Tweet Back

It's recently been announced that a small startup called Operation Bluebird is trying to relaunch classic Twitter, arguing that the Elongated Muskrat has allowed the name and logo to lapse. I'm no legal expert, but there may be something of a leg to stand on. As a rule, a trademark is only enforceable so long as the company in question keeps using the mark consistently. That is, if a company rebrands, giving itself a new name and logo, they lose all rights to its previous assets. This is intended to encourage competition rather than allowing companies to essentially sit on their rights. There’s a lot more to this sort of move, but those are the broad strokes. 

As for the new Twitter, it’s set to launch in early 2026 and is currently letting people reserve usernames and handles for when it finally launches. As of this writing, it’s at a little over 150,000 applicants. 

I don’t intend to be one of them. 

I can respect the effort on display here, and there’s clearly a love and affection for what Twitter once was, but I don’t think there’s any chance of catching the same lightning in a bottle. Twitter’s acquisition by Musk fractured a big part of the social media landscape, and I think things are all the better for it. 

Once upon a time, I called Twitter my favorite social networking site, warts and all. It’s hard to describe what exactly I loved about it, but if I had to put it into a single coherent thought, it had an immediacy and a conciseness to it that you didn’t really get out of other platforms. It took the status update aspect from the likes of MySpace and Facebook and made that the entire site. It was also very accessible. I’m old enough to remember when you could use text messaging to post Tweets, back in the days of flip phones and T9 predictive text. That may seem rather quaint now with smartphones, but this was kind of a big deal back in the day. You weren’t bound to a swivel chair in front of a desktop, you weren’t lugging a laptop, and you didn’t have to break the bank buying one of those new fangled smart devices that HTC was making. If you had a phone and a good connection, you could submit a small message to a public square. I remember once reading an article about some activist tweeting only one word: Arrested. I don’t know the exact circumstances, but you certainly couldn’t have made such a quick and concise post to such a wide audience while seated at your desktop as the SWAT team kicked your door in. 

Over time, the site evolved to include a few quality of life features, such as the ability to post images, the ability to post links in a way that didn’t count against your character limit, and eventually a doubling of the character limit from around 120 to 240. On a side note, I love the reason this upgrade happened. The story goes that Twitter wasn’t very big in Japan until a massive earthquake hit the nation. Suddenly, people all over Japan were signing up for Twitter to keep in touch during the crisis. That may not seem like a big deal, but you have to consider that the Japanese language is built different from us European/Latin-based types. To a Japanese person, that 120 character limit may as well have been a 120 word limit since a single character in Japanese can be either a letter, a word, or even a short phrase depending on the usage. Microblogging was the chocolate to Kanji’s peanut butter. As word of these longer-than-normal tweets spread, people around the world wanted in. Obviously, you can’t change a language overnight and emojis can only get you so far, so Twitter opted to double the character limit. The platform’s biggest paradigm shift was done out of jealousy for the Japanese language. 

Despite all this, Twitter grew with the times by sticking to a very practical model. This drew in a lot of new users and eventually Twitter became the go-to place for news organizations to seek out statements from famous people who had now graced the platform with their presence. There would be an incident or scandal or some other controversy, the offending parties would release statements to Twitter (as opposed to directly to the press) and you’d see a screenshot of that tweet on the news, be it on the TV or on the website or anywhere else you’d get your news. There was a direct line between a person of importance and the general masses. Of course, this was a bit of an illusion as it was just as easy for a celebrity to post a Tweet themselves as it would be for them to hire a full-time social media manager to post on their behalf. Still, it came with a sense of authenticity. Barring any hacking, there wasn’t anything on that feed that a user wouldn’t want there. 

However, this wasn’t going to last. Nothing does. Something at sometime was going to come along and disrupt the whole operation. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, and Twitter was no exception.

The fall came in the form of a buyout by a narcissistic billionaire who felt that Twitter wasn’t being as transparent and honest as it should be with what kind of content was and wasn’t allowed on their site. One of the events preceding this takeover was Twitter banning a number of high profile users for violating terms of service, including Alex Jones and Donald Trump. This was viewed by Musk as Twitter not being a platform supporting free speech despite its insistence on being the digital village’s public square. Musk seems to have trouble grasping the fact that free speech does not extend to things like slander and libel or hate speech or calls for violence and harassment. His view seemed to be that people would get to say whatever they want and that the consequences of these actions would just somehow magically work themselves out. Ironically, he’d go back on this promise of totally free speech as he’d start cracking down on satire accounts or impersonations of people and organizations. 

As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for because you just might get it. 

