Writing in Le Monde, Marion Solletty takes yet another cut at what this latest move by Google means:

. . . the star of Silicon Valley feels itself under threat. Its vital forces, the engineers who fine-tuned its mysterious algorithms, are leaving it. With the eye of a connoisseur they have watched the sparkling rise of the new stars of the Web, the social networks. And they respond to the call of the bold.

Search, and text ads, and YouTube videos: all that is just so yesterday, man, just so . . . 2008, you know! And then following directly comes the anecdote of Cedric Beust (with a suspiciously French name!), a six-year Google employee who now has left to join LinkedIn.

What goes around, comes around. According to Solletty, Google first stocked itself with quality personnel by raiding the leading Internet-related firms of its own period of skyrocketing growth. Now it’s the turn of others, including especially Facebook, whose employee total has gone from 1,000 to 1,700 within the past year (although it has had its own top-level defections), or Twitter, which has tripled from 100 employees to 300 in that same period.

Ironically, Google’s latest salary-move did cost it one employee. The internal company message announcing it (“CONFIDENTIAL: INTERNAL ONLY”), and lauding employees as “the best in the world,” was soon leaked to an industry blog so we could all savor the message, at least vicariously. But he who did the leakin’ was fired.

UPDATE: It’s worse for Google than we thought! TechCrunch now has this piece about a Google engineer threatening to leave to join Facebook and getting $3.5 million in stock to stay!

                          

In part, the value-added from Mme. Bergey’s piece comes simply from the specifics she provides. I had vaguely been aware of a novel having been published wholly via Twitter, but didn’t know anything more specific. Turns out it was called The French Revolution, by Matt Stewart, and, sure enough, just over a year ago (starting on Bastille Day 2009, appropriately enough) it was “published” in the form of 3,700 tweets. Here’s that Twitter-feed’s site, but by this point you (together with me) are a bit too late: that particular collection of tweets constituting the novel is no longer available, so you’ll have to buy it from Stewart’s site here.

At least from an iTunes link accessed via that very same homepage you can download a free iPhone app that provides supplemental video, music, and recipes (!) to enhance your reading of Stewart’s novel. Come to think of it, why not just make an app that is a novel in and of itself? Well, they’ve already thought of that, even in France. There the pioneer has been a certain Hieronymous Donnovan (real name: Laurent Blanquin), although initially he published his novel Real TV from September 2008 until January of 2009 via the alternate social network MySpace, posting a new chapter every Monday. The interactive nature of that particular medium meant that feedback from readers, as the novel was being revealed piece-by-piece, was a given. Says Donnovan: “Even though I knew where I was going [with it], the comments did have repercussions on the [novel's] course.”

When that exercise was over, he then got together with the French company Storylab to turn the work into an iPhone app: the first five chapters free, but €1.59 for each set-of-five of the remaining 15 chapters, making the total cost €4.77. Since then that original iPhone app has been supplemented by one for the iPad and another for Android, and Donnovan has been joined in this sort of enterprise by William Réjault, a writer of somewhat greater renown within France. He also chose to publish his novel (Le chemin qui menait ver vous, or The Road That Led to You) on the iPhone/iPad with initial chapters free and later chapters costing something, for a total cost of €8.00. Multiply that by 20,000, which is about how many times the apps have been downloaded so far, and see whether you don’t come out at the end with a decent piece of change. (Granted, some readers would have not paid for the full book, and this revenue was inevitably shared to some degree with Réjault’s app-builder.)

And there are sure to be others, including one Alexandre Jardin, who will publish his new novel Le Zèbre (The Zebra) via iPhone/iPad app between October of this year and May of next. But M. Jardin plans to take an even more different approach: the action of his novel will apparently happen in “real time,” meaning that he’ll be making it up as it goes along, relying heavily upon readers’ feedback as to how the tale should progress, to the point that certain active readers might even become actors in the story themselves.

All of this naturally casts a new light on what literature and the authorship thereof is supposed to mean, although it is not as if this sort of heavy influence on the very make-up of a novel wielded by the technical details of its publication is anything brand new. The classic works of Charles Dickens, for one, were famously structured with a view to their serialization in the leading British newspapers of their day. (Among other things, this meant that each chapter had to end with some sort of climax, so that readers would be curious enough about how things turned out to be willing to buy the next edition of the paper.) In the decades in-between, however, and particularly since World War II, a vogue set in for non-linear narration, in which authors of fiction felt free to skip freely back and forth from present to past (and, I suppose, to future as well). This sort of thing, one can assume, will be rather harder to pull off when one is, in effect, collectively building a narrative largely on the basis of reader feedback. There is also the Idea that stretches back at least to the Romantic Era of the Author as the lone, genius artist, delivering his life-wisdom to us the readers from the mountaintop – what will happen to that? Or was it ever a valid concept in the first place? The Nobel Committee, for one, does seem to assert that it is, every year, in the second week of October.

