NBA lays down the Twitter law

No using PDAs, cell phones or other electronic devices by players, says the NBA's Twitter rules.

The league has defined "during games" as the period of time beginning 45 minutes before the start of a game and ending "after the postgame locker room is open to the media and coaches and players have first fulfilled their obligation to be available to media attending the game."

"During games" also includes halftime, according to the memo.

Then Milwaukee Bucks player Charlie Villanueva famously tweeted during halftime of an NBA game last year.

Chad Ochocinco quits Twitter

NFL wide receiver Chad Ochocinco (who changed his name from Chad Johnson) says that he is quitting Twitter.

Due to the many rules the NFL has made I've found it difficult to enjoy Twitter and I'll be deleting my account :(

The rules are pretty harsh.

Of course, I don't think he's actually quitting Twitter, I expect to see Ochocinco back on Twitter sooner rather than later.

NFL lays down harsh guidelines on Twitter use

Wow.

From the Associated Press:

The NFL said Monday it will allow players to use social media networks this season, but not during games. Players, coaches and football operations personnel can use Twitter, Facebook and other social media up to 90 minutes before kickoff, and after the game following traditional media interviews.

During games, no updates will be permitted by the individual himself or anyone representing him on his personal Twitter, Facebook or any other social media account, the league said.

The use of social media by NFL game officials and officiating department personnel will be prohibited at all times. The league, which has always barred play-by-play descriptions of games in progress, also extended that ban to social media platforms.

The NFL's player who gets the most publicity for using Twitter, Chad Ochocinco, tweeted:

@ProFootballTalk what's the new policy that I am hearing about, need the ins and outs so I can get my tweet team together?

Charlie Villanueva, an NBA player then with the Milwaukee Bucks but who signed with the Detroit Pistons earlier this summer, sent a tweet at halftime of a game against the Boston Celtics this March.

Villanueva wrote:

In da locker room, snuck to post my twitt. We're playing the Celtics, tie ball game at da half. Coach wants more toughness. I gotta step up.

The NFL rules seem to be overkill.

Some teams themselves, the AP report notes, have laid down their own Twitter restrictions. And setting the restrictions on Twitter to an hour and a half before the game seems like something that the teams themselves would want to do. But not necessarily the NFL.

And as for the officials, if they want to join a social media network... too bad. It is completely prohibited.

The anti-Twitter

Woofer, which looks like Twitter but is incredibly different, has a unique premise. Instead of requiring users to stay below 140 characters, it forces users to use at least 1,400 characters.

CNET looked at the website:

When you look at the site's three principles of woofing, you begin to believe that Woofer truly will be the salvation of the language: "1. Be eloquent. 2. Use adverbs. 3. DEA (don't ever abbreviate)," the site says.

ESPN banning Twitter for most instances

The Worldwide Leader in Sports, ESPN, is like a lot of companies these days. Seemingly every person on their staff has a Twitter account. I follow about a dozen of these folks to find out the latest about sports news, including their RSS feed Twitter account.

But now ESPN has decided that all this Twittering by their reporters isn't a good thing and has banned tweeting except for cases where it serves ESPN's interests.

Ric Bucher, who covers the NBA for ESPN and ESPN.com, said in a Twitter post today that the sports giant is prohibiting Twitter posts that don't serve the network. Bucher has more than 18,000 followers on the site.

I caught the tweet by @RicBucher.

Here it is:

The hammer just came down, tweeps: ESPN memo prohibiting tweeting info unless it serves ESPN. Kinda figured this was coming. Not sure wh ...

He followed up with a tweet that says,

My guess is I can still tweet about my vacation/car shopping, etc. Which I will do, if I can. But the informal NBA talk is prob in jeopardy.

In other words, there is no longer any reason for me to follow ESPN personalities for scoops on sports news.

