Emerging economies get new role (BBC)

G-20 roundup from Pittsburgh. Click on the above video for Russian TV footage of black-clad cops rousting black-clad protesters, as a robotic-sounding voice emanates from a police loudspeaker: "No matter what your purpose is, you must leave." NYT story here.

Twitter's Value Is Set at $1 Billion (WSJ)

Thanks to all of you who get paid nothing by Twitter despite your being its only product/asset, the company that hasn't yet generated any significant revenue is about to get $100 million in new funding. In August 2008, Twitter had 4.3 million unique visitors; this August it had 54.7 million. Now hooked, users are, like it or not, about to be bombarded by advertisers and marketers. Too bad most of you are either out of work or otherwise can't afford to buy all the shit you'll be told to buy. (See next item.)

The Long Slog: Out of Work, Out of Hope (WSJ)

Typically excellent human-interest WSJ story, this one focuses on jobless Americans. Introducing an array of hard-luck yarns: "Nearly 15 million Americans are jobless, and the number is widely expected to remain high even as the economy slowly begins to recover. Part of the problem many of the unemployed face: the very fact that they have been out of work a long time."

IPO Market Snaps Back as Taste for Risk Returns (WSJ)

Five companies go public — the biggest IPO week in a year and a half. One of them is electric-car battery maker A123 Systems. Two others are REITs.

Boss blames smartphones for stress as company suicide rate comes under scrutiny (The Age, Melbourne)

CFO at France's biggest telecom warns that, as story says, "the barrage of emails from smartphones and personal computers was stressing out employees."

Market's Eyes Are Bigger Than Its Stomach; Chokes On New Supply (StreetInsider.com)

Double bubble trouble.

Yes, Celebs Have Tax Issues Too (ABC News)

No, not a reality show, but a slideshow.

MORE HEADLINES FOLLOW

All that bullshit you've tweeted on Twitter about yourself, your interests, your habits, every mundane detail of your desperate life — it's all about to finally pay off. Not for you, but for Twitter.

Biz Stone and his crew are getting ready to roll out "commercial accounts that will entice business users to pay for premium services like detailed analytics." Seems like a smart plan, and of course Twitter's been working on this for a while, and Biz Stone has of course been itching to get rolling on the moolah front. This new development from Twitter itself is not particularly good news for CoTweet, which is already helping businesses navigate through the tweet dreck.

Twitter's "pro accounts" would seem to make a lot more sense for advertisers and marketers than hoping that people will see their ads amid all the billions of posts. And it's better, in a way, for Twitter users because you won't see such plastered ads. What you will feel, however, is penetration into your own personal business by advertisers.

Wait till they get their hands on all that detailed info you've given them for free.

Maybe you don't mind behavioral targeting — you may even embrace the idea of someone taking all your social networking on Twitter and Facebook and detailed records of your Google search activity and turning it over to advertisers, the government, et al., so that various entities can check up on you, pander to you, or manipulate you.

As to the power of Twitter, here's just the latest tidbit: AdAge's "Could Twitter Destroy Hollywood's Marketing Magic?" It concerns the impact of "commenter culture" (ugh, what a phrase) on who goes to which movie.

Autoblog's take on Hyundai's Twitter feed. More on the "link economy" here, here, and here.

Ford's massive campaign to promote its European model Fiesta ahead of its introduction into the U.S. invades New York City on Friday, but the automaker's social-media blitz has already started.

You've gotta hand it to Ford. Here's how it's promoting its agitprop for Fiesta: "FORD FIESTA AGENTS TEAM WITH GOD'S LOVE WE DELIVER: AGENTS WILL DELIVER MEALS TO LOCAL NYC RESIDENTS THIS FRIDAY"

The unbailed-out automaker — Detroit's Big One — has a "director of social media" now, so what do you expect but "The Fiesta Movement," an ad campaign already plastered on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.

OK, so Ford's social media ad campaign is not as entertaining as the tail-chasing tale of hypocritical adulterer Senator John Ensign on Titter.

