes are you willing to excuse?

Putting outages to good use 

If you're a regular user of Twitter you're probably quite familiar with this image.

They've tried lots of variants, making it funny, or cute, with pictures of LOL Cats, doing cute things with screw drivers, but the pictures aren't funny for long, the more you see them, the more tiresome they get.

Then I had an idea they could be used for a good cause.

Yeah that does it!

How to get Twitter to declare your love 

Those little devils who keep the gears turning inside the Twitter machine added a toy that's got the community sending public love missives whizzing around. You can figure it out yourself, or you can cheat and read this howto.

@lovelyperson <3

Substitute the name of your lover in place of "lovelyperson" and you've just broadcast your love to all of TwitterLand.

While we're on the subject of Twitter, a couple of other items.

1. A must-read piece in today's NY Times, gives a clue why kids don't go for Twitter if their parents use it. No kid wants to be observed by his or her parents. Would they go for it if their parents weren't there? No one knows.

2. Conventional wisdom says you can't build a scalable distributed Twitter out of RSS. At first I accepted this, as a puzzle, then I remembered that's why we put the cloud element in there. I felt that for some applications polling would be too much. Since the cloud element has been largely ignored, most of the the apps of RSS couldn't scale to do what Twitter does. But if RSS desktop apps like NetNewsWire or FeedDemon were adapted to understand the cloud element, and if a proxy system was worked out to get through firewalls and NAT, it might just work.

3. Or you could use XMPP.