Sara Bareilles interview: uncharted territory and her Kaleidoscope Heart

“I don’t have any trouble being very honest with my lyrics,” she says of the fact that her new single King of Anything is an even more blatant kiss-off than her last hit song. But the phenomenal success of Love Song three years ago, rather than setting her free, left Sara Bareilles stuck under a self-imposed ceiling of expectations and unable to write any material she cared for. And it wasn’t until she decided to turn her frustrations into lyrics that the floodgates opened in the form of a song called Uncharted, which ultimately turned out to be the centerpiece of her new album Kaleidoscope Heart. “It helped me get over my writer’s block,” she says of Uncharted, “and it was a nice moment of connection with my producer of the first record, Eric Rosse. He and I sat and had a chat about how overwhelmed I was and stressed out about trying to produce material for the next record, and he basically was like, “You know, it sounds like that’s your song right there.” And so at his encouragement I sat down and really, for the first time in a long time, had written a song that really meant something to me.”

That the central component of an artist’s second record was written as a reaction to the success of the first record might seem cliche in a different context, but in this case it was more about addressing the issue for the sake of letting it go. “I’m so happy that I had the success that I did with Love Song, but it does mean that everything that I do from now on is gonna be measured up to the success of that song. So that was something I really had to say, and then kind of let go of to a certain extent and really divorce myself from owning that expectation and letting myself release it into the universe and move forward.”

Uncharted even goes so far as to very pleasantly drop a seemingly anti-inspirational message on listeners near the end in the form of “Compare where you are to where you want to be and you’ll get nowhere.” But even that, Sara says, is all about detaching the artistry from the expectations.

“I think it’s the idea that you end up being crippled by being so attached to the outcome. I think that’s one of the many lessons I’ve learned in my experience is that the more I’m attached to what the outcome looks like exactly, the less likely I am to actually end up there.”

But even with the role Uncharted played in bringing the rest of the album to life, it was the sonically peppy song King of Anything that Sara knew she wanted as her lead single as soon as she’d finished writing it. As upbeat as the song is, the message is nothing short of devastating, as she spends three and a half minutes telling a know it all to back off. As it turns out, her honesty as a songwriter extends to being perfectly willing to reveal what her songs are about. Whereas she famously admitted that Love Song was written as a way of telling her label that she wasn’t interested in writing a love song for her first record, King of Anything was once again aimed at her own inner circle.

“It was actually kind of ironic, because it came about in a very manner as Love Song did,” Sara says of King of Anything. “It was at a point where I felt like I had sort of finished the record from a writing standpoint, and I was just sharing the music for the first time with people that are in my inner circle, so it’s management and a couple of people from the label and bandmates. And I didn’t realize how defensive I would be about their feedback. It was totally what I was asking for, that’s the purpose of playing new music for people, is to get some sense of how does someone else hear this song? But I got really protective and really defensive, and I I remember having this moment of clarity of saying to myself, and so it begins again.”

So why the emphasis on making it the first single? “I felt like that was my message to myself and to the world right now. Not everyone’s gonna like this record, there’s gonna be people that think that I’ve gone in a direction that they don’t support or whatever, but ultimately I have to know that I love it.”

The success of King of Anything on the heels of Love Song, then, begs the question of just how it is that Sara Bareilles get away with continuing to score radio hits by smiling away while dropping lyrical bombs. “I think the trick is, if you can sort of play musically and make it sound happy, or make it sound light and bright, and kind of juxtapose the depth or the darkness of the message with something that is fun to listen to. For some reason, that kind of combination is really appealing to me. It’s funny, it honestly makes me laugh to sort of tell someone to kiss off while you’re dancing around.”

But even if her fans are prepared by now for the stern messages wrapped in pretty packaging, they might still be spooked by the appearance of another person’s on the album in a song called, appropriately enough, Not Alone.

“He’s a character out of one of his own films,” she says of the fact that none other than the late Alfred Hitchcock makes a brief cameo in the song, in the form of a quote from an interview. So how did she end up deciding to use Hitchcock’s voice of all things? “We were playing with the idea of adding a musical interlude to that song because it just sort of felt like it needed something to smooth out the transition in the middle section of the song. And so I kind of wrote this very flowery piano part, and then my producer Neal [Avron] got excited about writing a little string arrangement, a kind of 1930’s sounding, old movie string arrangement. And then so we added that part to the song, and we always felt like it was just the perfect bedrock or foundation for something else. And I thought it would be amazing to get a quote from an old movie, and so I started looking online. When I think about some of my old movies, they’re Hitchcock films. I was looking at films like The Birds, but it never felt like I found a quote that made sense. And then I started looking at interviews of Hitchcock himself, and that totally spoke to me.”

