Zorinaq

Revenue Idea for Twitter: $1 per Month to Raise the Limit to 280 Characters

The current 140-character limit of Twitter is a main pillar of its success. Brevity makes writing and reading effortless. Their users love it.

Well, most do. Some want the limit to be raised or dropped altogether. But I believe doing so would kill the very essence of the service.

So what if Twitter offered the option to pay a small fee, say $1/month, to double the limit to 280 characters? If only 10% of their users took the offer, that would be about 30 million users bringing $360 million per year, increasing the company's annual revenues by +260% (estimated at $140 million in 2011).

This would solve Twitter's profitability problem for good. It would preserve the sweet shortness of most of the tweets. Those who want to be more eloquent can now be, because anybody can afford $1/month. And we are all happy ever after?

Surely, I must not be the first one to have come up with this idea. It sounds too obvious.

Deleting 39794 Gmail conversations

I unsubscribed from the qemu-devel mailing list, and deleted all the archived emails —spanning a few years— from my Gmail account. According to Gmail this represented 39794 conversations (threads).

• My mailbox's size decreased by 752 MB: the average space consumed by a conversation was 19 kB.
• It took 60 seconds to move all messages to the trash.
• It took 250 seconds to empty the trash, or 6 ms per conversation, which suggests only one HDD seek per conversation on Google's servers.

This is good performance. Can you delete this quantity of emails just as quickly from your company's email server?

LAX Approach

An amateur photographer friend and I went on a building roof with a good view on the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to make a time-lapse video of the planes landing at night. The frames are separated by 10 seconds:

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