Behind the Twitter meltdown

The unwritten story, blue checkmarks vs everyone else

Not Obama, too!

When Elon Musk started offering Bitcoin buybacks via Twitter, you could be forgiven for not taking it seriously. After all, it’s not the least outrageous thing he’s said or done on social media. It falls right on the “hack or weird?” line.

But once Bill Gates, Apple and (gasp!) Obama and Biden joined in, well it was clear Twitter had a really big problem on its hands.

It was fascinating following the meltdown in real-time, from the first Elon posts to many, many others, to the eventual shutdown of Verified Twitter. We all knew the blue checkmarks would be the first with their backs against the wall when the revolution came, but wow, a lot of people really had some serious bottled-up Twitter verification feelings. ;)

I beamed into BBC Radio and ABC News to talk about it — really, the big issue behind the unserious scam messages is that all the 2FA and personal security best practices in the world aren’t going to do you any good if someone can get access to the admin panels for your favorite online service.

How long should your news story by?

Bloomberg News editor in chief John Micklethwait says, “A good rule of thumb is that stories should either be shorter than 400 words or longer than 900.” Can’t argue with that.

The podcast to watch (uh, listen to…)

Another Obama story? Locking popular podcasts into specific platforms, like Spotify is trying to do, kinda kills the get-it-in-any-feed vibe of podcasting (although that leads to plenty of confusion as well — Stitcher, Google Podcasts, iTunes, whatever, why not bring back RSS feed while you’re at it?

All that said, Spotify’s idea to lock down Michelle Obama for a platform-specific podcast is just brilliant. I mentioned it to Libe and without missing a beat, she said, “I’d listen to the hell out of that.”