The winner of this auction gets my account with all of my followers. The account is in my name now, but the winner of the auction can pick any other name that's available on Twitter for the transfer. For example, you could have http://www.twitter.com/x where x=any name thats not already taken. You can change it yourself at anytime too, one of the cool features about Twitter settings.

So basically it's like getting a new account with your own name, but having a pre-installed audience.

The first sign of value to most people would be the number of followers I have (the audience size). At the beg. of this auction, there are 1397 followers and I am actually quite proud of the actual quality of these followers, moreso than the number. Feel free to explore everyone to see who's there.

Also, as with any dynamic group, there is obviously risk. My followers could jump ship at anytime. There is no guarantee on this part. People will come and go, thats just the way it is. Whether you represent a company, a group or just yourself, this group will not want to be sold to, Im sure. The successful winner will share a reciprocal value with the followers.

Finally, I'd just like to give props to all of you out there who are following me on Twitter. No offense what so ever - we can easily find each other again.

It's no big deal. I liked Twitter. But I found it too easy.

I think my time would be better spent drawing cartoons and writing books.

That's just how I feel.

Want to get something done? Turn off Twitter. Turn off Facebook. Turn off blog comments. Turn off FriendFeed. Turn off Flickr. Turn off YouTube. Turn off Dave Winer's blog and Huffington Post. Turn off TechMeme.

Turn off the distractions.

Yesterday, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, head of Her Majesty's Government, became the first head of government (at least, as far as I can tell) to officially embrace Twitter.

Is this a momentous occasion? It's hard to say. Politicians have been increasingly embracing various forms of social media. Nowhere, for example, do more elected officials actively write blogs than in Europe.

Some have suggested in recent days that Twitter is going mainstream. Perhaps that's the case as well.

There has been a lot of conversation in the circle of folks that dips into my FriendFeed stream regularly on the topic of comment and discussion fragmentation, which essentially means the problem of posting things on your blog, them ending up in your lifestream at Twitter and FriendFeed, and the ensuing conversation never making it back to the original posting place. This little bit of functionality actually re-unites a bit of the conversation from the FriendFeed fragment (shard?).

I wonder if this means that they'll be working on further comment fragmentation formulae? We'll be interested to see how this develops.

Technology has made staying in touch with your friends and family both easier and harder: living a fast-paced, on-the-go lifestyle is easier (and a lot of fun), but it's more difficult to keep track of everyone when they're running around at warp speed. That's why we're excited to announce that we've acquired Jaiku, a company that's been hard at work developing useful and innovative applications for staying in touch with the people you care about most -- regardless of whether you're at a computer or on a mobile phone.

Current Jaiku users can still use the service normally, and new folks can sign up for an invitation to the service when we're ready to expand. We plan to use the ideas and technology behind Jaiku to make compelling and useful products. Although we don't have definite plans to announce at this time, we're excited about helping drive the next round of developments in web and mobile technology.

First, Twitter was a fun side project, then it was cared for lovingly at Obvious until it was time to form Twitter, Inc. Today, we're excited to announce an important moment for Twitter. We've raised funding from our friends in New York City at Union Square Ventures.

From some of his early writing about Twitter we had a hunch Fred Wilson was someone we'd get along with. After we met with Fred and his team, we knew we wanted to work together. As Fred's written in his post about the news, Twitter is going to use this funding to grow our resources and focus on the important tasks ahead.

To help us achieve these goals we're also working with our old friends out here on the West Coast at Charles River Ventures. In addition, we're honored to include some folks we've been inspired by as angel investors including Marc Andreessen, Dick Costolo, Ron Conway, and Naval Ravikant to name a few.

From 1 pm - 5 pm EST, our bloggers will be at work, chatting about the action on the TV screens. Feeds will come in from around the world, and we'll throw some opinions out there. Who rocks harder, Foo Fighters or Fall Out Boy? Who has more stage presence, Madonna or Shakira? Figure it out and get back to us on Saturday.

Pownce is a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. You'll create a network of the people you know and then you can share stuff with all of them, just a few of them, or even just one other person really fast.

At some point, Twitter-ers came up with their own method of directing updates to one another using an @ symbol. We started supporting this behavior by doing things like creating the in reply to link, confining the reply messages to friends in the loop, and linking the @username to a profile. Another layer of support to this behavior is a feature we launched tonight which collects updates directed at you-just in case you missed 'em.

So what the heck are they talking about? Some Twitter users willingly provided their usernames and passwords to a mash-up project called Twittervision (a service unaffiliated with Twitter except that it accesses our API). They did this so they could be part of the fun and access more Twittervision features. However, Twittervision was not checking to see if any of these folks had marked their updates as "protected." Starting today David Troy, the creator of Twittervision, tells us he'll make sure to check for this.

As a reminder, please note that mash-ups and other experimental projects built using the Twitter API are totally awesome and fun but developed by folks outside of Twitter. So, we don't necessarily test them all out. If privacy is a concern, we remind you to refrain from supplying your Twitter username and password to other people, sites, or services.

