Please send this to anyone in areas affected by Gustav who is NOT familiar with “social media.” PLEASE DON’T JUST BLOG ABOUT IT! Many people have already left their Internet connections. Try to SMS a summary of this information to them, or call them.

If you have (or want to make) any media contacts, please spread the word so they can pass it along to local residents, shelters, etc.

All messages received at the “gustavhelp” or “gustavsafe” Twitter accounts will be re-posted for public viewing at http://gustavtracker.appspot.com.

PLEASE follow this public page if you are in a position to help. Notices may also be posted manually through this site.

IF YOU NEED HELP:

SMS JOIN GUSTAVHELP to 40404 (you only need to do this once)

Send as many messages as you need to, but you must start each message with d gustavhelp

Include as much information as you can (how to find/reach you), but remember these messages are public. Do not hesitate to ask for any kind of help if you need it!

EXAMPLE: d gustavhelp Mary Smith on roof 1322 Magnolia St New Orleans help

EXAMPLE: d gustavhelp Joe Biffen 555-555-5555 need a place for my horse near 123 Anywhere St New Orleans

IF YOU ARE SAFE:

SMS JOIN GUSTAVSAFE to 40404 (you only need to do this once)

Send as many messages as you need to, but you must start each message with d gustavsafe

Include as much information as you can, but remember these messages are public.

EXAMPLE: d gustavsafe John Deveraux and family are safe (cats too!) in Kentucky

Dear Twitter,

I was one of your earliest adopters and have been one of your top supporters for a long time now. When others complained during your (endless) downtime, I was there with tweets of encouragement, determined to withstand the hard times with you.

No more.

Twitter has given me a lot: a job, a wonderful boyfriend, and an amazing community, to name a few. I want to give back. But these days, I feel like I’m enabling a drug addict. (A Summize search for “abusive + Twitter” yields multiple pages likening you to an abusive partner.) You need someone to give it to you straight, so here it is.

We don’t need you.

We’re sticking around and eating out of your fridge while we wait for one of your competitors to iron out enough kinks to make for a stable jump. Relative to our relationship with you, the bar is pretty darn low.

Your attempts at “communicating” with your audience have been met with some praise. The people giving that praise are “nice” people. You don’t want to listen to them, because they’ll tell you what you want to hear so you’ll like them back. Me, I am not nice, and I’ll tell you that the more you open your mouths, the worse you make it for yourselves. I’ve been silent up until now, but the day I lost faith in your team was the day I watched your Scoble video interview and it hit me that you have NO IDEA what you are doing.

Ev, specifically: I’ve heard stories of you sleeping under your desk and not knowing where your next meal was coming from during the last dot-com bust. These stories made me respect you, because you knew how hard things could be, and this experience must make you a stronger, wiser person. I don’t know you personally, but I have a gut feeling that you are better than this. Speak up! DO SOMETHING! Or, acknowledge what’s happened and walk away now.

As far as I’m concerned, Twitter, you basically spit in my face and are laughing about it. If my company was in crisis, I’d be living at the office until things turned around. All your Twitter streams seem to tell me is that you’re doing anything but working. The fact that you openly tweet about your not-work pretty much boggles my mind.

So, you’re a free service, and you don’t owe us anything. Fair enough. But you have to monetize somehow, and you’re obviously building your user base to the size where you can profit via advertising to the masses. If you screw us over before you even START monetizing the site, we are all going to leave before you make a penny in profit. Any Business 101 text would suggest this is poor business practice.

Fucking over your developers - and I believe you’ve screwed over every single last one of them, at this point - only makes this worse. Why should they come back to you? How can they trust you will not pull the API out from under their feet again, whenever you damn well feel like it?

Not only that, but you have limited access to OUR OWN DATA by not letting me go back more than 20 pages. Knowing you, you probably deleted it by accident and neglected to ever make a backup. That’s not acceptable, just like Plaxo can’t take away 95% of your address book and expect us to be OK with it. Your endless sidebar - “We’re working to restore IM services to all users. Thanks for your patience!” - just makes me angry now, because if you were really working on it, it would have been done. Months ago. You seem to think you live in a magic world that no one else can possibly understand. You are wrong. You are not the first company to need to scale.

I’m still staying on Twitter, for now, because that’s where my friends are, and I would put up with a lot for my friends. But have no fantasies that I’m not poised to jump the very second a ship comes along. And then I will sing that new ship’s praises from the highest mountain.

You still have a chance, Twitter. The new boat hasn’t come yet (but it’s close). Get your act together. Make some promises, and do not allow yourselves to break them under ANY circumstances. Unless you do this reallyreally soon, I will not be maintaining a pro-Twitter blog (notice our recent silence? It was not because we were too busy.) and I won’t be telling everyone I meet about you, like I used to. Building trust will take time, but if you act right now, you might be able to save yourself.

Good luck.

Marina

Before, if your tweet was over 140 characters, Twitter would tell you exactly how many characters over the line you were.

If it said “-2″ you’d know you had to eliminate two characters before you could send your tweet.

Now, it just says TOO LONG:

I miss the old way — now i have to guess as to how much I need to shorten my tweet.

What do you think?

Twitter headquarters:

Via: the Next Web

Twitter had a fun Valentine’s Day surprise for us!

Type the following message:

@TheirTwitterHandle <3

and a special heart message is displayed.

Clearly we had fun with it:

Twitter may be hard to define, but just about anyone could have done a better job than this article that appeared in The New York Times today.

Sure, it’s amusing to those of us who are already regular Twitter users, but it explained very little about Twitter for someone unfamiliar with the service. This could have been an amazing opportunity to reach a whole new audience, and that opportunity was completely wasted.

If anyone you know mentions that they read the article, please take a moment to try to explain to them what Twitter’s really about, lest they think we’re all loons tweeting about what we’re going to eat for dinner (and nothing else).

If it helps, you could also point them to our article on how to define Twitter.