Rap song about Twitter: "Hit me on Twitter"

And no, it isn't one of those jokey, "I'm a guy who can't rap, isn't it funny!?" rap songs. It's an actual rapper (Mista F.A.B.) telling people, "Hit me on Twitter."

Listen to it.

Mark Cuban doesn't like the AP

I think that Mark Cuban has a beef with the Associated Press, judging by what he said on Twitter moments ago.

Why do people believe that AP stories are factual ? Their fact checking is horrid, their balance non existent. They are worthless IMHO

I lost a little respect for Bill Simmons

*sigh*

Simmons talking to Mediaite:

1. How do you get your first news of the day?

ESPN.com, RealClearSports, hoopshype, Buster Olney’s baseball blog, Mike Lombardi’s football blog, Deadline Hollywood Daily, Drudge Report, TV Tattle, Google Trends, my Twitter page.

Drudge Report? Really?

Though I do like his take on Twitter:

Facebook is a social network; Twitter is a media/marketing vehicle disguised as a social network.

Tony LaRussa drops lawsuit against Twitter

St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa has dropped his lawsuit against Twitter.

But they reportedly settled a month ago.

A month ago, LaRussa said:

“The biggest misconception … was that it was about somebody using Twitter to be critical of me,” La Russa told the Post Dispatch. “I have plenty of critics. You can’t sue everybody who is criticizing you. That seemed like the perception that I or we were upset with the criticism. No, it was the improper use of the name.”

The fake Twitter account made fun of his DWI and the DWIs of some of his players.

Twitter ain't off the record

From Benson, aka @desertronin.

It was discussing if a Capitol Hill staffer can expect his tweets to be off the record just by declaring it to be so in his bio on Twitter.

Farrauto put up a sentence on his Twitter account stating that all of his “musings” are off of the record. It’s like standing in the middle of a room of people, some of whom are his friends and others of whom are reporters, and shouting at the top of his lungs, then not expecting the reporters to write about any stupid things he said.

Anything you say in a publicly available place is on the record.

And anything that you put on Twitter from a non-private account is public. It's searchable, you can find everything on Google, on Twitter's search engine... so to think that by slapping up a disclaimer saying your publicly available "musings" are off the record is almost as funny as the press releases I constantly receive that have this disclaimer at the end:

Confidentiality Notice: This e-mail,including all attachments is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review,use,disclosure or distribution is prohibited unless specifically provided under the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender and destroy all copies of this message

Sorry, Farrauto, anything you say in public is on the record.

And if your tweets are not protected, then they are completely public.

As the Washington City Paper put it:

You cannot speak into a microphone and be off the record at the same time. Those two things are incompatible and should never be attempted.

Twitter is just another kind of microphone, a internet-based, 140-character microphone.

Twitter: Average user has 126 followers

Some stuff that Evan Weaver, Twitter's lead engineer in its services team, said at a recent talk:

-the average user has 126 followers;

-only 20% of its traffic comes through the Twitter website; the other 80% (logically) comes from third-party programs on smartphones or computers. So if you're looking at Twitter stats on your website, you're probably underestimating that source of traffic by a factor of five;

-an early peak test of the service came during President Obama's inauguration in January, when more than 300 tweets per second were being added to the message queue.

Read the whole article for some Twitter geek stuff.

@TheOnion: Twitter Creator On Iran: 'I Never Intended For Twitter To Be Useful'

America's Finest News Source:

"Twitter was intended to be a way for vacant, self-absorbed egotists to share their most banal and idiotic thoughts with anyone pathetic enough to read them," said a visibly confused Dorsey, claiming that Twitter is at its most powerful when it makes an already attention-starved populace even more needy for constant affirmation.

I love Twitter. Hell, you probably got here from Twitter.

Steve Jobs liver joke

From Chumworth, a writer for David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel:

Steve Jobs had a liver transplant two months ago. His doctor's say he's doing really well liver 2.0.