Those fans who most endeared to the earnest ballads of her first record are in luck again this time around, with songs like Hold My Heart, which “will be a single” at some point. And the theme of letting go permeates through other songs, including the hopeful Let The Rain.

“That song to me is very much about rebirth and trying to find solace in letting go. I think a big theme for me this record was all about facing challenge head on, facing fear, facing anxiety, facing your own strengths. It was all about kind of embracing what was going on on the inside. To me, the actual physical sense of being baptized is a very unique and purposeful metaphor.”

She doesn’t get a lot of credit for it, but Sara Bareilles was one of the earliest major label musicians to find her way onto Twitter, back in the middle of 2007 when most people hadn’t even yet heard of it. But, continuing with the honesty theme, when her former marketing manager at Epic Records first mentioned the emerging social network to her, “I thought it was the dumbest idea of all time. I agreed and started an account, but I was like ‘This is the most pointless thing I’ve ever even heard of.’”

But although Twitter back in 2007 still consisted largely of everyone “talking about how they eat toast in the morning,” she stuck with it over the years and has been rewarded with followers in the millions. “I’ve actually really embraced it. I like it a lot actually now. I think partially because there’s no filter. It is the direct connection between the artist and the fan. And I think that’s why fans love it so much too. There’s no middleman.”

So now that Sara’s first two major hit songs have both been of the pleasantly devastating variety, does she feel any need to go in a different direction for her next single? “It’s not something I really consider. The choices that I make when I’m writing are always to make sure that the song is coming from an authentic place. And so if there seems to be a pattern with that, it’s probably because I was going through something over and over again and had to get it out in an artistic way. So I don’t worry too much about having the same message come out.”

And as far as how those only judging her from her radio hits might perceive her as a person, “as long as the message is true and authentic to the author, I guess it’s just out of your hands at that point.”

Learn more at SaraBareilles.com • iTunes • Twitter • Facebook

app review: Twitter for iPad

Twitter for iPad recently launched! The official Twitter app was updated to be a universal app, working both on the iPhone and iPad. At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much bells and whistles, but once you figure out all the little hidden secrets, you’ll definitely love the new user interface.

When you first launch the app, you have a left panel with links to your Timeline, Mentions, Lists, Messages, Profile and Search. On the right side is your timeline of tweets. If you’re holding the iPad in landscape mode, the tweets only take up the center area of the screen. You might think that it’s wasting a lot of space the first time you see it. But try tapping on a tweet. The tweet will expand and create a new panel to the right of the timeline. The edge this app has over other iPad Twitter apps is the built-in browser that will display webpages, videos, and photos linked in tweets without closing the app. Having content display in-lined makes the Twitter user experience flow much more seamlessly. If you tapped a tweet that was part of a conversation, the tweets will also be grouped together in a new panel. This makes keeping up with conversations much easier!

As you click on tweets, new panels will appear to the right. You can swipe to slide through the panels to bring up more content. I find this to be an ingenious way to use the space of the iPad. A lot of content is displayed at one time and getting to specific data is as easy as a tap away.

Tips for getting the most out of the Twitter app:

Pinch a tweet and it’ll expand. I find it much easier to use two fingers (one on each hand) and drag out (mimicking a pinch movement). Some of the tweets are one-liners, so the tabs are pretty narrow. If you find a long tweet, it’s much easier to pinch.

Another tip is to use two fingers and drag down on a tweet. This displays the conversation (@replies) in a panel below. I thought this was a very clever way to display tweets. Be sure to keep both fingers on the tweet though. Once you let go, it’ll quickly roll-up like window shades!

If you have an iPhone, you may be interested in our walk-though of Twitter for the iPhone.

Download the Twitter iPhone/iPad app for free now.

More Screenshots

Viewing @replies and a follower’s profile.

The interface for replying and sending a tweet.

Ping, new Apple social network in iTunes 10: it’s not Facebook or Twitter

Apple has introduced its own social network named Ping. (No, not Bing). The network is built into the new iTunes 10 software, which is aimed at encouraging socialization of music and content. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has made it clear that Ping is neither Twitter nor Facebook, however his demonstration of a Lady GaGa-themed page shows that Ping does integrate Twitter. Jobs referred to Ping as being for “social music discovery” – with the ability to follow artists and friends. “You can get as private or as public as you want,” Jobs says of building your own Ping social network. Jobs is also apparently a fan of Paramore.

A half-dressed Lady GaGa appeared via pre-recorded video from the studio to talk about Ping.

