Twitter’s Opening Day and Other Fascinating News on the Web

# is the New $

A brief history. There was a little company called Blogger. They ran out of money during the first Internet bust. One of their founders, Evan Williams, was left to keep servers running. When we had lunch one day, way back then, Ev showed me a pile of books on a coding language called Java. He was reading those so he could figure out how to keep Blogger up. Then the Internet economy came back. Google bought Blogger. Evan had the money, freedom, and clout to start Odeo, out of which Twitter spun, and then flew. And today, Twitter had a very big IPO that may have never happened if Evan hadn’t been able to read those Java books really fast. Twitter is the biggest tech IPO since Facebook. And its first day on the market went a whole lot better.

+ Twitter’s opening day is providing quite a bounce for its shareholders. But this is nothing compared to the first boom. Twitter’s big morning wouldn’t have come close to cracking the top 25 first day gains of 1999. Let’s put it this way. Twitter is no Ask Jeeves.

+ “There’s some sophisticated, supple, and even revolutionary technology at work. Appreciating Twitter’s machinery is key to understanding how an idea so simple changed the way millions of people advertise their existences to the world.” Paul Ford on the hidden technology that makes Twitter huge.

+ Chartgirl’s guide to who’s making how much.

+ Sam Biddle on the guy who pretends he invented Twitter.

+ If I had known it was gonna be this big, I probably would have worked a bit harder on my first two tweets.

Why Journalists Love Twitter

Long before Twitter was big (and its still not, compared to some less-covered rivals), it was getting a ton of coverage. And even today, the coverage outweighs the news itself. Why? Because every journalist on the planet uses Twitter. Daniel Gross explains: “Journalists are obsessed with the offering in a way that many other people aren’t. Twitter is our medium. Many of us live in it, and we all feel we’ve done our part to build it. And so many usually skeptical scribes are shamelessly rooting for Twitter to succeed.” Guess which other company was in the exact same boat a few years ago? Apple. Way back when they were barely a blip on the computer industry screen, they were already getting massive coverage for each new product launch. And all those stories were being written on Apple computers.

+ Wired’s Ryan Tate: Why the rest of America doesn’t care.

Breaking Dad

“I never thought of myself as the type of guy who would be at a playground in the middle of a workday, but there I was, just the moms and their strollers and me: a stay-at-home dad.” GQ’s Alex French reports from the front lines of being a stay-at-home dad. Thankfully, I read this from the safety of my office.

Sans Trans

This would be a good time to hoard boxes of really unhealthy cookies, crackers, chips, cake mix, chicken nuggets and doughnuts. The FDA is getting ready to eliminate trans fats once and for all. Here’s a list of foods that might contain trans fats.

How to Not Get Arrested

Be boring. Don’t smile. And don’t slam on the breaks when you see a police car. Those are just a few of the valuable tips offered in an ex-cop’s guide to not getting arrested.

NFL Head Trauma Cases

Syndicated from Kottke: More NFL stars have head troubles – Hall of Famer Tony Dorsett is among a growing group of former NFL players who have been diagnosed with diseases caused by years of head trauma and other injuries. “Dorsett said he … gets lost when he drives his two youngest daughters, ages 15 and 10, to their soccer and volleyball games. ‘I’ve got to take them to places that I’ve been going to for many, many, many years, and then I don’t know how to get there.’”

Gun Column Gone Wrong

“I made a mistake by publishing the column. I thought it would generate a healthy exchange of ideas on gun rights. I miscalculated, pure and simple. I was wrong, and I ask your forgiveness.” An editorial hinting that some gun legislation could be reasonable didn’t go over too well with the readers (or the employers) at Guns & Ammo.

Storm Season

A super typhoon called Haiyan is headed for the Philippines. Experts are calling it one of the most powerful storms ever.

The Big King

“The Big King includes three bun slices, two beef patties, cheese, lettuce, onions, and Thousand Island-style dressing. Doesn’t that sound awfully familiar?” Burger King and the long path towards creating a Big Mac knockoff.

The Bottom of the News

So which of the newly minted tech luminaries got to ring the bell at the NYSE this morning? None of them. It was a nine year-old girl. And she’s pretty awesome.

+ Retro shots of 1980s shopping malls. We may have dressed poorly, but none of us were staring down at our phones.

+ The boring truth about Google’s mystery barges.