Yes, Virginia, there is a Twitter Pro
April 2, 2009 Category :media| new media| snark| twitter 0
A letter to the editor received from a young reader:
I am 8 years old.
Some of my friends say there is no Twitter Pro.
Papa says, if you see it on THE INTERNETS it's so.
Please tell me the truth; is there a Twitter Pro?
VIRGINIA O'HANLON
115 West Ninety-Fifth Street
VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what Apple and Microsoft tell them.
Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Twitter Pro. It exists as certainly as user entry form mockups and vaporware and unfunded startups exist, and you know that they abound as dead and moribund webpages on servers this whole world round.
Not believe in Twitter Pro? You might as well not believe in boo.com, or etoys.com or Webvan.
You might get your papa to hire men to watch Source Forge night and day, but even if they didn’t see beta versions coming down the pipe, what would that prove? Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
No Twitter Pro? Unfathomable. Because VIRGINIA if we tell ourselves that Twitter Pro is nothing but a fairy tale, if we come to believe its just a hoax on the unsuspecting, then we must again ask ourselves that much scarier and vexing question: “How can Twitter monetize itself.”
The Editor
[Snark Rosetta Stone: "Twitter Pro" was an April Fools Joke promulgated by the folks who brought you the Shorty Awards. It was an alleged invitation to participate in the beta program for a rumored paid enhanced service on Twitter that would monetize it. But it really was nothing more than a website that took your twitter avatar and put a "PRO" banner on it, and sent you to your twitter page to replace your avatar with the "enhanced" one. It then let you tweet an invitation to others. A lot of people were fooled, and I was one of them.]