So Twitter is going to look to deploy commercial for-pay tools by the end of the year:

“We’re looking at who’s using Twitter and for what,” Stone told the Reuters Global Technology Summit in New York via videolink from San Francisco. “Are there any commercial usages that are making a lot of sense?”

That's Biz Stone, Twitter founder (neat name?). I can imagine the Twitter's base will whine and moan for a while, then grow as they bring more services online.

Check this out. Look close and in the lower left hand side of the pic on this page. Go ahead, I'll wait.

ISN'T THAT COOL?

Searchengineland is rapidly becoming a favorite haunt of mine. Here's a rundown on Google's new approach to AdWords:

• The ad is an extension of the AdWords Product Plusbox feature Google has been introducing to advertisers who use Google Base. The new method is to not show the plus box, but instead just show three small links to products directly under the AdWords ad title.

That oughta jack up the value of your AdWords efforts if you've got individual products to sell. How would you apply that to a service company? We've been brainstorming that for quite a while.

No point to make about this one, except the obvious: if you can make realistic human emotions on anything, it's more compelling. Puppetry is an artform that comes and goes in the mainstream consciousness, but man it's a lot of fun when done right, and can be downright magical in the right hands. This is more of the former.

We recently created a wrap for this PowerGenix Prius.  Check out the photos--and no, your eyes do not deceive you, it runs on D Batteries.  A whole lot of them.  NiZn is such a superior technology to NiMH that these Ds give it considerably more range than a standard Prius.

After we wrapped it we had to, in a couple of days, design something to build around the battery pack in the back for car shows.  Without exact dimensions we put together this display that could be scaled to fit the trunk, and the outcome is pretty nice IMHO.

PC World has an article out about the "Dirty Dozen" cell phone design flops and failures. I have mixed emotions about bad technology design. On the one hand, you expect things like usability and affordability to be at the forefront of designer's minds. But on the other hand, (which the author acknowledges in the PC World piece) without trying something daring or risky, you may never get the reward of new technology. Imagine if Steve Jobs had listened to people who put down the idea of a personal computer? Cell phones, in my view (as well as practice to a large degree) are the logical successor of the personal computer, and becoming better and better every day (remember Newton?

Do you know the drill? Get to a computer...any computer, at home, at work, on your phone...and log in to Twitter. Then Facebook. Then Gmail. Then Reader, then Digg, then Reddit, then so on and so forth, and by the time you get to the end of all the sites/feeds/etc you MUST check, the replies are coming in for the ones you started with! Next thing you know it's an hour later, you're starving, and your cat won't look at you anymore.

Last week was another nvts week here at the Enemy of Good Enough.  We faced adversities such as: the death of our Designjet 500 (which we rely heavily upon), UPS forgetting a pickup, velcro becoming needle+thread becoming staples, and the distraction of NBA Playoffs.

We got it done, however, like we always do.  Here are some photos that pretty much sum up our ethos here:

Quantum Man Says: If you've got six little boxes, then you have one big box.

I've always wondered about Microsoft's marketing efforts. For a huge company with massive influence and a giant marketing budget, they seem to consistently fail to make compelling advertising.An article by Ina Fried today over at CNet gets to the point.

Anyone who has their doubts about this "internet thing" needs to take a look at what just happened to Domino's. After two employees posted a video of themselves doing pretty gross things to customer's food, Domino's went from managing a PR problem to contending with a full-blow poop-storm.