About this Job

This is a unique opportunity for an ambitious, multi-talented individual who wants to see the inside of a fast-moving startup and work closely with the founders. The ideal candidate is a future entrepreneur or executive who is willing to work hard and do a wide variety of non-glamorous tasks for a year or two in order to get their foot in the door, learn, and make connections. You will work directly with Twitter CEO Evan Williams and co-founder Biz Stone with the simple goal of saving them time. Which means: The level of work you'll do is only limited by your capabilities. Are you capable of: Designing a presentation? Researching a market? Creating a financial model? Great, as long as you're also willing to make copies and run errands. Essentially, you should be overqualified to be an assistant, but not have a problem doing assistant-like tasks. In exchange, you'll get unique visibility into a unique company, a great learning experience, and the chance to move on to do many other things (in Twitter, or elsewhere—with a strong endorsement).

Requirements

Excellent written communication skills
Strong computer skills (spreadsheets, word processing, presentations, email)
Highly organized and efficient
People person with tact and diplomatic instincts
Track record of trying things
Extreme trustworthiness
Strong interest in business and, particularly, technology startups
Broad knowledge of the Internet industry

(Photo by Jason Shellen)

For example, it doesn't even allude to the company's office drama; cofounder Biz Stone subs in as spokesman for new CEO Ev Williams. It also skips over Twitter's latest privacy violation, which even affected the author of the piece.

But it does, in a roundabout way, get at the heart of Twitter's problem: The tool for posting short text updates can be useful for businesses — just not Twitter itself. Cofounder Biz Stone suggests the company may find a way to charge business customers for "premium services." A great idea. If only it had tried it a year ago, before the market crisis made such a move look desperate, rather than a bold experiment. (Photo by Getty Images)

Jason Kottke, a popular blogger, wrote about the Yearbook Yourself site on Sunday. Ev Williams, the founder of Twitter, soon adopted an Eisenhower-era look on his site, even as he complained about the trendiness of FaceYourManga. His colleague at Twitter, Biz Stone, was an early adopter of the manga look last week. A Twitter user, Vishy Venugopalan, notes that it's too late to go manga, and has followed Williams on the Yearbook trend.

This is fashion, of course, nothing more and nothing less. Countless startups have sprung up around the idea of blinging your "avatar," the fancy word entrepreneurs like to use for one's online depiction of self. But no one seems to be making money off this trend. Yearbook Yourself, improbably, was offered up by a chain of shopping centers, which advertises some of the apparel chains in its malls on the site. FaceYourManga only says that it is "property of Pixelheads," which appears to be some kind of Web design operation.

The profile-pic generator is nothing new. A Simpsons avatar generator was popular last year. Nintendo's Wii uses "Mii" avatars, whose manga-lite stylings became popular even off the videogame console. But the two new sites show that demand is spreading. There may not be a market in this, but there is a mania.

What we lose is any sense of who we're dealing with online. Unreal avatars serve to further the breakdown of online manners, and personal boundaries. It's easier to flirt with, or insult, a manga character or a black-and-white Photoshop job than a real person. Of course, our online friends never really were our friends, were they? Look at them: They're just funny pictures, acquaintances as trading cards. Collect them all.

(Profile pics by ev, biz, caroline, and midtownninja)

1. Robert Scoble
2. Michael Arrington
3. Jack Dorsey
4. Biz Stone
5. Matt Cutts
6. Pete Cashmore
7. Dave Winer
8. Guy Kawasaki
9. Loïc Le Meur
10. Kevin Rose
11. Merlin Mann
12. Stowe Boyd
13. Jeff Atwood
14. Jeremiah Owyang
15. Veronica Belmont
16. Kara Swisher
17. Scott Beale
18. Marc Andreessen
19. Ryan Block
20. David Sifry
21. Emily Chang
22. Om Malik
23. Timothy Ferriss
24. Nick Douglas
25. John Battelle
26. David Cohn
27. Louis Gray
28. Tom Foremski
29. Tim O'Reilly
30. Ariel Waldman
31. Matt Mullenweg
32. Dean Takahashi
33. Philip Kaplan
34. JD Lasica
35. Sarah Lacy
36. Brian Solis
37. Charlene Li
38. Rafe Needleman
39. Dan Farber
40. Howard Rheingold
41. David McClure
42. Margaret Mason
43. Jason Goldman
44. Leah Culver
45. Chris Shipley
46. Jackson West
47. Liz Gannes
48. Owen Thomas
49. Adeo Ressi
50. Max Levchin

(Photo from Michael Arrington)

Clever of Stone, in a post promising increased Apple-related Twitter usage won't bring the site down, to suggest that Twitter and Apple are up to something together. Especially after past hints of a Twitter-Apple collaboration had the companies' mutual fanboys so revved up.

