It is easy to scoff at Twitter’s bubbly Web 2.0ness and a model that, on the surface, appears self-promotional. Billed as a “microblogging” service, the service permits 140 character updates from the site, any phone, and a growing array of desktop clients. It is easy to wonder what merit can arise from permitting people to speak of themselves from virtually any locale addressed by a cell tower. Yet, a peek beneath the glossy exterior reveals a teeming world of robust and, at times, very personal communication.

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In an interesting and unprecedented move, Rock the Vote has partnered with Microsoft to allow XBox 360 owners to register to vote over Xbox Live beginning August 25th. The partnership comes as Rock the Vote tries to register 2 million new young Americans for the election this fall, and with a user base as vast as Xbox Live (12 million members) consisting largely of that demographic, it puts them in a good position to reach that goal.

The initiative extends so far as to allow 360 owners not only the ability to register, but a place to “participate in presidential polls and voice their opinions to the presidential candidates.” A dedicated political forum will be available, and Rock the Vote PSAs will become available through Xbox Live.

To provide some scope, Microsoft conveniently pointed out that if all of XBL’s user base were of age and voting, they would number sufficiently to be considered the 7th-largest state, controlling around 20 electoral votes.

Chris Brogan gives us a list of 50 extremely useful web apps, summarizes their cost (many are free), categorizes them, and gives links. A handy little list.

Delicious 2.0 goes live. Promises to be “faster, easier to learn,” and “hopefully more desirable”.

OMG HI UR 2 CUTE

TechCrunch revealed today that Fox Interactive Media’s Myspace social networking phenomenon has agreed to start implementing OpenID authentication. This brings their 200 million user accounts to the already-300-million-strong OpenID userbase.

No, this does not mean we’ll be hearing the latest hits from Estelle and Kanye West or having “glitter bling” on OpenID-enabled sites.

Single sign-in is something of a panacea for those of us who live on the web. Perhaps one day OpenID will be the one.

Last month we had talked about the scaling issues and load problems that Twitter is experiencing. And experiencing them they are - just last night Twitter was down for over an hour. One of the reasons Twitter has so much load is that third party applications (such as Twhirl) have to use Twitter just like the rest of us - make a request, wait for the servers to deal with it, and then do something with the response.

TechCrunch revealed that in order to alleviate some of those issues, Twitter today opened up their “XMPP firehose” - the raw data feed of all regular Twitter data. Third parties can now access this feed, filter out what they’re looking for, and present the information to their applications. This should relieve some of the pressure on the Twitter service.

We were talking the other day about this crazy phenomenon - the one where the faceless, heartless behemoth of a megacorporation suddenly does a 180 and shows you that there are actual people (you know - human beings) working behind the scenes. Remember them?

A “rogue” Comcast employee named Frank Eliason went and started a Twitter account called “Comcast Cares”. People who were tired of getting the runaround from the phone support, who were tired of holding for an hour, or who weren’t getting the help they needed tried Tweeting ComcastCares as a last ditch, desperate effort to get some help.

Amazingly, it worked. Suddenly modems were getting rebooted, technicians were showing up, and internets were getting faster and more reliable.

Comcast got wind of this, and contrary to all common sense, went and gave Mr. Eliason some more people to help him out.

We’d like to believe in the romance and idealism of this, that maybe “Frank” is able to go around the system, and get things done without the red tape. We’d like to envision him as a Robin Hood figure, a lone hero working the system from the inside. We’d like to see him saying “IM IN UR BIG CORPORATE OFFICE, FIXIN UR STUFF”.

Perhaps we’re a bit glassy eyed and starstruck. This is probably all highly engineered, has been discussed in meetings, and has three middle managers running the show. Perhaps Frank Eliason isn’t real. Perhaps it’s all a sham.

But we can dream, can’t we? We can dream.

Man in Perth sells lifestyle on Ebay.

The Well c.1989 = Icrontic c.2008 (except our haircuts are better).

Forget mobileMe. Try Rapture mail.

The big news out of the WWDC 2008 conference is not hardware this time around - it’s a suite of web-based apps called MobileMe.

Apple purchased the domain me.com and is going to be rolling out a series of productivity apps such as an email client and calendar that will be fully mobile and will synch with whatever devices you happen to be using - including PCs and Microsoft software such as Outlook.

This is in clear competition with Google apps. Where the Apple version seems to shine is in presentation. The MobileMe apps look almost like a regular Mac OS desktop. Seems like 2008 is going to be the year of the “cloud” application.

They are billing MobileMe as “the Exchange for the rest of us”. A place where you can keep all of your “stuff” and have it accessible via web anywhere you happen to be.

Sitepoint’s Kevin Yank asks the question: Did Rails sink Twitter?.

If you use Twitter, there’s a very good chance you see “Something went wrong. Reload the page and try again” or similar messages quite often. Twitter experienced explosive growth this year, but it is clear that their backend is not up to the task. Multiple times a day, I myself get Twitter errors.

Twitter is arguably the world’s largest Rails application. However, Kevin Yank believes that poor planning on the developers part, and bad decisions regarding the overall design philosophy of Twitter are responsible for their issues, not necessarily Rails itself. He believes that if Twitter was developed as if it were a CMS instead of a messaging services, that would explain the issues that are blossoming now.

It’s an interesting article, but begs the question: How do they fix it?

Remember the raid on Pirate Bay? Turns out the lead police officer was employed by Warner Bros. AT THE SAME TIME.

The September that never ended.

London Bridge isn’t falling down, it’s twittering (via Waxy).