Jess Sloss aka @thattallguy

Law.com reports today on a lawsuit from a Texas-based emergency broadcast technology company alleging that by designing its system in a way that allows Twitter to be used for emergency broadcasts, Twitter has violated the litigant's patent.

I think we can all agree that intellectual property rights have gone seriously wrong over the past years...

Ridiculous

ps. A great documentary on IP and our society: http://www.ripremix.com/

Interesting way to visually describe the current communications options we have available to us.

While seth writes about these tools/mediums individually, it's the power of combining them that really rocks.

Pair a Low Bandwidth/Sychronized tool, such as twitter, with an high bandwidth Asynchronous tool like a ART and we've got a real winner.

Check out what Hugh is doing with it: Evil Plans

Chas clearly describes why social tools like twitter are so valuable at extending his reach and amplifying his voice.

"Four of them [twitter users], one with 300 followers, two with 2000 followers and one (David Armano) with 19,000 followers, re-tweeted the story. Eight of Armano’s followers, with 1300 more followers, collectively, re-tweeted it again. So immediately the “reach” of my Twitter campaign jumped to around 27,000, almost 40 times the 700 I started with"

Click through and have a read. Totally interesting

http://chasnote.com/2009/08/03/twitter%E2%80%99s-more-effective-than-facebook-at-driving-traffic-to-content/

more great proof for those timid clients out there

Google does a great job at telling us whats relevant to our queries online, but it leaves a lot out.

Real time search engines are pulling useful data from our social graph, offering immediate and often more relevant results than Google.

While some of the companies noted in the Trendspotting post (click through to read it) are going to be game changers, the one to watch, IMHO is Twitter.

Twitter and Bit.ly are working on something that will make this "real time thing" a lot more relevant to a lot more people.

I dont know what it is yet, but as GaryVee says - Twitter is Bringing the Thunder, with Search

Lets see what happens.

For those of you who question Twitter's ability to make money, you're so wrong.

I Couldnt agree more with Gary. Real Time is a very relevant, and potentially profitable niche in search. Lots of other companies are exploring the space, but Twitter has the upper hand, they have the users.

Keep an eye on this space as twitter moves to be "the pulse of the web"

How does an Internet junkie, news organization, or political operative monitor rapidly evolving real-time events, from the crucial details to the bigger picture? More importantly, how can a data stream be turned into real-time action, reaching the people who need it, when they need it, and in a form they can easily digest?

In this real time, all the time world, sometimes the importance of certain things drift out of our consciousness as fast as they drift out of our news feeds.

#iranelection ( the use of twitter to rally, communicate and break news about the recent election issues is Iran) is one such instant. It will go down in history as one of the turning points in the way humans connect and communicate.

Brave individuals (thousands of them) used twitter to bring us live action, from the streets of Iran. Something that CNN, BBC or any other network could not do. It created a world wide uprising, something that I'm sure has struck the fear of the crowd into most governments around the world (be they legitimate or not) ... even the Whitehouse has blocked twitter on it's computers.

The point here isn't that Twitter is Awesome, though I think it is, but rather that control of the communications tide has changed hands. Out of the few, into the masses.

Regardless of the tools used, twitter, facebook, the internet in general, has altered the way "we" communicate, and I LOVE that.

That being said, it's new, it's imperfect (spam!) and it's still not reached the majority of connected people on the planet.

Though that seems like more of an opportunity than a fault.