So, what’s happened since Twitter imploded? We’ve seen a number of other social sites step up to fill the gap. The centralized source of direct information is now decentralized. It’s no longer “So and so Tweeted yesterday…” but now “The blah blah blah posted on Substack that…” or “What’s his name wrote on Medium...” or “… the company announced on its Threads account.” Among many other new names and faces to the scene. Sure, some of them have been around for some time, but now they’ve found a new purpose serving as a place of refuge for those fleeing the Muskrat. There’s no longer one name in the directory. The monopoly that Twitter built for itself through raw determination crumbled under its own weight and now it’s no longer top dog in the social media scene. 

In the end, people don’t need a new Twitter because they’ve already found one, whether it’s Bluesky or Threads or Substack or Medium or WordPress. While Operation Bluebird is more than welcome to prove me wrong, I don’t think they’re going to achieve what they set out to do because it’s physically impossible to replicate the success of Twitter. Even if they were to, what safeguards do they have against history repeating itself? 

In the interest of full disclosure, I left my Twitter account abandoned on the very day of my 15th anniversary of signing up. I keep it around for a few reasons, partly because it's costing Musk money to keep it up and running, but mostly because there's a number of very talented artists there who have yet to jump ship because they don't want to lose the audience they've built up over the years. 

18 DEC 25 THU Update: Well, this hit a snag earlier than I thought it would. 

QuikTek

I mentioned Twitter last time, and writing about how I appreciated its versatility made me remember something. The first weblog I ever had was on Yahoo!360. I knew well of (and hated) MySpace, but hadn't heard of Facebook. I always preferred 360 to MySpace because it seemed that 360, by virtue of being a Yahoo! service, attracted a wider and more eclectic audience, whereas MySpace was almost exclusively a teen phenomenon. Call it ageism or technophobia, but it's probably safe to assume that more people have an e-mail address than a MySpace account, therefore that older and/or less tech-savvy generation still "ooh"-ing and "ah"-ing over Electronic Mail will be more likely to start up a weblog if that service is offered as part of the "packaged deal" that came with their e-mail account as opposed to seeking out an external, self-contained site that requires separate registration. In other words, on Y!360, you got more people who would probably not have otherwise started a weblog because they wouldn't want to leave their comfort zone.

Yahoo!360 is gone now, crushed underfoot by practically every other social networking site in existence, the key problem being a few unresolved technical issues (which led to my friend Vanessa tragically losing her entire account), the others being a deliberate dismantling by Yahoo! in light of a proposed buy-out of Facebook and an attempt by Yahoo! to make the networking tools of 360 a more integrated part of one's Yahoo! profile. I've archived those entries to a site called Multiply, a rather shameless MySpace knock-off. I won't link them here; they're not much to look at. Most of them recount my obsessions over my own personal pet peeve about 360 in light of other weblog sites like Multiply or Blogger, which was mobile-friendliness. I prided myself on "breaking the system" by using my PSP's built-in web-browser and wi-fi to write entries in clear defiance of desktops. It probably went a little too far; every time I got a new device, my readers would know it, evidenced by my "Hey, guess what I'm writing this on!" style of entry.

There was something I don't think I ever said on 360 and I think I never said it because I wasn't actually sure how well it would translate to text, so here goes:

The very best thing about 360 is that WE'RE ALL DIFFERENT, COMING FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE, ALL OVER THE WORLD, and yet, at the end of the day, we're all just sitting at home in front of our computers, talking to one another.

the very worst thing about 360 is that we're all different, coming from all walks of life, all over the world, and yet, at the end of the day, WE'RE ALL JUST SITTING AT HOME IN FRONT OF OUR COMPUTERS TALKING TO ONE ANOTHER.

The point is, while I may have been seemingly singing the praises of Twitter last entry, my adoration is almost entirely conceptual; the first social networking site made with mobile networks distinctly in mind. By its very nature, it encourages people to go out into the world and not feel tethered to their undoubtedly uncomfortable desk chairs in front of their undoubtedly cluttered and cumbersome desks upon which rest their undoubtedly ghastly laptops and monolithic desktops.

To crib a saying by filmmaker Jean Cocteau: Weblogs will never truly achieve anything until they can be taken to all the same places ordinary notebooks and pens can go.

Twitter was a good start.

Tumblr appears to be the next step.

Evernote is the long stride between them.

Do It To It, Dammit!