But it's clear they're talking about Cook, who they identify, rather insultingly, as "a former systems administrator." The post brags about "a recently enhanced staff of amazing systems engineers formerly of Google, IBM, and other high-profile technology companies." That, too, is an obvious dig at Cook, who's mostly worked at startups.

But the friend of Blaine who emailed us about Twitter's outage puts the blame on an "operations guy" at Twitter, whom he describes as a "fucking moron." He writes:

The whole story is that it takes more than just Blaine to keep Twitter up and running and whether servers are up, properly configured and not running hot definitely doesn't fall under the developers' responsibilities.

The other part of the dispute was whether Twitter needed to be rewritten in another programming language. Perhaps, but that wasn't the real issue in scaling, according to the Cook camp.

We're utterly unqualified to evaluate the technical arguments here. But the back-channel badmouthing that's going on here? We're experts at that, and we rate it utterly delicious. As fingerpointing goes, this Twitter battle takes the prize.

Waldman's complaint: Using a (now-offline) anonymous Twitter account, @confess, a user called Waldman a "crack-whore," and mockingly congratulated her for having "graduated to soft-core lesbian porn!" When Waldman asked Twitter's team to warn or remove the user, founder Jack Dorsey declined, on the grounds that "we've reviewed the matter and decided it's not in our best interest to get involved." Waldman believes Twitter owes it to their community to do just that, and got them involved instead.

She took the dispute to her blog, instantly become a cause célèbre — with 700 comments, 2,000 Diggs, and a raging debate on customer-service discussion board Get Satisfaction.

As CNET's Caroline McCarthy observed, "in the bubble-like culture of Web 2.0, Waldman is a sort of celebrity — and with celebrity comes scrutiny and often ugly commentary." Attention magnifies attention. Now Waldman's an even larger public figure, and therefore target — and sure enough, she's been called a whore a whole lot more after the incident than before.

Being called a "whore" online is one thing, but being called one in connection with one's search results? This may be Waldman's deeper gripe. "Anyone can use Twitter to consistently harass you and ruin search results for your identity," she writes. Twitter enjoys a stratospheric rank in Google's search results, making it a favorite in the world of social media marketers — the world in which Waldman works. But the spat has only strengthened the associations between Waldman's good name and the bad ones she's been called, from the all-powerful Google algorithm's point of view.

For a few, this reporter included, getting the mantle of "whore" tossed atop one's search results might be a value add, but for most, it's a detractor from the business at hand. What hurts Waldman as much as the misogynist namecalling is that potential business partners will see a social-media expert who's bad-mouthing a rival service to shame it into managing her online reputation for her.

(Photo by adactio)

The scaling shit only bugs nerds. Most people aren't doing enough messaging volume to notice. The people bitching are the ones who would never leave. Actually, whoever invests in Twitter is getting IP rights to something that solves a whole *class* of scaling problems, i.e. not just what's wrong with Twitter. I mean, I assume Twitter is a feature of everything going forward. Either Twitter proper, or that capability. That means everyone who succeeds will encounter this issue. If there's five non-Google companies in the world who've figured this out, I'd be shocked.

Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters, a space constraint meant to allow them to be sent to cell phones as text messages. Many of them are shorter, though, and Twitter has been using the remaining space to place house ads since last October, as entrepreneur Charlie O'Donnell first noticed. They began as jokey little asides: "Tip: Wow, you look *good." But they've since changed to tips about Twitter features. As O'Donnel noted, it's a simple step for Twitter to switch from advertising its own products to advertising others: "Tip: Drink Jamba Juice."

Google and others have struggled to sell ads profitably on social networks like MySpace. Stone and his cohorts, no dummies, have to have noticed this, and concluded that placing ads on the Twitter.com website is foolish, provoking user outrage for little payoff.

Advertisers, meanwhile, are hankering to reach people on their cell phones. Using the remnant space in Twitter messages is a simple way to do so, and hard to turn off without disconnecting from Twitter altogether. In this effort, Twitter's biggest rival will be its power users, who have already figured out that Twitter is a perfect way to send out spam to their so-called friends.