Car companies on Twitter

The LA Times looks at how car companies are attempting to use Twitter as a part of their marketing plan for cars:

Scott Monty at Ford says the company has been using Twitter since July of last year and now has about 30,000 followers across 12 subject areas. "We're using it in day-to-day communications in terms of interacting with people, solving vehicle-related problems, sharing corporate news and live tweeting from events and auto shows." He says the company's more popular feeds include information on its Drive Green program and its Mustang model, and the company recently launched a bilingual feed in English and Spanish.

@PeteHoekstra digs deeper

Congressman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) is still digging deeper, a day after, via Twitter, comparing the Iranian election protests to an unsuccessful political stunt that House Democrats tried to pull.

From Politico:

The incident he was referring to occurred in August last year when Nancy Pelosi shut out the lights in the House chamber after passing a motion to adjourn for the August recess. Republicans had taken to the floor for a pre-election round of bashing Pelosi and Democrats for failing to lift restrictions on offshore drilling.

It should be noted that there are a few differences between the victimized Iranians and the oppressed Republicans.

Pelosi, unlike Ahmadinejad,didn't dispatch her Revolutionary Guard to beat them up or shoot them in the streets, nor did she have the capacity to block their access to the Internet, rig a national election to keep them from being seated in the legislature or place them under House arrest when they protested.

Is there any question as to why Republicans are mocked so often?

State of the Twittersphere

Hubspot, the folks behind the Twitter Grader came out with June's "State of the Twittersphere" report (pdf).

Some findings:

• 79.79% failed to provide a homepage URL

• 75.86% of users have not entered a bio in their profile

• 68.68% have not specified a location

• 55.50% are not following anyone

• 54.88% have never tweeted

• 52.71% have no followers

I am not in any of those categories.

And:

• The average user tweets .97 times per day
• The average user has tweeted 119.34 times in total
• The average user has a following-to-follower ratio of .7738

Something to look over if you are a Twitter user.

Everything he needed to know about social media he learned from being @the_swine_flu

I've met Baratunde a couple of times, and he is hilarious. He made fun of my other blog's name from the stage at the Big Tent in Denver during the Democratic National Convention (though, admittedly, New Mexico FBIHOP is a pretty damned weird name).

He happens to be one of those people who "get" Twitter -- he uses his Twitter account in one of the best ways of anyone who I follow. Ditto with his Facebook account (and probably a hundred other social media networks that I don't know about).

He also one of the few people I know that sends out more tweets than I do, which is pretty impressive.

But here is a video of him showing, using his experience as @the_swine_flu, how to use Twitter correctly and to get attention effectively. Using humor, of course.

Twitter a one-way mode of communication?

Is Twitter a one-way mode of communication?

That's what a study from Harvard Business Publishing hypothesizes.

The study of 300,000 Twitter accounts found that that top ten percent most-prolific Twitter accounts accounted for 90 percent of all the Twitter posts. Which is amazing.

However, the study also show, "A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one."

This suggests, to me, that they didn't just do a poll of active accounts. There must have been a significant amount of accounts where people start an account, think, "I don't see what the fuss is about" and quit. Or they decide to shed the name and start a new account with a new name (even though it is incredibly easy to switch names in the "settings" menu).

The study writes:

To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue - Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia's edits. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

I'm not so sure if a study of those "top ten percent" of Twitter accounts wouldn't prove otherwise.

It would be interesting to see how many of the tweets sent out where "@ replies," or replying to the original author.

Using Twitter in the classroom

One teacher at the University of Texas at Dallas has been utilizing Twitter in his teaching, according to an article in Read Write Web.

Rankin uses a weekly hashtag to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class. Some of the students have downloaded Tweetdeck to their computers, others post by SMS or by writing questions on a piece of paper. Rankin then projects a giant image of live Tweets in the front of the class for discussion and suggests that students refer back to the messages later when studying.

People are using Twitter for a number of different applications, many that the founders of Twitter surely never anticipated.