I asked a more detailed version of this question to Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter yesterday morning at the Conversational Marketing Summit (of course, folks also tweeted it all):

@ev I follow Twitter more than FB, some see Tweets only as FB updates. Would be cool if status was write once, read everywhere.

Part of his answer is that there is a technical limitation. Facebook’s API doesn’t currently allow you to get Status out, only to put it in. So it’d be up to Facebook to allow it.

But also, people use status differently on different services.

In fact, someone followed up asking if they couldn’t have an option for some tweets to update their Facebook status and others to leave it alone. @ev indicated that the simplicity of the single text box with few options is a key feature of Twitter that they are reluctant to tinker with.

Why would it be important to selectively update status to different services? Continue reading →

A real magazine on newsstands available to Muggles this October will have an animated cover, just like The Daily Prophet newspaper read by Harry Potter.

Nokia is buying Symbian in hopes of setting it free.

By making the operating systems for its smart phones free and open source, will better compete with forthcoming Android and the iPhone App Store?

It must do more.

Not to repeat myself too much, but it’s all about the complete user experience, and Apps are the new Singles.

Unless Nokia finds a way to address the complete experience for users of buying and using the phone, it’s still going to be falling behind.

Perhaps more importantly, Nokia can’t drive all inovation for the industry. Independent developers must contribute. They must make it easy and fun to discover, buy, install and running applications for Symbian, as well as making it easy for developers to write and sell apps across handsets and carriers using their platform.

Otherwise, the innovations will all be coming from somewhere else, and the market share is likely to follow.

I was on the local TV news last night and this morning on several stations, as well as in the papers. “Dale Larson, Pallbearer” said the caption in the print edition of the San Francisco Chronicle.

The article described us as a “group of costumed partygoers [who] held their own protest march.” I disagree that we were either partygoers or protesters. The caption got it right: we marched a few miles up Market street to mourn. Then most of us left to go home on the last train — Muni closed down at 8:30pm.

In all the coverage I saw about Castro Halloween, the issues were presented as a matter of controlling a party and how that affected cops, businesses and the public. Of course something had to be done to fix an annual celebration that had grown to hundreds of thousands and included nine shooting victims last year. But nowhere did I see mention of the tragedy of a cultural loss, or of a desire to reclaim values that once dominated this celebration.

The essential point to me is that Halloween in the Castro originated as a neighborhood party in a predominantly gay neighborhood that was dominated by overwhelming friendliness and spectacularly dazzling drag queens and their tolerant friends. Over the years, it attracted elements from outside the city who don’t share value for diversity and spreading love and joy. Shutting it down means they win. What a shame, and certainly a loss to be mourned.

I hope we find a way to reclaim the values of being fabulous and friendly over poorly costumed, sloppy drunk, intolerant and violent.

Another group of costumed partygoers held their own protest march, carrying a cardboard coffin up Market Street from Beale Street to the Castro, all the time chanting, “Come mourn the death of Castro Halloween.”

“If you’re going to kill Castro Halloween, you have to have a funeral,” said Mark Tyne, whose all-black ensemble was crowned with a top hat.