Why Twitter is more valuable than Facebook

An interesting story in the New York Times today on the value of twitter: 

“Twitter lets people know what’s going on about things they care about instantly, as it happens,” said Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive and co-founder. “In the best cases, Twitter makes people smarter and faster and more efficient.”

Mr. Williams, along with the other founders, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, first envisioned Twitter as an easy way to stay in touch with people you already know.

In 2006, when Twitter was just starting, the three men felt a small earthquake in San Francisco. They each reached for their phones to twitter about it and discovered tweets from others in the city. At that moment, it dawned on them that Twitter might be most useful for something else — a frontline news report, not just for friends, but for anyone reading.

Indeed, the news-gathering promise of Twitter was most evident during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November and when a jetliner landed in the Hudson River in January. People were twittering from the scenes before reporters arrived.

Bob Herbert's "More Than Charisma"

Bob Herbert discusses the charisma of Barack Obama in his column this morning. He first recounts a story in 2006:

On a rainy October night in 2006, I took a cab to the John F. Kennedy library here to conduct a very public interview. As we pulled up, the driver asked, “Who’s on the program?”

“Barack Obama,” I said.

“Oh,” he replied, “our next president.”

Almost anyone who heard his 2004 DNC speech felt the same way. Even conservatives like George Will, who said the first time he met Barack Obama, it was like watching Alex Rodriguez play for the first time, saw his magnetism, his charisma.

But Herbert explains why Obama isn't just a charismatic figure with a beautiful family:

We’ve been watching that something this week, and it’s called leadership. Mr. Obama has been feeding the almost desperate hunger in this country for mature leadership, for someone who is not reckless and clownish, shortsighted and self-absorbed.

However you feel about his policies, and there are people grumbling on the right and on the left, Mr. Obama has signaled loudly and clearly that the era of irresponsible behavior in public office is over.

No more crazy wars. No more torture, and no more throwing people in prison without even the semblance of due process. No more napping while critical problems like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, global warming, and economic inequality in the United States grow steadily worse.

Yes, you get the sense with Obama that there will be no more rash decisions. No more petty ideological decisions. Just calm, thoughtful leadership. And after 8 years of George Bush, it is exactly what this country needs.

Bill Kristol is a jerk and hates multiculturalism

If you read this blog, you know I'm not a big Bill Kristol fan. However, I'm usually content to let him be. But today's New York Times column was something else:

Obama has selected Yale’s Elizabeth Alexander to compose and read a poem. I still remember watching Maya Angelou read “On the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993 — and thinking that American culture really was in a state of irreversible decline, as she indulged in that multicultural cataloguing of “the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew,/ The African and Native American, the Sioux, / The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek,/ The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,/ The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,/ The privileged, the homeless, the teacher.”

Huh? Is he actually saying that multiculturalism helped American culture go into "a state of irreversible decline?"

This is, of course, moronic. America's greatest asset, in my humble opinion, is its idealism. The Bill of Rights says that people of any race, religion or creed can live in this country without government intervention. This mixing of cultures has created a culture that is diverse and continually changing, and it is far more interesting to me than the homogeneity of an all-white European nation, for example.

Kristol's comments are at the very least in bad taste, and I think could be construed as racist. It's clear to me he's showing his preference for a whiter, less diverse America.