. . . and the reasons won't fit in a tweet. About those DISASTROUS Twitter numbers, Slate says:

On the earnings call, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo specifically attributed the quarter’s revenue shortfall  ($436 million, short of a projected $440 million to $450 million) to the underperformance of some of Twitter’s new “direct response” advertising products that have not performed as well as expected.

From a layman’s perspective, being $4 mil short of almost half a billion for something that’s given away and charges nothing to use - well, that’s not bad. More bad news: they bought a company that uses proprietary tech to do something something leverage disruption blah de bad blah:

But the acquisition of TellApart does tell us something: that Twitter is now trying to monetize nonusers, people who don’t have Twitter accounts but might read it anyway.

This is the modern economy: if you can’t make money from your customers, go after non-customers. It’s like renting bowling shoes to people who are walking past the alley on the other side of the street.

The article notes that 20% of Americans have an active Twitter account - it seems high, but even if you cut the estimate by half and factor out people who just dip in now and then to follow a link from something someone posted on Facebook, it’s still a lot of people. So charge them. Say, 85 cents a month. If this drives a ton of people off the service, well, imagine someone delivering the bad news to investors: “We’ve lost 65% of our customers. And when we say ‘customers’ we mean people who didn’t give us any money. On the good side, the rest of the ‘customers’ are now paying us money, whereas before they didn’t.” You’re right; the stock would tank. More:

As long as Twitter remains the Web’s default bulletin board for up-to-the-minute news, Twitter’s content will be irreplaceable, but if something better comes along (and it always does), an exodus of users will immediately damage it. The medium matters: YouTube’s videos are far “stickier” and long-living than 140-character tweets. Twitter discourse is evanescent, and the close relevance horizon will make it very easy for communities to pack up shop and move elsewhere, leaving little behind.

Unless you archive your tweets, that is. So what is this better thing that could come along? Someone is sitting in a room right now trying to answer that question, but how do you simplify something that’s already the definition of simple? it’s like trying to reinvent a better fork. I know - we’ll simplify it even more, and use only two tines! No, then it would be tongs. And there are already tongs.

THE BIG 80s American Commodore Computer Club, English Commodore Computer Club, Italian Commodore Computer Club, Bloody Abbo-bloody-synnian-Commodore Computer Club darling:

Sorry, that’s more of a 90s reference. Here’s a collection of 80s magazine covers at Mental Floss. Charming, in their own way.

VotD Sorry for the cliche, can’t resist: I for one welcome our new Sandwich-Making Chornobyl Fox overlords.

They have evolved super-intelligence, thanks to radiation.