If ever you're tempted by such an offer...

...you deserve what you get: bought friends* with zero investment in you.

Seen on.

---

*Probably just robots, actually, mixed with a couple of mercenary guys that nobody can make any sense of.

I Guess Now We Know What *I'm* All About.

Full results here. Get your own thread examined on TweetPsych.

Tim Burton's Cadavre Exquis

Alongside the Toronto International Film Festival, Tim Burton's inviting users to play a game of Tweet-based Cadavre Exquis. As Len Kendall (photo credit) says here, "it's dark and stylish" - typical of Burton's work. (Consider the Willy Wonka remake with that slightly traumatising, but decidedly Dahlish, dentist dad interlude.)



Cadavre Exquis, French for "Exquisite Cadaver," is a parlor game where a person starts a story and others continue the thread until it arrives at a conclusion. You may remember that Rhea Scott did something similar with filmmakers in '08 to promote her production firm, Little Minx.

Burton's story revolves around Stainboy and his investigation of a mysterious and slightly animorphic goo. If you're clever and slightly insane (our favourite kind), make like the director and dig into the deep, unexpected places where tales twist perversely. One such mind is plenty, but paired with the contributions of a few thousand...? We can't wait to see what gets dug out.

Help spin the yarn at BurtonStory.com. Note that Tweets must contain the hashtag #burtonstory.

The effort is a promotion for the Tim Burton exhibition which originally appeared in New York's MoMA. It'll be opening at the Toronto International Film Festival building, downtown in the aforementioned city, this Friday. Don't miss it! No guarantee that your 140 characters of fame are going to be incorporated in a Stainboy movie, though.

Next: WORLD DOMINATION.

Via my darling Milan.

Twitter's Long-Awaited Ad Strategy.

How often is it that the thing we've all been waiting for turns out to be exactly as imaginative as all the other things we already hate have?

Fairly often, I guess.

(In response to the secondary question still only half-formed in your mind: "pertussis" is whopping cough. You can still get that? Maybe they changed the name so people wouldn't automatically think about The Consumption.)

Breaking Twitter Etiquette

Chelsi: i twittered about you

Me: I just retweeted it even though that's a douche move

Chelsi: it's okay, you're drunk

Me: that merits a blog post!

Chelsi: cheers!

By way of explaining this behaviour, Le Web's wiped me out and I'll need two days alone, and gallons of wine, to recover. Also, I'm reading a copy of The Lovely Bones, which I won't say is bad, but which I'm not proud to admit I'm using as post-geekout therapy, either.

The Race to Own Real-Time Search...

...begins and ends in 24 hours, more or less.

Shortly after Microsoft is said to have inked a liaison to incorporate Twitter and Facebook updates into Bing, Google announces a similar deal with Twitter.

Success and usefulness of either will depend on how they decide to present that living breathing gangbang of real-time data. Can't wait to see how it pans out.

Interesting though how no one has yet come up with a freeform (and indexable) way to share thoughts in real-time that can viably compete with Twitter. I guess that's part of what Google's trying to do with Wave, but can't say for sure as I don't have it yet. (*scowls*)

ad:tech London: Hashtags for Today's Auditorium Sessions

Hallo, folks. Rough start today; the party at the Kensington Roof Gardens last night was chill, long-lasting and laced with vodka. As a result, attendance this morning is thin and slightly haggard.

But for the valiant, some good news: wifi is now available in the main auditorium. That means more people can participate in the Twitter orgy. (*does a little dance*)

I'll be livetweeting a few sessions today: Trends & Predictions 2.0, What Makes Young People Tick Online?, and The Shifting Rules of Engagement in Digital.

Here are the hashtags for auditorium-based events this morning and afternoon, in the event you want to either join the conversation or start one.

o Keynote Presentation: A trip to the future... #at09future

o TRENDS AND PREDICTIONS 2.0: Interpreting global market trends to forecast the future for your business & community. #at09trends

o WHAT MAKES YOUNG PEOPLE TICK ONLINE? Engage youth audiences with meaningful dialogue, relevant content and targeted incentives. #at09youth

o JARGON-FREE APPROACH TO TARGETING: Right person, time, message, place. Sounds simple – so how’s it achieved? #at09target

o KEYNOTE: Loyalty, transparency, conversations and giving a damn! #at09loyalty

o CREATIVITY IN DIGITAL: Featuring Match.com and Playboy. How match.com remains the brand of choice for people looking for love. #at09matchplay

o THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN CONSUMER DIALOGUE: Blogs, UGC and communities – how are they changing the way people engage online? #at09engage

If you just want to lurk, visit search.twitter.com and run a search for the hashtags you want. Also be sure to check out #adtechlondon, an ongoing stream of what everybody's seeing, doing and selling.

ad:tech London: Wedding Organization to Engagement, and Vice-Versa

This week I'm in the city of Big Ben for ad:tech London, which kicked off this morning with a keynote by Managing Partner Thomas Gensemer of Blue State Digital, who explained -- as much as he could in a 30 minute space -- what keys to success characterized the Obama campaign.

