'Why are you ruining Twitter?'

I told Webware writer Josh Lowensohn that I was being pitched to talk to the guy behind the Twitter game Spymaster, and his first reaction was, "Ask him, 'Why are you ruining Twitter?'" It's suitably belligerent question given the violent Twitter postings that the new game is generating. Reminiscent of the Vampires and the Zombies social role-playing games that were big on Facebook last year, Spymaster rewards you for building an army of followers on Twitter, and makes it too easy to spam Twitter with your actions. When you "assassinate" a competitor, or perform other in-game activities, Spymaster sends out a Twitter notification if your account is configured to do so (which it is by default).Chris Abad, CEO of iList, which built Spymaster as a side project, says, "We're not encouraging people to spam Twitter." He reminds me that when you sign up for the game, it gives you "a granular ability to tweet out or not" your activities in it. There is a small in-game recurring reward to sending out Twitter notifications, although Abad says it's "insignificant" compared with the rewards you get for doing other things, like recruiting members and achieving objectives. But that's why those notes are out there.

Tip No. 1: There are Twitter tools that can filter out tweets that contain the #Spymaster hashtag: Tweetdeck,Destroy Twitter, Twitterific, Peoplebrowsr, and other Twitter clients have an "exclude" filter. Twitter.com does not, unfortunately.

Tip No. 2: You can also go to the Spymaster opt-out page to prevent yourself from getting invited to the game at all. You may get invitations to the game via direct messages to your Twitter account if you don't. The best bet, if you don't want to participate in this system in any way, is to user both tips: use a client that blocks those spammy updates you're getting, and opt out of getting the game's invitations.

Spymaster default: Tweet your in-game activities.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

I tried the game, and I don't see the appeal. But then, I never got into the slot-machine battle style of Zombies either. I have more interesting battles to fight, thank you.

When I talked to Abad, he was clearly focused on making the game more fun. In particular, he's aware that the big Facebook games got monotonous as players reached the higher levels, so he's trying to make the game more fun and collaborative as players progress through it.

He doesn't know, yet, how this virus will make money. "There's an opportunity here," Abad believes, but he doesn't appear to have an idea of where exactly the opportunity lies.

Beyond murder

One company that has used Twitter's viral capability to drive actual business is HootSuite, which, during theTwittercon conference over the weekend, told audience members that the first 100 people who visited a certain URL could could get access to the private beta of HootSuite 2.0. The instructons on that page told people to retweet a message ("@hootsuite HootSuite 2.0: Get More Twitter Tabs, Columns and Stats [100 FREE Invites] #twtrcon") to get their prize. Unfortunately, far more than 100 people retweeted that message, and the message took on a life of its own in the retweetosphere. For a few hours the ad swamped the Twitter stream of people who were trying to follow the conference by tracking the #twtrcon hashtag.

I had lunch with reps from HootSuite, who recognized that their little marketing stunt had gotten away from them. They were suitably cowed and promised never to do this again. Ironically, HootSuite is a tool for marketing and PR pros to help them track what people are saying about their company on Twitter. It looks like a good app. But spam is no way to build business relationships.

There are going to be more Twitter spam problems in coming months. From games like Spymaster that ask players to recruit their friends, to give-aways like HootSuite's that reward people for sending out messages, to just plain blanket spams from clueless marketers, spam is about to get much worse on Twitter. As I wrote previously, there are some people trying to do something about it. Loic LeMeur says he's building an antispam database for Twitter. And, as I said, several Twitter clients currently have rudimentary controls for filtering out specific messages. Future releases will probably get more sophisticated. Chances are also good that someone will combine a Twitter client with a proxy service to manage and spam-filter Twitter accounts for customers.

Spam is, sadly, a solid and proven monetization engine for almost every electronic communication system. That's doubly true when there's no cost to transmit a message, and triply so when you can get a system's users to do the dirty work for you. Spam makes money. Fighting it can be profitable, too. Welcome to the one of the best ways to make money on Twitter.

Intel launches chips for low-cost, thin laptops

Intel is launching its line of processors for thin, inexpensive laptops at the Computex tech conference in Taipei. Intel marketing chief Sean Maloney talked about this in a phone interview.

Intel marketing chief Sean Maloney

(Credit: Intel)

"It's clear that people like devices to be thin and light," said Maloney, who was speaking from the Computex conference in Taipei where he will be giving a keynote on Tuesday.

"We've really taken that to heart and come out with a complete top-to-bottom range of microprocessors that enable radically longer battery life and much smaller designs," said Maloney, referring to Intel's new lineup of consumer ultra-low-voltage (CULV) processors.