                          

At least those quotation-marks are in the original title, as if to show that the Gazet editors aren’t quite ready to fully endorse that opinion. Still, the first paragraph reads in its entirety: “The social-networking site Twitter is a cost-free and easy hunting-ground for child-molesters, experts say.” Their proof? One “on-line conversation” between a pedophile and his 13-year-old prey as published in the English newspaper The Sun – one that is thoroughly banal (13-year-old: “Are you trying to seduce me?” Pedophile: “No, not at all. I just want to more more about you.”) besides coming from a source of little more use to the general public than as an exhibitor of “Page Three girls” and none at all when it comes to factual presentation. Oh, and let me add: besides constituting but one instance (an “anecdote,” in scientific parlance) of alleged evil behavior, and one whose use completely misinterprets the Twitter’s technological essence at that. Yes, it is possible to use Twitter to send an “@reply” to communicate directly with someone – but then everyone who subscribes to you can read the message, and anyone can find it afterwards through search. And it is also possible to send a “direct message” to someone, that no one else can read – although that’s only when the two parties subscribe to each others feed, and tell me how that is possible in a case of pedophilia other than after the child-molester has already gained his victim’s confidence through entirely other means!

But what Twitter is really all about is not one-to-one communication, but rather broadcasting – it’s basically a broadcaster of 140-character-or-less messages. In this light, it’s ridiculous to paint it as some potential tool for pedophiles. This article is simply brain-dead, looking to attract attention through the cynical spreading of rent-an-expert pedophilia alarm. And that’s sad, among other reasons because presumably plenty of people (Belgians who are Flemish, mostly) read the Gazet van Antwerpen and believe what they find there, and so will come away with a mistaken negative impression of what has proven to be quite an innovative and useful communications tool.

                          

Naturally, I leave it to you, dear reader, to examine Pfeifle’s article itself as you may wish. Intern.de, though, has some reservations about it, like Pfeifle’s assertion that Twitter was mainly responsible for the emergence of the story of the assassination of Neda (Neda Agha-Soltan), who basically became the lead-martyr for the Iranian opposition’s cause. I also rather believe that it was YouTube, if anything, that figured most largely in spreading the news and horror of her killing. Pfeifle also conveniently ignores the very substantial defects to Twitter that emerged during those days of Tehran street-demonstrations, such as the sheer volume of “tweets” to be digested (221,000 per hour at their height, it says here) and the related problem of a high “noise-to-signal ratio” (i.e. it was difficult to glean out useful information – much less anything that could be verified – from that flood), as the audience for the “#iranelection” hash-tag eventually was even treated to tweet-advertising piggybacking on that tag from a UK furniture company! The intern.de blogger also detects a high level of sheer PR content in Pfeifle’s piece, whether it’s trying to spin for Twitter or for Mark Pfeifle himself. I agree, but again, you can go off to the Christian Science Monitor site and judge for yourself.

                          

Now, as you might expect he has been driven to take up his pen by a spate of recent “What’s it good for?” attack-articles, such as in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (by Bernd Graff; the title is pretty untranslateable – Tschilp, tschilp, bla, bla – and yes, part of the caption under that picture up-top of the two parrots cuddling asks “whether these two have rather more to say [i.e. that's interesting than Twitter-tweeters]?”), and even in his own Die Zeit (by Jens Uehlecke: Stop with the chatter [already]!; Geschnatter basically = “chatter”). One rather perceptive point he makes is to point out the parallel between reactions to Twitter among many journalists (“highly hysterical”) and the reception that weblogs met with when they first came into prominence about five years ago (wasn’t it about then?).

Ultimately, though (and just as in the case of weblogs), these attacks on Twitter generally fall wide of the mark, mainly because they invest too much meaning into it. Take the objection against the banal sort of “tweets” for which the service has become infamous, like recounting what one is having for breakfast, for example: Mohr points out that, although it’s true that a “tweet” can potentially be accessed and read by anyone with a Twitter account, that usually is not the intention of the “tweeter.” Rather, such broadcasts are only meant for a close circle of friends for whom such banal-but-personal information might well have some sort of relevance. (Put another way: if the “tweets” do nothing for you – just unsubscribe!) He also finds that Twitter’s critics are giving it rather more credit than it deserves by terming it a new “medium” (as in “mass media”). It’s not; it’s rather a “platform,” meaning more-or-less simply another means for communications, and not one making any inherent claim to accuracy (or, indeed, to seriousness). Yes, inaccurate and downright false information is transmitted via Twitter all the time, but the same is true of e-mail or the telephone, but you don’t see these smart-alecky journalists attacking those.

Presumably what seems to be the internecine battle over Twitter within the cohort of Die Zeit contributors has come to some sort of settlement, along the lines of “Twitter is OK after all.” I say this because of today’s latest piece there on the subject (Twittering with filter and magnifying-glass), which abandons the pro-and-contra rhetoric to simply present fifteen illustrations of handy Twitter-related tools (whether within Twitter itself or related websites that have sprung up to act as Twitter accessories). Yes, the accompanying explanatory text at the bottom is in German, but you might want to click through this presentation nonetheless, because (if you’re into Twitter) you might well find something understandable (because it’s mostly illustrations) and useful.

And then, for lame comic relief, there is also this belated Twitter-satire piece (“Period, period, comma, dash”) in the Financial TImes Deutschland, no less. The “Twitter Revolution” has arrived, author Nils Kreimeier proclaims, but things won’t stop there. He predicts that the next regime to feel the wrath of a microblogging-armed population will be Cuba’s, but by then it will be all about something called “Worder,” which allows not 140-character but rather just one-word messages. Soon to come after that: “Smiler,” with which users communicate only by sending out to the Net one out of a wide variety of “smileys.” Yeah right: hilarious (:-\ speaking of “smileys”) . . . frankly, I’m positive I read the same sort of lame humor somewhere else in English, a while ago, but I just can’t remember exactly where.

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