We. Are. What. They. Are. Going. To. Sell.  

When people say they don't know what Twitter's business model is they're being silly. They know. We all know. "Let us reason together," a US President once said.

They call it User Generated Content. We're the users. What do we do? Generate. What do we generate? Content. We're like the bacteria that make beer or yogurt. You put in the basic ingredients and out the other end comes content! It's cooool.

It all came to me last night while I was sitting in a theater watching a really bad movie, a remake of a totally excellent BBC mini-series. You can tell it was bad because instead of being wrapped up in the plot or studying how they crafted the movie, I was trying to figure out how they got me in the theater. They got me in with celebrity hype. There were two great stars in the movie. I thought it would be great. I was wrong! I bought two tickets, they got $20 from me, and we walked out it was so bad. (In one scene Mirren walks off stage saying "Fuck you very much," which I thought was a perfect summation of the movie.)

Someday, probably very soon, a movie studio is going to rent Twitter for 24 hours to do a special event for their movie. On that day 1/4 of the tweets you see will be about how great the movie is. You think you'll quit, and maybe you will, but a lot of people will think it's cool and they'll buy the product. Marketers love that kind of stuff. They pay big bucks for it.

So if you think that having a lot of celebrities doesn't have anything to do with you, you're wrong. The point of celebrities is they say things that everyone hears. That's what makes them celebrities. You may not want to hear it but they're going to say it anyway and in the end you are going to hear it, like it or not.

One more thing. You may groan when you hear Christmas music. But you hear it anyway. They own you for 1/3 of the year. And when you get to be my age, it's so bad that I find I'm humming Christmas songs all year round. In April I find myself singing "City sidewalks, busy sidewalsk, dressed in hoilday style. In the air there's a feeling of Christmas." And if you read that sentence, you're singing it too.

Kurt Vonnegut described a novel-within-a-novel, Now It Can Be Told by Kilgore Trout, in which the main character is the only real human and everyone else is a robot sent to test him. It's a possibility I have considered.

Doing my part to help revive the economy 

Once again I have some money burning a hole in my pocket and I want to blow some (of course) on electronic gadgetry. And, as always, I turn to the readers of this blog for advice.

1. Is there a Linux or Windows equivalent of the Mac Mini? A headless, keyboardless, mouseless computer that doesn't cost too much, that isn't made by Apple. I already have three Mac Mini's, I love them, but I find myself interested in, even lusting for, an Asus EeeBox. Have you tried it? Do you like it? Any other choices?

2. For the same application, I've been thinking about getting a gamer platform, with a really fast CPU and lots of RAM. (An aside, the application is processing lots of text, which involves relatively little net traffic and doesn't require a persistent IP address. No need to pay Amazon $90 per month when I could buy a cheap computer for $300 and be done with it.)

3. I bought a Panasonic wifi webcam a couple of years ago, and it was pretty good, but it stopped working (maybe dropping it a few times had something to do with that). I want the same functionality without the wifi. I'm looking for Mac software that samples the built-in camera every minute and saves the result to a file. From there, I can write scripts to push it where I want it to go. Surprised to see this functionality isn't something Apple provides, but near as I can tell, they don't.

4. Still thinking about getting the FlipCam. That was the thing I didn't buy last time I tried to kickstart the economy. (Update: I ordered the FlipCam today.)