Image-conscious celebrities have long tried to control their personal brand. However, the rise of the internet has made that job much tougher. A few years ago, publicists were scrambling to snatch up and register celebrity domain names (for example, “britneyspears.com”), sometimes paying off industrious domain squatters who had beaten them to the punch. Now, that battle is playing out all over again on Twitter.

Exhibit A: Pop superstar Kanye West is extremely upset at the microblogging service for allowing an imposter to claim the Twitter handle “KanyeWest.” AP reported (via TwitterBacklash) that the real Kanye posted an exceptive-filled essay on his blog (in all caps!) lambasting “THE PEOPLE AT TWITTER” because they “KNOW I DON'T HAVE A (ed: bad word) TWITTER SO FOR THEM TO ALLOW SOMEONE TO POSE AS ME AND ACCUMULATE OVER A MILLION NAMES IS IRRESPONSIBLE AND DECEITFUL…”

Kanye then demanded Twitter suspend “kanyewest” and similar accounts; a request Twitter was happy to oblige.

Exhibit B: This one may not have the same happy ending. The AP also reports that St. Louis Cardinal Manager Tony La Russa is suing Twitter, “claiming an unauthorized page using his name damaged his reputation and caused emotional distress.” In this particular case, the imposter tweeted comments disrespectful to diseased ex-players. Though the account has since been deactivated, the lawsuit claims the comments damaged La Russa’s trademark rights.

For its part, Twitter is apparently attempting to implement account verification, according to co-founder Biz Stone. The question is, how can they possibly implement that system?

The bottom line is for all the publicists and would-be celebs reading this, please go register your official Twitter account before some prankster with an axe to grind does it for you.

As for me… I kind of hope someone poses as me on Twitter. It would make me feel important.

I have recently undergone a re-evaluation of my internet identity. Almost as important (arguably more important) as one’s real life identity, internet identity is exciting in its malleability. Two years ago, as I was ushered around the Emerson College campus, my tour guide informed us that soon we’d be able to access the Emerson’s WiFi as far into the Common as the gazebo. I was stoked. I envisioned myself lying in the grass, my computer in front of me, attaching the latest short story I’d written in an email and sending it out to all of the literary magazines eager to publish me. At that point in time, this, in addition to the occasional Facebook visit, was the extent of my internet usage. This fact, and past, dark experiences of having my time wasted, contributed to my initial resistance to Twitter. Even now, after my resistance has waned a bit meaning I have an account that I update more than once every six months), the little byline that pops up when you search “Twitter” on Google, “What are you doing right now?”  makes me uneasy. At first, I didn’t see the point. “Twitter is nothing more than Facebook updates” is a sentence that I’ve said more times than I can count. Generally annoyed by information that is useless to me and unnecessarily shared, I saw Twitter as just another way for my generation to destroy whatever respect we’ve gained.

What turned it around? Curiosity. What else? I initially signed up when my sister, on the verge of having a baby, and my brother-in-law insisted that I stay updated on the progress of her labor via Twitter. I guess you could say the miracle of birth got my foot in the door, but it was the consistent emails (“So-and-so is now following you on Twitter!”) that finally nudged me to update and follow my friends’ accounts. I also have a little to owe to the blog post by one of my fellow ideaLaunch-ers, Brindey Weber, and her blogpost, which sparked my interest even more by revealing the practical uses of the site. I tend to stubbornly boycott things that the masses support (i.e. Twilight), so realizing that Twitter can be used as a launching pad to other things rather than solely for the point of tweeting/Facebook-status-updates opened my eyes (and online heart) to new possibilities. One of my first return tweets (a term that still makes me cringe because it sounds like it’s referencing drug use) was something along the lines of “Melanie Yarbrough forgot Twitter existed.” I stick by my initial argument that the majority of tweeters (including myself, most times) are sharing less-than-necessary information. And though I haven’t quite reached the point of text messaging my tweets to the website, I couldn't go much longer resisting something even God uses. That will not be the case if he ever reads Twilight.

Faced with an online culture that promotes openness, sharing and expression, news organizations are now scrambling to restrict the online Twitter, blogging and Facebook habits of staffers. According to various industry trackers, big publishers like The New York Times, Washington Post and Bloomberg have all informed employees to watch it when it comes to Web 2.0.