In fact, this ad campaign — full of self-referential stuff that makes it sound like a parody of an ad campaign (is it?) — does point to a growing use of social media that's already obvious: a blitz of marketing in which you'll have a hard time distinguishing friend from foe online. Restating the obvious: Any day now, Facebook and its ilk will no longer be referred to as "social media." They'll just be called "media" as more and more advertisers invade what is for now mostly interpersonal space and turn "social" into "marketing."

Ford needs to do something. In case the company itself doesn't mention it, "Ford pins hopes on small car market," as Australia's Manufacturers' Monthly points out. That's actually "small-car market," with the hyphen, although the car market is definitely smaller. In Australia, for example, auto sales are down about 20 percent.

As a preview of Ford's hard-sell campaign over here for the Fiesta, here's the promo material for what it calls "LOCAL FORD FIESTA AGENTS GIVE BACK":

Pretty strange that Ford would use the word "viral" in a campaign that vows to help AIDS victims. But that's what "viral" means these days, as AIDS recedes from the headlines and as even less reputable hucksters than car dealers try to bareback us online to buy their products.

Will Google's new Wave drown both Twitter and Facebook before the latter two even have a chance to monetize their huge networks of Earthlings? PC World's David Coursey uses more than 140 characters to raise the question "Is Google Wave a Twitter Killer?":

Don't pay no never mind, Coursey says, to how Google is portraying Wave so far (Google's Wave page). It's not a foregone conclusion, he adds, that Wave will drown the competition — once it's seen as competition. But he does note that the rumors that Google would buy either Twitter or Facebook haven't come to pass. And why would Google do that when it's rolling out something as comprehensive as Wave? He writes:

Remember this: Google (unlike Facebook and Twitter) already knows how to make money off the Web by selling ads. And remember AOL and MySpace, both of which prove how quickly the Next Big Thing gets overtaken by the next one.

Even if Wave doesn't drown Twitter and Facebook, its all-in-oneness — its potential to spread the news, e-mail, blogging, etc. more efficiently — poses a grave threat to an already dying daily-newspaper industry.

You don't need even 140 characters to sum up Twitter. How about this:

As opposed to daily newspapers, which have revenue models and management teams and are worth nothing.

Poor little Twitter, the Wall Street Journal notes, "trips on its rapid growth":

So, let's see . . . Twitter is free and it doesn't sell ads. In fact, as one analyst notes, "it has no current revenue stream." Yet, despite its built-in obnoxiousness, there are billion reasons to love Twitter — not the least of which is that it's such a beautiful little bubble boy:

His title? "Director of Digital Engagement."

As in the U.S., millions of characters in the U.K. are laying out their lives 140 characters at a time. Now the U.K. government's bureaucracy has stepped into Web 2.0 by appointing a chief of Twittering, an old-school type named Andrew Stott.

What's been free and easy until now — Twittering — may be on the way to becoming regulated and, at the expense of users, profit-making.

This is not making watchdog groups in the U.K. too happy. Taxpayer Alliance researcher Matthew Sinclair questioned the role of civil servants jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon:

Meanwhile, hints of trouble on Web 1.0, where Google's paid ad clicks plummeted in April, according to observers of the friendly but secretive Mountain View, California, giant of search services. In "Google money machine all cranked out?," Cade Metz of the Register (U.K.) points to a reportedly 26 percent drop in paid clicks during the four weeks ending May 9:

Twitter's already being terraformed: A PR agency has been set up to do major marketing and propaganda on it.

From the Register (U.K.) late last week:

Yeah, an "ecosystem" — the bullshit has already started. As the Register's reliably smart-ass headline writers put it:

Like a bucket of sweet syrup laid out for hummingbirds, Facebook has been assaulted by marketers eager to invade that planet's statusphere, as I noted last month.

No surprise that profit-takers are trying to use the networks, but in the case of Facebook, at least, users don't seem to mind this brainwashing.