Plenty of skeptics for Jack Dorsey’s next move
Jim McKelvey shows off Square. (Dawn Majors, St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
My colleague Tim Barker had a story this past weekend for our business section about the next business venture for Jack Dorsey, the St. Louisan who co-founded Twitter and has just started generating buzz for his latest venture, Square.
The mobile credit card payment system depends on a small piece of hardware that plugs into the audio jack in a user’s smart phone. With that dongle, a user can accept a credit card payment by swiping the card through it, getting the buyer to sign with his finger on the phone and, bingo, the transaction is done.
Tim (who is one of the reporters I edit) interviewed Jim McKelvey, a co-owner with Dorsey in Square and the guy who helped inspire the idea, thanks to a lost sale at his Third Degree Glass Factory in St. Louis. McKelvey couldn’t take a payment from a customer who wanted to pay with American Express. Read more
5 theories about why young folks don’t know Twitter
In the past three weeks, I’ve spoken to two college journalism classes. In both, I asked about Twitter. In both, I got a room full of blank stares. None of the students in either class was on Twitter. They didn’t know anyone who was. And most of them had never even heard of it.
Apparently, I’m not the only one who has experienced it. This Readership Institute item relates a similar anecdote — with a somewhat larger sampling of students than mine (Thank you, Stephanie Romanski). It also references a Time magazine item in August that outlined the typical Twitter user’s demos. The story says, “Today the site’s largest age demographic is 35-to-44-year-olds, who make up 25.9% of its users.” (Thanks to Chrys Wu for the reminder on that story.)
When I showed Twitter to my two classes, and described how it could be used to keep in touch, hear about breaking news, and experience the real-time “Best Week Ever” phenomenon, they all seemed to catch on pretty quickly. I give them credit for that. I was a Twitter lurker for months before it clicked for me.
So why am I on the fringe of Twitter’s sweet spot — and the kids aren’t anywhere near it? I’ve got a few theories. Read more
Conceiving a Twitter hashtag — and watching it boom
Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, debating (courtesy St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
This is the story of a Twitter hashtag – how it was born, how it grew and how it exploded.
To me, it’s a fascinating tick-tock on the power of social media and the multiplier effect as the network grabs hold. The hashtag was #vpdebate, which our newsroom conceived as a way to follow the tweets from the vice presidential debate in St. Louis last night.
We wanted non-Twitterers and Twitterers alike to benefit from what viewers had to say, so we planned to display “vpdebate” tweets on STLtoday.com’s politics page.
Fresh off the Online News Association conference in September, including a session on the use of Twitter in journalism, members of our newsroom discussed using a hashtag, settled on #vpdebate, and set about trying to see if we could get it to catch on. Read more
Visualizing the many places conversation can happen
Here’s a fascinating look at the many places conversation can happen in the social web. It’s a representation written from the perspective of public relations professionals, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting or useful for journalists. Because, obviously, they’re having conversations about us and the work we do as well.
And, they’re talking about the stories that we want to cover.
This chart was developed by Brian Solis, principal of FutureWorks, an award-winning PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley, and Jesse Thomas of JESS3. They call it the “conversation prism.” (Click for a larger version on Flickr.) Among his points on his blog, PR 2.0: Read more
Plurk can only make Twitter bitter — er, better
In the middle of last week, all my Twitter friends started buzzing about the new service that had just launched. They all wanted to try Plurk. And they wanted to know who else was trying it. Since then, it has been almost as much fun to see how other people kick the tires as it has been to kick the tires myself.
In the style of Twitter, Plurk is a playful microblogging site with a few different bells and whistles and more attractive interface — some might say more complicated — that puts your “plurks” onto a timeline. Read more
Kurt's Tweets- Funny. SW airlines magazine bothers to mention that pacemakers are always authorized electronic devices. #fb
- A disgrace, St. Louis. People still litter? http://post.ly/OUsk
- Redemption for Lindsey Jacobellis in snowboardcross? Only click if you really wanna know. http://bit.ly/99OgbM
- West Countians: If you're in the market for a pancake supper tonight, there's one here: http://stmartinschurch.org.
- The fiddling continues, even as Rome burns.