Twitter and the Dow Jones Crash, Plus Ruminating Over the Burning Corpse of My Stock Portfolio

Obama Pictures and McCain Pictures

twitscoop: One subject on twitter right now: http://tinyurl.com/45oo9n – no need to comment, this tells it all… This is clearly a market crash :(

I first got wave of this from the Twittersphere, which is actually how I get most of my ground-breaking news these days (hurricanes, earthquakes, real and fake heart attacks, and now the upcoming global market crash). As you can see, Twitscoop really does have the scoop on this:

twitscoop-dow.png

When the Apocalypse comes, the sign of the first horseman shall be Tweeted.

Twitter is an interesting observation deck for events that ripple across boundaries; despite Twitter’s scaling issues (which are being addressed, so the spectacle of the FailWhale should appear less often), the fact that Twitter is first-to-market and simple has given it a firm foothold in the heart of teh Internets. We wouldn’t think of turning to Jaiku or Utterz (now Utterli) or even FriendFeed (which aggregates across everything social media) for first-wave information.

These days it’s hard for me to think in terms of country boundaries when I think about the world in general; I’d call it a World-o-sphere or something, and think mostly in terms of domain names. How quickly the future arrives.

As for my stock portfolio: I’m in for the long haul and invested in big tech companies, fortunately, and not banking or other financial institutions (which have really cratered). I managed to avoid the AAPL-from-200-to-88 as well. It’s likely going to be pretty dismal for the future—at least as long unto 2010, and perhaps even as long as 5 years.

And I’m also very not invested in EBAY right now, for reasons that are probably most clear to people who have been following eBay news closely for a year, e.g., their direct competitors and random weird people like me. Y’all, somethin’ ain’t right when you lay off 1000 people for pretty much no reason—neither a big buy of BML nor the beginning of a crash (nor even the two combined) qualify as “a good reason,” unless the bleed was necessary before either happened or your future looks a bit hazy. 10% of a high-bar technological workforce is not easy to replace unless you’re going to be dropping your bar to the floor.