Maloney continued. "There are a lot of computers being announced here (Computex) that look like conventional notebooks in terms of how wide the screens are, but they're super-thin, the performance is very good, and they get up to nine hours battery life without a big, fat battery at the back," he said.

MSI X340 X-Slim laptop is one of the first CULV laptops

(Credit: MSI)

"It's a big change for industry. It means the technology weaves its way into your life more because you're going to have all-day notebooks," Maloney said.

The new processors will encompass the Core 2, Pentium, and Celeron processor architectures, according to Maloney.

Prices for these new laptops will start at $399 and range up to $2,000 in some cases, Maloney said.

And will laptops based on these chips impact the sales of Netbooks? "I don't think so," Maloney said, but added: "It's a loser mentality to not develop one segment because you're worried about the other."

Maloney continued. "The demographics (for Netbooks) that's completely untouched is kids between the ages of 7 and 12. So, the Netbook market is still at a very early stage," he said.

In addition, Intel unveiled the Mobile Intel GS40 Express Chipset for the new ULV-based laptops. This "value" chipset enables ULV-based laptops to support HD (high-definition) playback, Windows Vista Premium support and native support for integrated HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface).

Wireles options will include embedded WiMAX or Intel "My Wi-Fi" technology. My Wi-Fi transforms a laptop into a WiFi personal area network, connecting directly with up to eight Wi-Fi-certified devices, according to Intel.

Though a crush of new thin laptops are expected, the MSI X340 is one of the first. The X340 has a 13.4-inch screen, weighs 2.86 pounds, and measures .78 inches thick.

Kentucky coach's daughters stir trouble on Facebook

I wonder about college basketball coaches. It's hard for them to be squeaky clean. Or even vaguely shiny.

So they certainly don't need their daughters' social networking to cause more discombobulation in their attempts to be a cross between Vince Lombardi and Mahatma Gandhi.

You see, I am currently placing my mind beneath the shiny hair of John Calipari, the new basketball coach at the University of Kentucky.

Calipari does seem to make quite a few people tense involuntarily. I am suddenly reminded of a 1994 incident in which Temple coach John Chaney threatened to kill Calipari at a press conference. (I have embedded the video, purely for nostalgia's sake.)

One recent critic appears to be an ESPN.com journalist named Pat Forde. Forde happens to live in Kentucky and tends to drizzle on the Caliparade. For example, when Calipari was hired, Forde asked during his introduction whether the Kentucky athletic director would mention his two trips to the Final Four. Or merely one.

"Because the first one, with Massachusetts in 1996, was officially vacated from the NCAA record books after an agent hooked up star center Marcus Camby with cash and prostitutes," Forde said.

Now Calipari is a fond Twitterer. He tweeted that he thought Forde's criticisms were personal.

But the coach's socially networked stirring is nothing when compared with that of Megan and Erin. These would be his daughters. Both are college students. And both are esteemed Facebookers.

Megan unfortunately used Facebook to reveal who would be Dad's replacement at the University of Memphis, which might not be considered perfect media management.

Indeed, it prompted Dad to be quoted by CBS Sports as saying: "I told them that they have to get off Facebook. This stuff is crazy."

The feisty girls decided not to listen to Dad. In fact, the highly amusing folks at Deadspin have been following Erin Calipari's remarkably literate Facebook postings about ESPN's Forde. They make for stirring digestion.

The dictionary definition post, for example: "To Pat Forde, Pat Fording. Pat Fording (verb): To say or write something with no background or sources. To act like you know something when in fact you do not. 2. To repeat the same story in different words 3 or more times. eg. "You told me that story three times!" "Oh, sorry for Pat Fording that."

Or how about the hair-besmirching post: "Source: "Pat Forde's hair received improper benefits of around $10,000 from Just For Men Hair Club and his hair also had someone take his SAT for him."

Gosh. What will Daddy tweet now? Will he take away their laptops? Will he have them transferred to Oral Roberts? Or will the wise avuncular corpses at the NCAA decide that social networking, even by family members, is a heinous violation?

Big data and Cloudera: Follow the money

When it comes to open source, this isn't Olson's first rodeo; in his past life he served as CEO of the open-source database company Sleepycat, which was acquired by Oracle in 2006. Olson understands the fragile balance that exists in open source; he's a firm believer that good community relations are critical for open-source companies. Case in point--since we last spoke, Cloudera launched the industry's first certification program for Hadoop and MapReduce, open source projects that support data intensive distributed applications.

Cloudera on Tuesday is expected to formally announce the closing of a $6 million series B funding round led by Greylock (whose past investments successes include Red Hat among many others).

Olson reports that fast growth in the business and rapid adoption of Hadoop/MapReduce drove heavy interest from investors. For Cloudera, apparently it's a buyer's market, so it decided to secure funding now to allow it to expand the business rapidly on all fronts.

