Very bucolic! Gorgeous. ; )

You talk about wanting to "help others" but there is a noticeable lack of individuals who either you feel passionate about or who have inspired the passion with you. Perhaps you generalize to make this more useful to a general audience. I just know that people, specific, flesh & blood people, have marked some of my passions. Passions aren't rungs on a career ladder. They are things, people, organizations, ideas, activities you are invested in, who give you life. They are sometimes over-the-top and messy. We can make bad decisions by following our passions. But they also hold the greatest promise for us to achieve something marvelous, whether that is creating something new, building an organization up from scratch or starting a family. I appreciate your reflective writing style but I think you need to think about the emotions and physicality of passions and not make it so cerebral.

I don't think Twitter is "over" unless you're talking about fads. But you can't build a sustainable business on a fad unless you have an eye for the long-term development of something that was merely buzzworthy. So, Twitter is growing up. And that involves creating business development plans that don't have the flexibility of being responsive to their users. For all of its popularity, I don't think Twitter actually embraces 2.0 tenets of transparency and engagement. Except for their staff & their friends, I think they are out-of-touch with bulk of their users (who, for example, are not in the U.S.). I think they are now a medium-sized company with an enormous userbase that still thinks like a startup with a focus on operations and not customer service & communications. No one likes seeing the Fail Whale but it's baffling to me that Twitter employs several "Developer Advocates" to address their questions & they have several staffers who deal with communicating with celebrities but there is no one in Community Management or in an Ombudsman-like role to hear feedback from users. I assume they think that if there is a problem, they'll eventually hear about it. But this is corporate thinking and is not pro-active. It takes user loyalty for granted which makes it more likely that people will switch to the next, cool peer communication tool that comes along (Facebook doesn't quite fill this mass communication role). Thanks for your thoughtful blog post. It sums up what I've been thinking since Twitter suffered the onslaught of Internet marketers in early 2009.

I don't think Twitter is "over" unless you're talking about fads. But you can't build a sustainable business on a fad unless you have an eye for the long-term development of something that was merely buzzworthy. So, Twitter is growing up. And that involves creating business development plans that don't have the flexibility of being responsive to their users. For all of its popularity, I don't think Twitter actually embraces 2.0 tenets of transparency and engagement. Except for their staff & their friends, I think they are out-of-touch with bulk of their users (who, for example, are not in the U.S.). I think they are now a medium-sized company with an enormous userbase that still thinks like a startup with a focus on operations and not customer service & communications. No one likes seeing the Fail Whale but it's baffling to me that Twitter employs several "Developer Advocates" to address their questions & they have several staffers who deal with communicating with celebrities but there is no one in Community Management or in an Ombudsman-like role to hear feedback from users. I assume they think that if there is a problem, they'll eventually hear about it. But this is corporate thinking and is not pro-active. It takes user loyalty for granted which makes it more likely that people will switch to the next, cool peer communication tool that comes along (Facebook doesn't quite fill this mass communication role). Thanks for your thoughtful blog post. It sums up what I've been thinking since Twitter suffered the onslaught of Internet marketers in early 2009.

I'm bitter when my Direct Messages disappear or can't get a reply to a help question! Very cute cartoon though!

Besides the attitude towards the internet & women on it, it's a pity that all of the "Tweethearts" they chose were young, white & American. It's a big cyber world out there, Vanity Fair, and you chose to talk about & isolate a small slice of it. Open your eyes and look beyond the list of people your authors happen to follow. Your parochialism is showing.