Politics & the Internet

A few observations:
Obama works with a Facebook early stage employee:

• raises a shit load of cash by going for the long tail of contributors
• engages with Twitter, Facebook et al
  
• owns the Digg front page

Sarkozy works with Loic Le Meur.

So, what influence will the Internet have on the next UK election. Please tell me someone in the incumbent parties has been watching and knows that the hell they are doing (and this doesn't count).

Twitter: would you pay for it...no but they should (depending on who you are)

I read (and commented) on a post by Jason Calacanis who proposed that super Users of Twitter pay $20/month (or some other fee) or the use of the system.

My point was that the eventual end cost of most messaging utilities is zero and that if a charge was introduced then this would merely force a competitor with no uptime or scaling issues to enter and allow easy transfer of contacts.

A friend started me down a different track. His thinking is: Twitter needs it's top Users more than they need it:

In the last 7 days www.calacanis.com received about 5,000 visits/day. The site does not give feedburner stats and I am not sure if he is part of a RSS package which boosts subscribers. He has 27,000 followers on Twitter. What's hard to gauge is the traffic driving between the two.

My point here is: who needs who more? If you remove the top 50 Users from Twitter does Twitter not actually collapse? How many people joined/maintain their existence on the site because of a web personality (Calacanis/Scoble/Arrington)?

So, should Twitter be charging heavy Users for a clean cluster to support them or should Twitter be moving these Twittstars already and write it off as a marketing cost?

Twitter and and micro blogging eats itself

How many Twitter messages are:

Twittering on @Twitter

?

I do like these services even if I don't have enough time to constantly play ball. I'll pick it up for a while and then drop it again.

Anyway, as my wife is expecting our next girl in around a month I loved this which then made me thing of this.