So, with $11 million in the bank from top-tier VCs (Accel led the A round and participated in the B) along with individual investments from Diane Greene (former CEO of VMware), Marten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL), and Jeff Weiner (president of LinkedIn), Cloudera has successfully raised the smart money to compliment the big data all-star founding team from Google, Facebook, and Yahoo.

For a brief overview of Hadoop and Cloudera check out the video below.

Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.

iTunes 8.2 preps for new iPhone firmware

Earlier today, Apple updated iTunes to get it ready for the anticipated iPhone firmware upgrade to version 3.0. The company also updated its QuickTime video player.

iTunes 8.2, for Windows and Mac, makes the program ready for the iPhone and iPod Touchoperating system upgrade by pushing out changes made to recent prerelease versions of iTunes that had been available to only iPhone developers. It also includes one security fix.

Quicktime 7.6.2, for Windows and Mac, contains several security fixes, including patches for holes that could have been exploited to run arbitrary code by maliciously created PSD, JP2, and some movie files.

Come Ye to Apple, or Get Ye Thine Own Help - One to One Revamped

You've heard of One to One. You like it. You might have even bought it for some one. It's where you get a year of personal training (no more than one personal training appointment per calendar week) on a Mac, from a Mac specialist, in a Mac store, for $99. Nice idea, and useful for hordes of Mac n00bs.

Well, as of tomorrow, in a push to try and encourage customers to purchase their Mac inside an Apple Retail location, Apple will soon be doing away with One to One as we now know it. Soon it will only be available to customers at the time of purchase of a new Mac computer.

Here's some info on the new service:

• The new One to One service will be rolling out on June 2nd in Apple Stores (June 8th for online customers).
• This means that tomorrow (June 1st) Is the last day to purchase a One to One standalone (without a computer)
• Current One to One customers will be able to renew for one more year (as soon as their current membership expires)
• New One to One members (after purchasing a computer), will be able to renew for 2 additional years after the first year expires. Once these two renewals are used, they cannot buy One to One again unless they purchase another computer.
• The new One to One will include a data transfer and personal setup with a Mac Specialist, and will include a free "getting started" class. These classes will take place every day at 5pm.
• There will be no more "free" data transfers with the purchase of a new mac. (Unless you purchase One to One of course).
• One to One sessions, which previously cut off at 1 hour, may now go up to 3 hours, and may include up to 3 participants. (How bout we rename this to One to Three, then, Apple?).

In a continuing focus on the retail aspect of their business, Apple will also be remodeling over 100 stores this year, and opening 25 more.

Man Twitters and is attacked by tree

Human behavior is changing at a blistering pace.

Why, someone in Starbucks held the door for me today and actually waited until I could grab the door from him, rather than letting it swing tantalizingly before I could get there.

However, a British office worker called James Coleman has pointed us toward the perils of over-committed tweeting. According to a report in the Telegraph, Coleman, 23, was jogging when he suddenly felt the enormous uncontrollable urge to pull out his BlackBerry and Twitter.

Perhaps you have experienced a similar sensation. The buttocks tighten, the eyebrows begin to quiver and your hand reaches into the pocket of your tracksuit, desperate to clutch your most precious jewel.

You grab your BlackBerry with the intention of informing your 25 followers that you have, indeed, just reached into your pocket to grab your BlackBerry while jogging.

Should there be "Danger. No Twittering" signs?

(Credit: CC Angelin Richmond/Flickr)

Coleman, as almost everyone on the streets of Manhattan, temporarily lost sight of his own proportions.

Twitter can do that to you.

Before he could even finish his tweet, he thought he might have temporarily lost sight in an eye. Even more strangely, he was lying on the sidewalk and his head was beginning to throb.

Had a passerby, appalled at this arrogant thrust towards modernity, karate-chopped him to the ground? No, it was a tree. More precisely, a substantial, low-hanging branch that decided to play lumberjack.

"I could only see through one eye for a couple of days afterwards, but the swelling has started to go down now," Coleman told the Telegraph.

The experience hasn't, however, dampened Coleman's enthusiasm for ensuring that his 27 followers stay close to his footsteps, as well as his missteps.

Monday morning, he tweeted: "I am somewhat disappointed that my 15 minutes of fame stem from running into a tree whilst tweeting..."

Sir, but we are not disappointed. You have taught us so much. You have made us think very carefully about the wisdom of jogging and tweeting. However, you don't seem to have been put off by your own Twittering headbanging.

As I see that your latest tweet reads: "Running home--looking out for curbs, lamp-posts, cars, trees and all things stationary and moving :)"

Oh, Coleman, I am worried for the future of British business.

