Square is hiring all the best Silicon Valley talent, not Twitter, Zynga, or Facebook. This is good because I hope they put the companies that manage credit card transactions out of business. I actually did laugh out loud at the reaction.

Our recruiter does not give Square perfect grades for its recruiting, however. She insists the company is making a big mistake hiring so many Ruby on Rails developers, who tend to be 'hipsters with neckbeards.' We asked a source close to Square for his reaction to this concern, and he said, 'LOL.'

The Red Sox have had a pretty up and down season. I'm still not sure what to say about it, but there's humor in pain. Especially other people are making fun of my pain. Anyway, I thought these Tweets were good.

@fivethirtyeight


@jazayerli


@joekinsella


@mickshaffer


@petersagal


Via Stellar

What does Adam Lisagor call these Twitter stream coincidences? That they can happen is fascinating to me.

In this Vanity Fair profile of Twitter/Square founder Jack Dorsey, he's described as extremely focused ("Dorsey is unusually good at staying focused"), but then it also describes the year he spent learning botanical illustration, the year he spent becoming certified in massage therapy, his interest in fashion design, and his long time interest in transportation logistics. It seems kind of contradictory to me, but really what's being described is the ability to focus intensely on what's interesting at the moment. Not a bad thing, just different than extreme focus.

Like much of the east coast, Chuck Klosterman's travel plans appear to have been impacted by yesterday's weather. He documented his path through the several stages of traveler grief on Twitter, and then he stopped. Either his flight left, he ran out of batteries, or something more nefarious happened. In any case, enjoy.

-If I am allowed on this flight, I will become a better person. I will change. I will do whatever it takes. 6 hours ago
-Nothing is off the table. 6 hours ago
-I feel like I have entered a new level of desire. Things are clear now. I will give up everything for one thing. 4 hours ago
-If you (a.) need a kidney and (b.) control runway traffic at JFK, I'm ready to negotiate. #NotAHighQualityKidneyToBeHonest 3 hours ago
-How many people in this airport would kill a stranger with a hammer in exchange for air travel? #EveryoneExceptMaybeMyWife 3 hours ago
-A woman in the terminal is trying to stretch her legs by goose-stepping. The guy next to me is talking about Douglas Adams like he's alive. 3 hours ago
-"My mother is optimistic about this flight," says the goose-stepper. "That's better than nothing." #ActuallyIt'sTheSame 3 hours ago
-Maybe I should start wearing a sweater around my shoulders. I've probably been living wrong. This is my fault. 2 hours ago
-None of these people with sweaters around their shoulders seem upset. It's like they understand the big picture, you know? They get it. 2 hours ago
-FYI: They don't sell SARS masks in Huson News. 2 hours ago
-Whatever happened to SARS? That used to be so hot. 2 hours ago
-"My brother went to Simon's Rock," says the redhead sitting across from me. "He said, 'Never go there. It's a fishbowl.' That was his take." 2 hours ago
-Oh my God. The guy at the gate just got a phone call. Oh my God. What does this mean? What does this mean? Why isn't he reacting? 2 hours ago
-WHY IS HE NOT REACTING? This dude is the Robert Parrish of Delta employees. React! React! YOU ARE ALIVE, MAN. 1 hour ago

This seems like as good a place as any to continue the Chuck Klosterman blog project Chuck Klosterman Chuck Klosterman Blog Project.
-Klosterman recently started selling his essays for $0.99 a pop. People keep predicting this is the future of essay writing/magazine articles, but I think it's going to take a second to catch on. If there's a good delivery system, though, all bets are off.

-Back in September, he had 5 ideas to make the NFL better. I agree with all of them.

Lastly, How Modern Life Is Like a Zombie Onslaught, which makes some good points about the Twilight series.

Mike Champion with a really smart look at the problem of Twitter as "information network". Basically, it's difficult to find Twitter accounts that Tweet only about subjects that interest you, which then creates a lot of noise. I think this might be one reason celebrities and brands are so popular; people are more inclined to find the non-basketball related musings of their favorite basketball player interesting because it's their favorite basketball player! Mike uses the example of being less interested in the non-Ruby related musings of Ruby hackers... Until Twitter makes it more possible to follow interests, rather than accounts, it'll face this challenge.

Twitter is increasingly being described as an "information network" rather than a social network or "fun-like-ice-cream" novelty. That seems accurate, but the challenge is that Twitter is currently designed like a social network. Even with its innovative asymmetrical following relationships what you follow on Twitter are accounts [1] not "interests". As a result, it is difficult to consume information effectively and to tweet for disparate audiences.

PS Congrats on the baby, Mike and Sam.

On this year's World AIDS Day, several celebrities "died" or gave up Twitter in an effort to raise $1 million dollars (at which point they could begin Tweeting again) as The Daily What points out, they didn't do so hot raising only $104K (up to $184K now).

The most notable thing to emerge from this experiment is how, in the span of 24 hours, with millions upon millions of followers among them, these celebs were only able to collect about as much money as one of them makes in a minute.

Hey famous people, here’s an idea: Instead of using your limelight to shuck cash off common Internet folk, maybe you pull out your gilded checkbooks and donate the million dollars out of those fortunes happenstance so graciously awarded you.

This is a good example of what Anil Dash wrote about in January, the number of Twitter followers doesn't really matter if they're not engaged. It's incredibly difficult to get people to do things on the internet, and it's not surprising Kim Kardashian's 5.4 million followers didn't bring her Twitter account back to life. Elijah Wood gets a pass because he only has 8K followers.

I'm not sure this is what Biz and Ev had in mind. Last week Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff live-blogged the execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner's with 3 Tweets. Seems like Shurtleff is responding to criticism by digging in further. His latest Tweet? "Astonishing that no retweet whiner express outrage that Gardner shot 2 men in the face, & a cop; nor one word of empathy for their families."

Have you seen Twitter accounts with bios longer than 160 characters? I got followed by a Twitter account for Vapiano Boston and was surprised to see that they had a bio much longer than the typical limit of 160 characters. I saw this a couple weeks ago and didn't think about it past noticing it. This time I wanted to figure out what they were doing. It doesn't seem like anyone else has noticed though, because while I found a blog post on the topic yesterday (which for some reason I can't find today), I couldn't find anyone else talking about it. The post I found suggested these longer bios might be for premium accounts, but does a chain restaurant seem like the type of account Twitter would beta this with?

Anyone know anything about this?

Not even Twitter is safe from word of great white shark attack. This has been in my drafts folder for a couple months...