I should have known this would happen; I make a To-Do list and all it makes me want "to do" is anything but what's on the damned To-Do list. In my defense, some of the journal entries proposed are technically "here" on Blogger, just in draft form. So, they aren't NOT being worked on. The only one that may be abandoned is a review of Jim Starlin's Cosmic Odyssey, a mini-series featuring Jack Kirby's New Gods with art by the indomitable Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy. I may still make the accompanying primer video giving an historical overview of Jack Kirby's The New Gods. In keeping with my desire to write reviews of items that don't fit proper categories or are otherwise heavily-marginalized, the video would discuss how originally Kirby's Fourth World series of monthly comics were never meant to be part of the DC Universe proper. That is, we'd never see crossovers with or guest appearances by DC denizens such as Superman or Batman. Tragically, though, the books would be abruptly canceled (the notably ironic exception being Mister Miracle, Super Escape Artist) and many of the characters would be scattered to the winds, settling upon the larger DC Universe in an oddly intriguing kind of "separate, yet joined" status. There's a long-running tradition of superheroes (or other comic book characters) that lack the following to sustain their own title, but are popular enough that guest appearances in other books meet with little to no dissent or disinterest.
As for Cosmic Odyssey, I don't think I'll be reviewing it simply because it's a tad on the unremarkable side. It was far from disappointing; with Starlin's fearless approach to storytelling and Mignola's dramatic lighting and shading, it truly is a match made in heaven, one that I wish would have been repeated prior to Starlin's solo project The Death of the New Gods. Suffice it to say, if Starlin and Mignola do work together again, it won't be on The Fourth World.

Changing gears to old business, there's no update on Jolicloud's "Windows Refund" program as they've yet to answer my inquiry and I've found no other information on it specifically. There was, however, something tangentially related: an article sourcing the Novell Boycott's information about Dell's "Windows Tax Credit." I won't go into too much detail because it's actually going to help me round out the story regarding Jolicloud's refund program, but the long and short of the matter is that Microsoft has essentially pressured Dell into selling PCs with Windows pre-installed exclusively, with prices actually favoring Windows-equipped PCs versus ones with a Linux OS on it.

In the broader scheme of things, there have been a few minor changes to the format of Decay-Proof Record Scroll. I've overcome my fear of tinkering with CSS or, for that matter, any HTML document I didn't write from the ground up myself, and proceeded to tweak the template I selected when I first opened this Blogger account. While I do like the format overall, a few minor problems came up that were fast becoming persistent nuisances, chief among them the width of the main text column. For text, it wasn't an issue, and admittedly seemed to help the words flow, being neither an intimidating, monolithic wall of text nor a thin, whispy news ticker. For videos, however, it turned problematic. Even with videos in the 1.33:1 ratio, the results of refitting them to fit inside the column were less than satisfactory, with videos in 16:9 even more so. Granted, I remember the days when 160 x 120 was the norm and formats like 320 x 240 were "cinematic," but after more than ten years following those days, even I don't feel regret thumbing my nose at videos smaller than 320 x 240. Put simply, it's been long enough, we can expect more. The highest quality Youtube HD video may still only just hold a candle to a DVD, but they're still leaps and bounds above the Cinepak cut-scenes of the early CD-ROM era.

I've also added a Twitter module, which probably gets more updates than any other site I frequent. Then again, that's supposed to be the appeal of Twitter, that you can update it from practically anywhere with any reasonably-equipped electronic device, mobile or otherwise. In a sense, it's what I've always wanted from a weblog tool, a journal anyone can see that's as accessible to me as pen and paper.

Speaking of which, I've also removed Atop the 4th Wall from the Better Reads module. Don't get me wrong, I still watch each new update and hold no ill will against it, it's just that Better Reads seems better suited for weblogs that update irregularly as opposed to AT4W's "Every Monday" model. It also lets me give top billing to my friend Karla Thomas' new Tumblr page Bloggity Blog, which sadly doesn't seem to get half as many followers as her original DeviantART page. It's understandable as, typically, people who "live" on a particular site don't like to be told to go "somewhere else," even if it's only for a brief visit. This is probably the worst part of the whole "Web 2.0" side of the internet; no longer one vast, open country, but a scattering of walled city-states that insist on their own self-sufficiency.
It reminds me of something my brother told me when he went to Canada. On the plane, the in-flight magazine was full of ads promoting tourism in countries all over the world, including Poland and Japan. At first, he didn't think much of it until, when he landed and got settled in, he still kept seeing the same foreign travel ads all over, with the same ubiquity there that "What happens in Vegas..." has in the States. He said it really put the concept of "international" in perspective, noting how the US seems to have this "we have everything right here" mentality when it comes to tourism. It's genuinely sad that we went from services like Geocities to ones like MySpace; sure, it makes networking far easier, but it would seem to do so at the cost of diversity. Perhaps it's just an inevitable social phenomenon.

Last update: I'm also working on a short story, and hopefully I haven't jeopardized its completion by mentioning it here. Like the act of making the To-Do list, I find the less I spend talking about something is more time I can spend doing something, hence not displaying the list here. As such, I'm not going to delve into the plot apart from little hints I've divulged on my Twitter feed, such as doing research on Orbital Resonance despite not technically being a sci-fi story.

Now, we move onward to more regular updates, and less updates about updates.