This particular ad:tech is unique because we're trying something new and scary: livetweeting a number of the presentations. A feature called Picture on Picture enables us to broadcast three projections at once: a video projection of the session, the presentation (if panelists have any PowerPoints) and a dedicated window for the Twitter feed.

Each presentation has its own hashtag, which you can find in the ad:tech programme and which enables us to separate panel-specific tweets from general #adtechlondon tweets. For example, here's the material from the Obama keynote.

The cool thing about this experiment:

o It's new territory for ad:tech, an attempt to reap practical real-time application from a tool that's captured the imagination of both brand folks and citizen users.

o You can see commentary while the speaker is presenting, enabling you to catch things you missed and also input feedback if you think a given point is exceptional or total crap. (Seriously. The ad:tech folks were like, "This is part of the new environment. We should all welcome that kind of feedback.")

o People that get overlooked in the QA can air their views right over the speaker's head -- which certainly contributes to a session's entertainment value.

Caveats:

o There isn't any wifi in the auditorium, which means livetweet feedback is limited to users with 3G phones.

o Attendance is thin -- about 200 pre-reg -- which means that while the crowd's a little more intimate, there isn't a great deal of participation.

Still trying to work out the perfect formula. At the very least, I'm glad it's something we're trying and not just talking about. In the meantime, follow conference-related tweets at @adtech_london. Feedback that isn't batshit-insane* will receive a warm fuzzy reception.

---

* When I started tweeting as @adtech_london early this morning, somebody on Twitter ran off-field with the Obama conversation and tried converting my religion. Come on, there's a place and time for that: college on the quad.

Live from Twitter, USA! -- er, France!

Twitcam.com is a nifty little service that lets you broadcast yourself live (and uncensored!) on Twitter.

Log in with an existing Twitter ID, then hit "Broadcast Live" and grant the app access to your camera. When you're ready to share your face with The World at Large, hit "Broadcast & Tweet." This'll provide your Twitter feed with a link to your live video, accompanied by any message you send along with it.

The cool thing is, once users click on the link they can chat on the right-hand side of your livestream, enabling you to respond in real-time to whatever they're saying. (This can be both a good and bad thing,* I guess.)

When done, stop recording. The video lives on that link forever and can be embedded elsewhere on Internets.

Best of bests, it's ad-supported -- or, well, it will be once parent company Livestream drums up some hot-n-heavy sponsorship love. Meantime, it's free for anybody to use.

---

*Chelsi: "oh great, this is just what we need: spammerz broadcasting pr0n. @SilkySwallow takes her talents to the big screen!" Hey, now. Don't hate; congratulate.

Why Sarah Palin on Twitter...

... is "the best thing to ever happen on the internet."

And if you need more evidence than that, your standards are too high.

Cannes Lions: Talkin' the Twitter Biz-nass

Biz Stone's Twitter talk this afternoon was met with a full auditorium, people clamoring for places to park cameras and laptops so they could livetweet questions in real time.

Kind of a neat format. Stone addressed questions as they appeared under hashtag #hkcannes, the results of which were projected onto a screen. Two problems with this method:

1) Wifi outside the press room isn't accessible for free, meaning those that livetweeted from inside the room were either paying for use or mobiling it up. Questions were never taken directly from audience members, raising their hands, for example.

2) Questions were still for the most part selected by a Hill & Knowlton rep. I'm pretty sure the Oracle of Delphi had a less formidable filtering system.

Stone talked a bit about Twitter's birth, which I'm sure will become the stuff of online legend, so I don't really need to go into it. (Hey look, here it is.) One point of interest: his partner, Jack Dorsey, conceived the idea out of a fascination with AIM status updates.

Then he told a bunch of heartrending stories about how the real-time updating system got journos out of jail in foreign countries, kept people abreast of earthquakes and wildfire locations, gave hipsters a way to convey to each other which SXSW sessions suck, etc.

The hivemind behaviour born out of these instances of Twitter adoption yields zen inspiration to Stone: he likens it to watching birds fly in formation, using instincts to drive activity that seems perfectly coordinated.

Talk was also peppered with proverbs, which appeared above us like pop philosophy at a new age seminar. My favourite is "creativity is a renewable resource" -- something that came to Stone when he was asked, once, to come up with a five-word speech.






Here are a couple of videos of the QA portion, focusing on how Twitter expects to demonstrate its long-term viability by developing a business model.

On that little "definitions" section in right-hand Twitter nav:



On monetizing Twitter:



Nothing you probably haven't already heard. Obviously there's a way to shoehorn sponsorship or premium service opportunities into a site where product/movie reviews and brand opinions are solicited and freely given as generously as on Twitter. For a meatier description on how Twitter can add an e-commerce angle to its value prop, however, check out what one of its investors recently had to say.

