Twitter TV On, Twitter TV Off
The microblogging
site Twitter has put an end to all the gossips about it making a TV
show. It says it’s not making any such show. As the celebrity world
around Hollywood was also abuzz with this hearsay, the No.1 Twitterer,
actor Ashton
Kutcher, threatened to shun the site while wife Demi Moore expressed her
displeasure on Twitter’s move.
By
Rakesh Raman
Here’s what Twitter said in
its blog post of May 26: “Just to be clear, Twitter is not making a
television show. Some Hollywood folks are developing something that
leverages Twitter and they are extremely enthusiastic as evidenced by
all the media hubbub yesterday and today. We have little to do with
their efforts but we wish them success.”
It was rumored that Twitter will join
hands with Reveille Productions and Brillstein Entertainment Partners to
make a “Twitter TV Show” that will allow viewers to chase celebrities.
This had irked
Kutcher and Demi who thought it’d be an attempt to trespass upon their
privacy.
However, Twitter clarifies:
“Regarding the Reveille and
Brillstein project, we have a lightweight, non-exclusive, agreement with
the producers which helps them move forward more freely.”
Today, many celebrities use this
140-character blogging site for social networking. They report about
everything to everything else – all from their routine toilet-to-bed
stories – in the short text format.
Last month,
there was a highly publicized
contest between Kutcher and CNN played out
on Twitter. Kutcher had issued a challenge to CNN saying that his
account would set a new record on Twitter, attracting 1 million
followers before the Twitter account @cnnbrk, held by CNN’s
breaking-news feed. Kutcher won. And the contest also helped Twitter
gain a lot of publicity in the
struggling social networking market,
which looks like a mere bubble.
Even
Twitter, which was launched in 2006, says: “While our business
model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make.”
That’s true for other social networking
businesses also. Even video-sharing network YouTube, is trying hard to
make some meaningful money and
it’s costing the owner Google $1.65 million a day. (Read:
Google’s Expensive Pastime: YouTube)
Like deep-pocketed
Google invested in YouTube, most of these social networks are surviving
on investors’ money. Facebook too has just raised some capital.
Digital Sky
Technologies, an investment group with stakes in Eastern European and
Russian internet businesses, has made a
$200 million investment in
Facebook.
While there’s a noisy hoo-hah around social
networks, they are nothing more than some free hangouts for gullible
youngsters who want to have some “cheap virtual fun” – sometimes even
with fake identities.
Twitter is one of them and it’s simply based
on the “I-follow-you-if-you-follow-me” principle. Users just feel some
temporary excitement with more number of followers on their Twitter
accounts. Otherwise, it has yet to prove its utility. Will it?
Rakesh Raman
is the
managing editor of My Techbox Online.
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