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Twitter & Social Media

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Lawyer assesses Pinterest's copyright situation. Sasha Frere-Jones: Good Things About Twitter. Several light-years ago in Web time, Jonathan Franzen spoke at Tulane University and said that he found Twitter “unspeakably irritating,” expressing a concern for “serious readers and writers” and the medium’s inability to “cite facts or create an argument.”

Sasha Frere-Jones: Good Things About Twitter

I like that Franzen doesn’t sound like a celebrity worried about reducing friction and shifting units. He is the Kanye West of fiction: popular, gifted, influential, and willing to make unpopular statements without the intervention of handlers. But Thomas Jones at the London Review of Books points out that Franzen makes a “category error” by pitching Twitter users against serious readers/writers. The two coëxist, happily. The Abysmal Google+ Numbers: Users Spending 3 Minutes per Month on the Site - Rebecca J. Rosen - Technology. For many months now, the specter of Google+'s eventual failure has grown as a real possibility.

The Abysmal Google+ Numbers: Users Spending 3 Minutes per Month on the Site - Rebecca J. Rosen - Technology

It certainly *seemed* that the site was not catching on, but any real data to confirm that intuition was hard to come by. Certainly, when Google's own numbers turned out to be a flimsy charade, that seemed to be an ominous indication. An Instagram photo of "social media explained through donuts" went viral earlier this month, providing a few chuckles by confirming what everyone seemed to suspect: Google+ is an abandoned shell, a place once flooded by the curious and the speculators, only to have been abandoned by everybody but a few Google employees still trying to drum up interest. Twitter Is All in Good Fun, Until It Isn’t.