“God only knows what [Facebook is] doing to our children’s brains.”

Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook:

“I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and … it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

Gosh, I bet he’s keeping the millions of dollars he personally made off of all this, though, isn’t he?

“Twitter isn’t your audience. It’s your community.”

Andrew Mayne for Hidden Frequency:

[…] It’s easy to tell the difference: The guy on stage at the concert is in front of his audience. The people in the stands are in their community. When the concert is over the audience vanishes but the community continues; with or without the man on stage.

The stage metaphor is a bit strained, but this is similar to my own philosophy on Twitter and other social media sites. Unless you have millions of followers, treating Twitter like a broadcast medium means you miss most of what it’s good for.

“What’s The Twitshirt Thing?”

Twitshirt launched yesterday (16 April 2009) and provide a service that I’m sure many people would/will give their patronage to: The printing of individual tweets on t-shirts, on-demand. Since the t-shirt is the defining medium of this generation, and vanity publishing is in full vogue, it only makes sense that a business model which combines the two could succeed, and handily. They kinda fucked it up, though.

The problem: Twitshirt did not ask permission to sell the words of the authors of the tweets they printed. The author could opt-out, but that is at best a poor solution. It, without question, should be opt-in.

Today Twitshirt.com is down with a message saying, “We’ve heard your feedback-thank you. We’re reversing the polarity.”

Admitting one is wrong is not an easy thing to do, especially in public. Hopefully a relaunched Twitshirt will do what it should’ve in the first place: ask.