For example, according to LA Observed, Washington Post reporters were told via memo to, “Consult your editor before “connecting” to or “friending” any reporting contacts who may need to be treated as confidential sources.”

Bloomberg employees can no longer “publish Web sites, blogs other online journals that discuss companies, people or topics covered by Bloomberg News…” according to Valleywag.

The New York Observer (via Valleywag) claimed that New York Times editor Bill Keller opened a recent newsroom address by warning attendees not to tweet the proceedings:

Before we get going, I'm going to say something I perhaps should have said Monday, when we did our digital update in this auditorium...You wouldn't Twitter something you overheard at the coffee cart without asking. You wouldn't Twitter the Page One meeting (although it would probably get you thousands of followers.) So I'd be grateful if you would lay down your Blackberries and iPhones, and treat this as a conversation among colleagues.

It will be interesting to see if this crackdown results in any high profile violations and terminations. The whole crackdown reminds me a bit of how reluctant the film and music industries were to embrace new technologies and distribution methods like Napster and bit torrent.

Of course, “news” is a less tangible product than a song or film, but if authenticity and transparency are driving force behind success in the blogosphere and social media realm, how narrow is the vision of media outlets trying to rein it in?

GOOGLE DIED YESTERDAY! Or, at least acted really sluggish and crashed for a sampling of users early yesterday. Looking at the headlines of the incident, one would think that the Four Horsemen were gearing up for a trot.

First, the story. According to the Official Google Blog, an internal error resulted in 14% of user web traffic being rerouted through Asia. This slowed things down a bit. That’s it. The problem was identified and fixed within an hour. Urs Hoelzle, SVP of Google Operations offered his apologies, claiming, “We're very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we'll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again.”

Now, the inappropriate overreaction:

• Reuters: Google Blackout: The Fallout (ed: What, like after a world-ending atomic blast?)
• Computerworld: Google Down! (ed: RUN!)
• Hispanic Business: Google Down, World Stands Still? Google Outage Shows Site's Ubiquity, Our Overdependence (ed: To answer the question, no, the world didn’t stand still.)

And Twitter… Oh boy. It was on fire with #googlefail tweets. Or, should I say is on fire. Some people apparently still think Google is down a full 24 hours after the problem was corrected.

So to answer the question posed by the title: What does one do when Google fails? Apparently, complain about it on Twitter and write hilariously over-the-top headlines.

What should one do when Google fails? Use Yahoo.

Fans of Twitter laud the micro blogging site it for its ability to clue individuals in on what’s happening “now” and for its “real time” analysis of trends so current, they aren’t even trendy yet.

And Adam Wilson trumped them all this earlier this month with a tweet so “in the now,” he completely bypassed typing it… the tweet went out straight from his mind to the Twitteratti masses.

It should be mentioned that Adam Wilson is a biomedical engineering doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin Madison researching technology that could one day aid individuals who otherwise cannot communicate, but it’s hard to get past the the-future-is-now-and-it’s-so-freakin-cool factor.

The tweet in question was 23 characters long and read, “using EEG to send tweet.” In reality, the process is still slow and clunky, with users strapping a brain monitor on and crafting a message letter by letter from an alphabet flashing on a computer screen.

In a release, Wilson further explained how the technology worked: "The way this works is that all the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually. And what your brain does is, if you're looking at the 'R' on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the 'R' flashes, your brain says, 'Hey, wait a minute. Something's different about what I was just paying attention to.' And you see a momentary change in brain activity."

Click to see Wilson’s mind reader in action.

Advances in medical technology aside, it’s notable how Twitter lent itself to the promotion of a mind reading device. Critics often blast Twitter as a collection of unfiltered musings containing nothing of value. As ESPN’s Bill Simmons so bluntly put it, the Twitterati’s mindset toward writing can be summed up as, “’here are my half-baked thoughts about absolutely anything and I'm not even going to attempt to entertain you.’"

With that thought, perhaps it’s time to stop describing Twitter as “real-time” and start touting it as a peek into the collective mind of the Internet.

(Image courtesy of UW-Madison)

Conventional teen wisdom: once your parents embrace something, it is no longer cool. So, inspired by a recent Facebook friend request from my mother, I am boldly declaring on this blog that Facebook is so over.

With Facebook’s rapid growth, (More than 200 million active users), it was only a matter of time before it reached a critical mass and spread to the squares… and even the technology-impaired, like my mother.

