The “relaunch” of the 2D Mario games with New Super Mario Bros. on DS and now on Wii are great as well. Though they don’t necessarily feel the same as the old Mario Bros. games either, they do hearken back to the 2D days of old more than the 3D games. I’ve even heard that the Wii version is somewhat difficult, a welcome change from the direction the industry seems to be more or less heading in.

I hadn’t heard about sonic until just now but I was pleasantly surprised about a week ago when I found this.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002BRZ9G0/ref=s9_simz_gw_s3_p63_t2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=01WMNV1A8TFV67GYYZV7&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846

And on topic B – I’m not a big fan of social networking in any of it’s forms… though I’m posting here… so take that with a grain of salt.

Can on-site advertising alone provide a good return on that much investment? I’m not sure, but I doubt it. So I think they’ll have to allow advertisers to target Twitter users based on their profile, or maybe the content of their “tweets”. The danger is that might drive some users away.

I guess there’s just tons of money floating around looking for good investment. God knows, the stock market isn’t returning anything. And T-bill rates are way down. So the big investment houses that survived the housing bubble, are looking elsewhere.

Whether or not its taken root on ground that will slide away at the first sign of rain is another thing, and like it or hate it, it’ll be interesting to see what happens in the future. I’m still waiting to see if they can actually monetize it. They’ve got millions of dollars in backing from media companies, but currently no way to sustain it without severely limiting the functionality of the site.

I’ll probably be forced to integrate it into the next version of Reflect Games somehow, so I guess I should keep quiet for now anyway.

And whether or not I need it is beside the point. It’s just another new toy to play with .

I’m not suggesting Twitter provided value during election protests, or influenced their outcome. Twitter doesn’t support Farsi, so most traffic was probably from Americans or journalists anyway.

Nor am I suggesting that use by civil/municipal organizations provides better service than existing outlets.

I’m just saying that it has taken root. The longevity of popular fads doesn’t depend on their usefulness. What matters is that people use them, and talk about them, until they reach some critical mass.

You must admit that requests from the US State Department asking Twitter to delay their scheduled maintenance until after the protests — followed by international news stories about it — are a promoters dream come true! You said it yourself: the media reports boosted it.

I think it’ll be with us for a while — useful or not.

The role Twitter played in the Iranian elections was nebulous, at best. It didn’t change the outcome in the slightest, and the whole debacle would have been just as easily covered on blogs or other independent news sources. And we’d probably be better off if it had been, because we wouldn’t have had to rely on the sound-bite nature of Twitter for info.

But then, I have doubts about the legitimacy of the messages posted on Twitter to begin with. What would have stopped me from creating a Twitter account and pretending to be from Iran and in the midst of an election crisis from the comfort of my apartment in California?

That’s not to say that I don’t believe anything was going on with the Iranian elections; surely, there was something wrong going down there – I highly doubt the people of Iran freely and willingly re-elected Ahmadinejad – but that’s another issue. My problem with Twitter in the Iranian elections is that there was absolutely no way to verify that the comments people were making were real or accurate.

Add to that the fact that, as they reported how important Twitter was to these elections, all the news organizations in this country were also busy getting advertisements for their networks on the service, and you’ve got me pretty skeptical of the whole thing. I seriously doubt Twitter would have take off the way it has over the last few months if the media hadn’t gotten on-board and begun using it as a free platform for advertising.

The road construction / delay notices are of limited use as well, as more states adopt laws banning people from using mobile devices while driving. If you require traffic news urgently, most GPS systems include that functionality these days. But hey, it’s probably easier for your county’s transportation office to post a short blurb on Twitter and hope people read it without crashing, rather than releasing the news to GPS services or reporting the problem to the highway patrol and news outlets.

Anyway… I’ll agree, regretfully, I might have been wrong about Twitter taking off, but I won’t concede that it serves some great purpose quite yet.

Your Nostradamian musings aside, I think you’re wrong about Twitter. Despite its tendency to promote needless blathering, its use by the Iranian election protesters gave it legitimacy. And lots of US municipalities now use it to post road-repair notices, and schedule changes.

So I think Twitter has grown roots.