Max Gladwell

Giving Twitter credit for effectively spinning off companies like Foursquare, Gowalla, Plancast, GetGlue, and Foodspotting. Happy Days is one of the most successful and iconic sitcoms of all time. This idealized portrayal of life in the ’50s and ’60s ran from 1974 to 1984. It gave us the Fonz, the term “jumping the shark”, and [...]

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Twitter’s latest geolocation feature, Local Trends, starts us in the direction of geospatial awareness. How relevant or useful are Twitter’s trending topics to you? There was a time when the Twitter ecosystem was more contained and trending topics was generally useful or at least interesting. As this screenshot shows, it’s become useless. The mainstreaming of [...]

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Twitter’s sudden profitability is a lesson in priorities and value creation. Bloomberg BusinessWeek broke the news today that Twitter became profitable. (Just as surprising, Bloomberg BusinessWeek broke this story before the tech blogs.) Twitter achieved this feat through big search deals with Google and Microsoft (Bing) totaling $25 million. Though it remains to be seen [...]

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The confluence of events that lead to the serendipitous success of the #EcoMonday Twitter meme. The genesis moment for #EcoMonday was April 24th, 2009, at precisely 1:34 pm Pacific Time. We know this because Twitter keeps up-to-the-minute records of everything we Tweet and Retweet. It was a Friday, and a unique series of events would [...]

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Happy New Year! Best wishes to everyone who’s read, followed, and supported Max Gladwell. Alas, Twitter was not there to celebrate the ringing in of the New Year (EST). We didn’t even get the fail whale. Service resumed about ten minutes after the ball dropped in Times Square. Considering the year we’ve had, though, it’s [...]

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