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Twitter pressed a button tonight, and not just the one marked "Kill." They sent two wakeup calls to their users:
2. We will kill your use of Twitter if it suits us. Just when people were starting to think that Twitter could be used for serious stuff, you know -- like news, and revolutions.
Now this one tweet from ABC's Jake Tapper puts it all in perspective. "Twitter killed my ubertwitter." He got the subject and object of that correct, and the verb. What if, just saying -- one of the revolutionaries in Cairo or Bahrain or Tripoli was using UberTwitter or Twidroid. Not impossible you know. What if they went to send a message, one that might save lives, and found out that Twitter had shut them off. Mark Suster, a venture capitalist, commenting on Quora says: "As a long-time user of UberTwitter I find this kind of platform behavior offensive. Not as a VC or as somebody who loves Twitter and always has. But as a user of a product Twitter chose to punish. It sure would have been nicer on your users if you issued a public warning and had given them 72 hours to respond. Who you fucked was me. Your loyal user." |
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When Amazon kicked WikiLeaks off, without adequate explanation, they did far more damage to their own rep than they did to WikiLeaks. Everyone knew WikiLeaks is a hot potato. What we didn't know is how little heat it would take Amazon to dump one of their customers. It would be one thing to stand up to repeated court orders and finally cave. But in this case, there wasn't even a judgment against WikiLeaks. They kicked them off because it suited them. And that killed Amazon as an environment for journalism. RIght there. If they ever want to get that back they have a lot of explaining to do. 