Report: Best Buy's iPhone supply running low

iPhone 3G supplies are dwindling. Does this mean a new model is on the way?

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

First-generation iPhone 3Gs are becoming a lot more scarce at retail.

Best Buy is anticipating its iPhone inventory running very low over the next few weeks, according to AppleInsider. A memo from Best Buy corporate to its sales employees says the stream of iPhone 3G inventory to its stores will slow to a trickle. Some stores may run completely out of the devices.

Reports surfaced last week of an Australian distributor that supplies iPhone 3Gs to carriers saying there was "only a few weeks stock available."

This is a similar pattern to what unfolded last year, when first-generation iPhone supplies began to run low at retail locations ahead of the launch of the iPhone 3G last July. Apple cut production perhaps a bit too early during the last go-round, resulting in very few iPhones sold during the second quarter of 2008.

This year, the reports of dwindling iPhone supplies are coming more than a month later than last year, suggesting that perhaps Apple has fine-tuned its iPhone model end-of-life process.

It also, of course, suggests what almost everyone is expecting at WWDC next week: the announcement of new iPhone hardware to go with the new iPhone OS 3.0 software

Dell cans its Mini 9 Netbook

Dell has stopped selling 8.9-inch Netbooks, focusing instead on ones with slightly larger screens.

Visitors to Dell's U.K. Web site earlier on Monday found the Mini Netbook page displaying the phrase "Available in 8.9" but no actual options for buying the Mini 9 model. The site focused instead on Dell's Mini 10 and 10v Netbooks.

U.S.-based tech site Engadget noted that a customer service representative in the U.S. had confirmed the "end of life" of the Mini 9.

Dell is the latest Netbook manufacturer to move away from 8.9-inch-screen devices. It appears that most consumers prefer screen sizes measuring 10 inches and above, despite the fact that such devices have the same screen resolution as their smaller kin.

Dell's Mini 9 can still be bought through Vodafone, which bundles the Netbook with a monthly mobile broadband subscription over a two-year contract.

'Android' Eee PC: The un-Intel Netbook

An Eee PC Netbook based on a Qualcomm processor that runs Google's Android operating system looks promising as an alternative to the millions of Netbooks out there tethered to Intel Atom processors and Microsoft Windows.

An Asus Qualcomm-based smart-book is a promising alternative to Windows-Intel Netbooks

(Credit: Asus)

Asus was showing a Netbook at the Computex conference in Taipei running the Android OS on top of Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor, according to TweakTown.

When Asus plans to ship a Netbook based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor isn't clear and Asus is not disclosing its plans (later this year?), but it becomes even less clear when you add Google's Android operating system to the mix. Michael Rayfield, an Nvidia executive, doesn't expect Android Netbooks to appear commercially until next year.

What is clear, however, is that these Netbooks are different from the Windows-Intel variety. Qualcomm is calling them "smartbooks" rather than Netbooks to draw attention to the fact that they will operate more like smartphones: standard 3G connectivity, always-on, and all-day battery life.

And what makes this Asus demonstration at Computex interesting is that all Asus Netbooks to date have run on Intel processors. Obviously, Asus thinks the Snapdragon technology is different enough to warrant a separate design.

Other specification for the Netbook include a 10-inch screen, a built-in Webcam, and a universal 3G radio that supports UMTS and CDMA networks on all frequencies used globally, according to an IDG News report.

Google giving small businesses local search data

Google is giving local merchants the ability to access data about how Web surfers arrive at a local listing in Google Maps, in hopes of figuring out why so many people in a particular neighborhood are searching for pizza.

Google lets small businesses create a small Web listing that appears next to queries such as "pizza San Francisco," which pop up in Google Maps with a link to a business' Web site and address information through a service called Local Business Center. Inside the center, they've been able to do things like verify their address and phone number, but Google is now adding search results data to the dashboard within Local Business Center, said Carter Maslan, director of product management for local search.

For example, San Francisco pizza parlors will be able to see the zip codes from which searches originate that wind up at their listing, the keywords that searches are using to find their result, and basic stats about search activity, Maslan said. The idea is to give those businesses a set of metrics from which they can make business decisions about expanding delivery areas, advertising in certain areas, or what people are looking for in a local pizza joint.

"It's that kind of new visibility into search patterns that we hope will help business owners," Maslan said. This feature is not linked to any of the accounts that businesses might have with Google's AdWords or AdSense programs.

The service is gradually rolling out Monday to those in the U.S. with Local Business Center accounts, with support for additional countries coming later.

The new dashboard for Google's Local Business Center now comes with a lot more data.

(Credit: Google)