UPDATE: It turns out that basically your information wasn't private if any one of your friends had given their details to Twittervision; effectively it was able to go and read private data you'd been given access to, and then build separate user pages for those people. Dave Troy responds: "There was no "glitch" in Twitter's API (outside of the scaling issues we've all witnessed) but rather in the cumulative interaction between our system and theirs." I've now changed the headline from "Twitter glitch leaves 'private' users exposed to the world' to the current version.

Mr. Troy predicts businesses will be able to mine people's tweets for valuable customer data.

For his next project, he plans to craft a universal translator to allow him to pry into the thoughts of foreign Twitterers.

"It's sort of a Babel kind of thing," he said.

Just don't expect any greater profundity from overseas.

"I've been seeing all the Japanese posts and I didn't know what they mean, and I translated them and they were just as stupid," Mr. Troy said, laughing.

Well over the last four days, Twitter has been non functional more than it has been in the past. It's been constantly loosing tweets, or missing tweets in the feed, or the servers have just been down (those cats seem to be have been a constant problem). This is Twitters longest period of technical trouble. Maybe I’m seeing more of it; having access when the rest of the world is asleep, and a good period for downtime adjustments, but it has been very flaky.

This has lead to a fair number of people, who are new to Twitter to just abandon it really before they got started. This is not good for any startup company. Or as Miles Burke has suggested maybe a name change in jest, is the way to go. The longer term users of Twitter are also starting to suggest that maybe they should be looking for a better alternative (remember people tell that Gen-Y is fickle).

In its current form, Twitterverse displays popular words based on time and popularity. We’re pulling data every minute from the public timeline RSS feed as it updates.

The data is parsed by word match, eliminating certain types of words, and a script generates the cloud based on time frame and popularity. We’ll be adjusting the algorithm frequently as we get more data, as well as limiting out certain words (or display names). For now, words are displayed based on being repeated a certain number of times during the specified timeframe.

Even at this basic level, you can start to get a sense of our collective activity and the general zeitgeist of the day. For example, since we cleared our test data and started re-collecting data off the public timeline on Sunday, April 8 at 5:40pm PST, we started to see a shift from people twittering about "easter" early in the day to a growing number of people twittering about "sopranos" as the night progressed. You can imagine checking in daily to see what topics arise.

But the larger aim is clearly to woo the sort of tech-savvy Democrats who can harness online gadgetry to benefit the Edwards cause. And Twitter stands out, both for its cachet among true tech cognoscenti and the level of commitment it exacts from users. Plugged in with mobile wireless devices, especially active users post and respond on the site dozens of times a day.

So it's not surprising that Edwards dictates his entries to an aide, who enters them on the site. It's also not surprising that many of the entries are terse to the point of near-semaphores, such as this post of a month ago: "In san antonio."

However, it is surprising to note that Edwards has interactively Twittered his way into committing some actual news. Well-known blogger Robert Scobie came across a Twittered declaration from Edwards that his campaign would be "carbon neutral," and posted a text reply asking how a fast-traveling presidential campaign could ever hope to redress its fearsome carbon-consumption deficit.

Much to Scobie's surprise, Edwards promptly Twittered a promise to offset the carbon he generated by funding alternative-energy research - marking what seems to be the first policy clarification from a major candidate on social software.

So the launching of Twitter provides a good alternative considering that the use of mobile phones is much higher than that of computers. In Malawi for example, there are about 50,000 Internet users against about 700,000 mobile phone users out of a population of about 12 million. Twitter allows users to post a small update via SMS, instant messaging client and the web. Anyone who chooses to follow you will get that update on the Twitter home page, or their mobile phone of they choose to. Unlike most mobile phone web services, you can update via SMS from anywhere in the world and from virtually any handset.

Although Twitter was designed to let users announce what they're doing at the time of posting, we have already seen other uses coming up. The train system in San Fransisco (BART) uses Twitter to announce changes in schedules; conference participants use it to post notes of the sessions at the conference and there are updates from news companies like BBC via Twitter.

How much growth has Twitter lost because of all the time it's unavailable? I have never engaged in sustained use of a web app that is down this much - I can imagine large numbers of other people just walk away and never come back. Everybody says Evan Williams has struck gold in this wildly succesful new service - but I'm sure he knows there's a real risk of that never proving true do to constant service problems. Good luck to the Twitter folks - I sure wish the site was up!

But the service of San Francisco-based Obvious Corp. might go down as one of the era's silliest fads, along with unreadable MySpace designs and blog widgets that display pictures of recent visitors.

These deep thoughts leap into the world as blog posts — as well as text and instant messages to blather-stream subscribers. But it probably won't take many posts about midnight fridge raids and toenails ripping through socks for readers to conclude their Twitter pals are turning into twits.

Remember the "Seinfeld" episode in which Jerry and George pitch NBC "a show about nothing"? At one point Costanza asks a network executive, "What did you do today?"

"I got up and came to work," the exec replies.

"There's a show!" George exclaims. "That's a show."

That's also a Twitter.

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