This device can’t possibly make any money, but perhaps it will bring Peek some needed exposure!
When the team at Twitter Inc. hatched the idea of producing a mobile device dedicated to “tweeting” they contacted Jonathan Kaplan, founder of a gadget company that experienced one of the most successful exits for venture investors in 2009.
Kaplan, who sold Flip camera maker Pure Digital Technologies Inc. to Cisco Systems Inc. for $590 million in stock, told the team the man to talk to was Amol Sarva.
Sarva is the founder of Peek Inc., a company that coincidentally aims to be the Pure Digital of mobile email. The company builds a sleek, simple, affordable gadget that allows people to send or receive email.
alman:
If you have a mac and a twitter you would be stupid not to use this. That is all.
Hah! Tweetie is pretty good but I think Twit Menulet is better.
Because there’s no better way to market a new operating system, Burger Kings in Japan are selling limited edition Windows 7 Whoppers to coincide with the release of the operating system today. What is a Windows 7 Whopper? Try seven mostly-beef patties stacked high on a sesame seed bun with lettuce, tomato, onions, pickles, ketchup and mayonnaise. What, no cheese? But I want to die! 30 customers a day will be able to buy the whopping Whopper for ¥777 ($8.55), but after that it’ll set you back a staggering ¥1,450 ($17.10). Which, I’m sorry, but no way. $17 for a burger? THOSE BETTER BE SNOW LEOPARD PATTIES. See what I did there? God I’m L337.
This is hilarious. It is pretty funny. Having lived in Japan, I can tell you that this kind of nerdy, sincere wackiness is just par for the course.
As I wrote over on the Stock Menulet tumblog, I’m actually thinking of giving in and making an iPhone version of Twit Menulet. At $3 a pop, I’ll lose a ton of money, but perhaps the iPhone version would drive sales of the desktop version. Or..is that a dumb idea?
Update: The TwitShirt website is now down with a message saying they heard the complaints, be back shortly. If they relaunch as an opt-in service, I have no beef with them.
Update #2: It’s back with a proper opt-in program.
Here we go again.
A few months ago, a web business called ChoiceTweets sold shirts with funny tweets on them. They even scraped some popular-tweet websites to offer a guaranteed selection of clever bon mots. This was widely criticized, and rightly so - who gave them the right to scrape Merlin’s Twitter feed and sell merch buoyed by his wit? Offering an opt-out program was mocked still further - as Cameron Hunt put it, running a legal business is not a 2.0 feature.
Today, Airbag Industries, a respected and loved web company, pulled the same exact boner. They launched TwitShirt, premised as above. Cameron’s criticism is even better this time:
Dear Airbag: how about I sell your website designs for $50 bucks a pop. You get $1 for each, or to opt-out, just give me your FTP passwords.Some defended ChoiceTweets with one or more of the following:
“You should be honored they picked your tweet!”
“Jeez, what’s the big deal? It’s just a stupid thing you wrote in 10 seconds.”
“You’ll get exposure this way!”Let’s be clear: Airbag Industries, LLC doesn’t get to decide whether fame, honor, or attribution are sufficient compensation for your writing. For someone to sell a shirt the entire premise of which is yours does not constitute some sort of “fair use”. No one will be buying these because they’re well made American Apparel shirts, nor because of the curvy arrow thing under your tweet. Your idea sells the shirt, 100%. The fact that TwitShirt has an opt-in royalty system (50c per shirt) changes nothing. They assume that the tweet is theirs to use until you complain, at which point you can’t negotiate anything without giving them your Twitter password. This is not a business relationship. This is douchebag behavior, end of story.
If your tweet is good enough that someone would pay $20 for it, it’s valuable enough that no one should just steal it.
My favorite line is the comment that “running a legal business is not a 2.0 feature”!
Hi there! You - yes, you with the Twitter account. Check this - Birdfeed is a brand new Twitter client for your iPhone. It’s fast; it keeps a local store of your friends’ tweets so you can catch up on the twittergeist while you’re on the, err, elevator; it does all the usual fun shopwork of uploading pics, switching between multiple accounts, etc.; it’s as uncluttered as a Scandinavian rumpus room.
Birdfeed was designed by signed below and imagineered & engineered by that Jarvis Cocker of the indie Mac community, Buzz Andersen. Thanks for the memories, Buzz. And thank you for your time, gentle reader.
Cool! I’ve been heavy into the Twitter clients for more than a year, and this is the first I’ve heard of Birdfeed. I’ll have to give it a taste.
Tweetie for Mac lets you switch between the Timeline, Replies, Direct Messages, and Search panels of your account with Command-1, -2, -3, and -4, relatively speaking.
If you use more than one Twitter account in Tweetie, you can switch between them by using Command-Shift-Up/Down arrows. This means you can switch between any account, and any panel under each account, without touching your mouse.
Tweetie’s shortcut convenience extends even to its popup posting window: hit Command-Down arrow while drafting a tweet, and you can change the account that you’re posting to by arrowing up and down, then hitting Space or Return.
*I* say: we badly need to implement global hotkeys for Twit Menulet. This is promised for version 6, due out in a couple of weeks.