The numbers back this up. According to the Inside Facebook blog, the number of Americans over 35 on Facebook has nearly doubled in the past two months alone, now compromising 30% of users. Of those, the fastest growing demographic is women over 55. Pulling back a bit, there are now more users old enough to have kids (ages 26-65) than there are kids (ages 13-25 – Facebook forbids users younger than 13) on Facebook.

Will the adult presence on Facebook have a chilling effect on the lewd behavior conventional wisdom says teens chronicle online? Perhaps. And if it’s no longer safe for a teen to post compromising photos of alcohol consumption and obscenity filled wall-postings, where will they turn for their daily debauchery? Twitter perhaps?

Perhaps not, according to Reuters’ MediaFile, Twitter’s recent rise in popularity is due to adults:

But Twitter devotees are grayer than one might expect: The majority of Twitter’s roughly 10 million unique Web site visitors worldwide in February were 35 years old or older, according to comScore.

In the U.S, 10 percent of Twitter users were between 55 and 64, nearly the same amount of users as those between 18 and 24, which accounted for 10.6 percent of the total.

You can find me too: @LifeTipsLady 

Tweet tweet!

Got to hand it to Michael Arrington for this great scoop. His site, TechCrunch, is reporting that Google is in talks to purchase Twitter. According to "two separate people close to the negotiations," the deal is in late stages.

Besides complete and total Internet domination, why would Google bother with the micro-blogging service that has yet to even unveil a business plan? Perhaps it's because of Twitter's vaunted “real-time search” of Tweets. As Arrington explains:

More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually (The W Hotel pestered me until I told them to just leave me alone), or simply gather the information to see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.

And all of it is discoverable at search.twitter.com, the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer.

People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That’s valuable stuff.

How is Twitter's search different from Google's? In a word, simplicity. Twitter is only searching and indexing 140 character tweets, not scouring and ranking whole websites based on complex algorithms. Therefore, Twitter's search results are more immediate, or available in "real time."

Beyond marketing, others claim that the Twitter search function can provide a unique insight into news and events, a thought that Valleywag's Owen Thomas throws cold water on:

Williams's Twitter, which lets users post short updates about whatever thought crosses their minds, is being hailed by the Valley's groupthinking bloggers as a revolution in "real-time search." Much as a stopped clock is right twice a day, occasionally one finds some bit of timely news posted by a Twitter user. (It's hardly a threat to established newsgathering operations, because more often than not, what's posted on Twitter is just a link to some page on CNN.com or nytimes.com.)

The fact that Google is in cost-cutting mode and has engaged in significant company layoffs also seems to belie any major purchases. However, Google has a history of purchasing hot web properties with no real revenue model... they bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.

For what it’s worth, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone addressed the rumors on the Twitter blog.

It should come as no surprise that Twitter engages in discussions with other companies regularly and on a variety of subjects.

That’s certainly not a denial.

The conventional wisdom is that Twitter’s popularity stems from the fact that the microblogging service allows followers an glimpse into the personal lives of others. While I’ve maintained that the driving force behind Twitter is just the opposite (that is, Twitter is primarily driven by exhibitionism, not voyeurism); either way, people are all about immediate access to intimate details.

That said, Twitter is a natural fit with celebrities. Fans want to be closer, celebrities crave attention. But the New York Times performs the Twitter equivalent of debunking Santa’s existence by suggesting that GASP! some celebrities don’t write their own tweets! They have ghost writers churning out phoniness 140 characters at a time.

According to When Stars Twitter, a Ghost May Be Lurking, rather than allowing backstage access to the celeb’s life, Twitter is really just another vehicle for manipulation and branding. From the article:

Many online commentators are appalled at the practice of enlisting ghost Twitterers, but Joseph Nejman, a former consultant to Ms. Spears who helped conceive her Web strategy, said there was a more than a whiff of hypocrisy among critics.

“It’s O.K. to tweet for a brand,” he said, remarking how common it is for companies to have Twitter accounts, “but not O.K. for a celebrity. But the truth is, they are a brand. What they are to the public is not always what they are behind the curtain. If the manager knows that better than the star, then they should do it.”

I’m sure I speak for disheartened fans everywhere when I ask, if you can’t even believe in tweets anymore, then what can you believe in?