The RFP that Ate My Life, and Yours, and Twitter's.

Dolla make you holla! Who's In -- and Who's Out -- in the First-Ever TwitteRFP.

Also, this just in: based on the small avalanche of responses, Current.tv has decided to extend the number of RFPs to 17 entrants, most of which will have come from #twitteRFP, instead of the original 5.

Current's Jordan Kretchmer: Originally, the RFP was going to be distributed to 10 total. Was hoping for 5 to come from #TwitteRFP.

Not one to miss an opportunity, Adam Wohl's already come up with a new hashtag for the impending clusterf...

Best E-Card Evar.

Thanks, Candace. <3

Dear People-that-Still-Use-Myspace,

Please stop sending me these. They make me feel sad.

Maybe in 1996 I would've pegged all my self-worth on how many saucily text-rendered Kisses™ I got,* but times've changed.

Now I measure my value by how often I'm reTweeted for saying stuff like this. All. Day. Long.

---

* "7-9 freaken hot." Yeah, baby, yeah.

Daily Beast vs. HuffPo.

Web20h...Really? describes why it thinks Tina Brown's The Daily Beast is kicking HuffPo's ass. Good points made, though I'm not too sure I'd compare them in the first place. (My thoughts here and here.)

Props to @vijaysankaran for passing me the link.

You Know You Want Summa This.

Found LeVar Burton on Twitter. Seeing him, looking all bad-ass and social media savvy, made me nostalgic for the days when LeVar was my cuddly Reading Rainbow friend. That's when I hunted this down:



I fucking love that song!!!

On a serious note though, and if like me you're thinking of adding LeVar to your list of Twitter homies, watch this (very short) video of him speaking at Wellesley College.

Hrm. He's kinda starting to resemble Avery Brooks circa Deep Space Nine. More importantly: Yes, they play the Star Trek theme, and yes, he finds a way to slip in, "You don't have to take my word for it!"

Guf-faw.

Twitter as Service or Utility.

@drtobiasfunke Singlehandedly Restores Love of Show, Faith in Twitter

I am a huge Arrested Development fan, going as far back as when the show was actually running (which is rare!). And my loyalty only improved with age: I turned at least five people (now enthusiasts!) onto it, and watched Seasons 1-3 at least five times straight through.

It was my religion.

But even zealots move on. The last time I touched my AD DVDs was maybe summer of last year. I've since rediscovered Buffy, Angel and Star Trek: Deep Space 9. If anybody asks me, sure, I still dig the show. Have I got high hopes for its return, or for a full-length movie? Not really. The fire's become ash; I have officially Ceased to Care.

So it was with surprise and pleasure that I returned from vacation late Sunday to find @drtobiasfunke following me on Twitter. For non-ADers out there, Dr. Tobias Fünke is a (blazing!) closet homosexual, prone to awkward Freudian slips and just generally icky.

As a character, Tobias is totally rich. His clothes are disgustingly frumpy, he can never be completely nude, and he has anal-rapist -- short for psychoanalyst and therapist -- printed on his business cards. He's also married to the gorgeous and sex-starved Lindsay Bluth, played by Portia de Rossi (who's gay in real life! IroNY!)

In contrast, Dr. Fünke's Twitter personality is newborn and still sorta fætal. Whoever's behind it depends heavily on jokes that were thrown around during the short life of the show. But he's willing to interact and try giving the character off-network legs, which is ridiculously appealing. To my Twittered glee at him following me, @drtobiasfunke replied, "I'm only electronically following you. Physically, I'm attracted to women that have more of a Redford-esqe quality."

Hilarity ensues. I'm in love with a dead show all over again.

There's a lot to be said for an emotional connection forged by brand appropriation. If the cats behind Arrested Development hope to build momentum in its existing fanbase, maybe to help hype some future film in the make, microblogging is a good place to start. (A Dr. Tobias video blog would be awesome, too. I would watch it EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. Or maybe week.) I'm looking forward to seeing how @drtobiasfunke develops, and to following other AD characters as they appear.

Other fictional characters thriving on Twitter included the cast of Mad Men. Twitter personalities like @Don_Draper and @PeggyOlsen enjoyed a good run until AMC pulled out its bitch pistol and sent Twitter a legal takedown notice. Way to be wet blankets, guys: nothing like hosing the people that made you. UPDATE, 8:58pm: Looks like the Mad Men team's back on Twitter. Three cheers!

But back to the point. I'm not sure whether @drtobiasfunke has ties to Arrested Development's production team, but he got me into the show again. Hit me with ads, invite me to groups, send me petitions. I'm back on the team, ready to bring my favourite TV icons back to life.

The Rise and Fall of Twitter

"Why can't they just hire a proper programmer?"

We don't know, Hitler, we don't know.