oh, that's interesting.

Yet another blow to Twitter.

Lots of good stuff in this post including:

How to explain something in thirty seconds.mantra (three words), not mission statements (sixty words). Think time, not money, is the most important commodity. Think ahead, not on your feet. At the end of your thirty-second spiel, there should be an obvious answer to the question, “ So what?” If you can’t explain enough in thirty seconds to incite interest, you’re going to have a long, boring career. Unfortunately, many schools don’t have elevators or else students would know how to explain things in a thirty-second elevator pitch. Think

“I pulled together the welcome screens that grace some of the more popular social networks and communities on the web. As you look at these note how similar the language is - particularly Twitter, digg, Friendfeed and Stumbleupon.

Today, “open content” is the biggest front of innovation in higher education. The movement that started at MIT has spread to more than 200 institutions in 32 countries that have posted courses online at the OpenCourseWare Consortium. But, as Wiley points out, there’s still a big gap between viewing such resources as a homework aid and building a recognized, accredited degree out of a bunch of podcasts and YouTube videos. “Why is it that my kid can’t take robotics at Carnegie Mellon, linear algebra at MIT, law at Stanford? And why can’t we put 130 of those together and make it a degree?” Wiley asks. “There are all these kinds of innovations waiting to happen. A sufficient infrastructure of freely available content is step one in a much longer endgame that transforms everything we know about higher education.”

I’m currently reading the book Free by Chris Anderson, which revolves around the increasing prevalence of “free” as an economic business model. As I read the book, I thought I’d share the occasional interesting paragraph or two.

Here’s the first one that caught my eye:

“I found that the idea that you could create a huge global economy around a base price of zero was invariably polarizing, but the one common factor was that nearly everybody had their doubts. At risk of ageist generalization, there were broadly two camps of skeptics: those over 30 and those below.

The older critics, who had grown up with 20th century Free, were rightly suspicious: Surely “free” is nothing of the sort - we all pay sooner or later. Not only is it not new, but it’s the oldest marketing gimmick in the book. When you hear “free,” reach for your wallet.

The younger critics have a different response: “Duh!” This is the Google generation, and they’ve grown up online simply assuming that everything digital is free. They have internalized the subtle market dynamics of near-zero marginal cost economics in the same way that we internalize Newtonian mechanics when we learn to catch a ball.

The fact that we are now creating a global economy around the price of zero seemed too self-evident to even note.”

The music business makes the movie business look clean.

“Facebook isn’t a social network, it’s really a communications platform –in fact, when you look closely, it’s not unlike an operating system on the web.  Early innovations such as the instant messaging tool,then the applications platform that allowed 3rd party developers (called F8, correction: Just Facebook Platform) aren’t unlike what Microsoft offers to consumers. What separates them from others is the social news feed which aggregates what others in your network are doing.”

Twitter changed its homepage and it looks like it’s all about putting search front and center. Your move, Facebook…