Worth listening to if you live in San Francisco and have kids

"…in pursuit of revenue, Twitter faces the same challenge that has dogged social-networking platforms like Facebook. If advertisers can tap into its network free of charge, why would they pay the company to do so?

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the San Francisco start-up is watching the outside initiatives closely as it prepares to launch its own fee-based services this year, but doesn't view them as competition. "We want to work with those companies that are already making an effort," he says. "

Mr. Stone says Twitter recently hired a product manager to oversee the development of commercial accounts. The accounts would offer users more features in exchange for a fee, but Mr. Stone says Twitter hasn't set a launch date for them.

Twitter continues to creep into the enterprise

"I believe that more standardization leads to more agility," John says. "SaaS allows us to say, 'This is good enough … for what we need.' So you don't end up with these horrible situations where you have these highly customized systems. We go with [configuration] option A, B or C. If one of those three doesn't meet our need, we can try to influence the next release. But in most cases, A, B or C is going to meet the need."

"TwitterHawk allows you to automatically send tweets to people based on key words. Guy gives an example of someone tweeting about “fashion week” and TwitterHawk sending that person a tweet directing them to the Fashion page on Alltop"

"With roots in computer clustering and grid computing, the technology that first sprouted during the ASP era of the late 1990s is now the computing topic du jour. There's understandable reason for the excitement but advocates of cloud computing now have to battle the inevitable hype that attends any major technology shift."

"Is it possible to run an online-only local news site that serves a city's readers well while turning a profit? Is a digital news product a viable solution for cities whose papers can no longer afford to operate? We think so."

"What caught my eye, though, was that professional services firms were building up support for various SaaS applications such as Safesforce.com and GoogleApps. As such an ecosystem develops around software as a service, it’s clear to me that the phenomenon, which essentially requires trusting a service based in the cloud, heralds the eventual acceptance of actual cloud computing, where IT infrastructure is delivered from the cloud."