Jobs also announced that iTunes digital music sales will surpass total sales of CDs in the United States in 2011.

Rihanna is on Twitter for real: “no more corny label tweets”

Rihanna’s presence in social media is nothing short of massive, with nearly eight million Facebook fans and more than a million Twitter followers. But the singer hasn’t really been on Twitter – until now. Earlier today, Rihanna used her Twitter account, which had until now essentially been just a series of promotional posts, to announce that’s she “finally took over my Twitter page” and that we can expect, in her words, “no more corny label tweets.” Her announcement tweet was promptly retweeted by, at last count, more than four hundred followers, with her name currently being mentioned on Twitter more than once per second. The singer is enjoying chart success with her new collaboration “Love The Way You Lie” with Eminem.

iPhone iOS 4.0.2 update out-trends Droid 2 despite Verizon paid placement

On the day Verizon decided to invest major money in getting “Droid 2″ listed as a promoted trending topic on Twitter, Apple managed to upstage the campaign simply by releasing a very minor software update for its iPhone – which caused the iPhone’s “iOS” operating system to reach the trending topics list due to popularity of discussion rather than paid placement. It’s highly doubtful that Apple timed the release of the iOS 4.0.2 update (yes, it’s a mere x.x.2 release and it’s still trending) merely to upstage Verizon’s Twitter advertising campaign for the Droid 2, but it’s worked out that way anyway. Because paid-for trending topics are placed below the naturally popular trending topics, “iOS” is currently two spots above “Droid 2″ on the list. Of course neither has managed to upstage pop culture topics like “Scott Pilgrim” or cultural occurrences like “Ramadan” on today’s trending topics list. But the list does go to show that regardless of marketshare numbers (and for the record, the iPhone is still winning the marketshare numbers over the entire combined Android platform handily), the iPhone is the only smartphone that anyone outside the geekdom that anyone in the mainstream actually cares about enough to care about one way or the other.

As far as the timing, Verizon has to be cursing its bad luck; paying for “Droid 2″ to be a “promoted” trending topic was a hard stab at invading Apple’s territory, as any time Apple makes a major iPhone related announcement, it’s commonplace for eight or nine of the top ten trending topics to be something Apple-related on that day. Not only did Verizon have to give Twitter major money just to get the new Droid attached to the bottom of the list, it got upstaged by an insignificant iPhone software update to boot.

Interestingly enough, one of the inclusions in the minor iPhone iOS update is a patch aimed at continuing to force hackers known as “jailbreakers” off the iPhone platform; the geeks who “jailbreak” their iPhone are probably the only iPhone users who would be better off with a Droid instead.

Smashing Pumpkins Billy Corgan lets loose on light and darkness in rock music

Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan has let loose on the state of rock music this evening via his Twitter account, sharing a prolonged stream of thought which touched on everything from music critics to the concept of light and darkness in rock music, and where he thinks it’s headed. Tweeting from a Pumpkins tour stop in Japan, here’s what Corgan had to say in its entirety:

“Critic Robert Hilburn once said of me that I had the talent, but didn’t have the disposition to lead. Wrong. I cannot lead darkness to light … Point being no one can lead darkness to light. Darkness only begets more pain. See current state of Rock and Roll for dire confirmation. … The days of death and destruction being prima matter for the rock and roll machine are over. No one is gonna do it better than the Crue! … The new Age has come, and music will serve as a standard bearer for a new way to connect in Love and Respect. I am happy to lead from Love. … Goodbye to the generations that are more happy to write about you if you are beautiful and dead…or dead of Spirit.”

Billy Corgan recently spoke with Beatweek about Smashing Pumpkins and more in our cover story interview.

Twitter down again, Emma Watson’s hair to blame?

Twitter has crashed out again today, with the familiar “over capacity” fail whale appearing in place of user timelines. When the social network was in a prolonged epic struggle to remain up and running earlier this summer, many users assumed it was due to the impact of World Cup soccer related discussions, and Twitter uptime has indeed improved since the World Cup ended. Today’s outage, however, has no clear culprit – Twitter has merely posted the generic statement “We’re currently experiencing a high error rate on Twitter” – but the prevailing topic on Twitter at the time of the crash was the fact that Harry Potter star Emma Watson has more or less shaved her head, leaving no more than an inch or two for reasons that have as of yet gone unexplained. So maybe we should just assume that Herimone Granger has used her “No-hair-o patronum” spell to knock Twitter to the ground for what has thus far turned out to be a multi-hour outage.

Ellen DeGeneres Idol departure crashes Twitter – Jennifer Lopez next?

Twitter has crashed in the wake of Ellen DeGeneres’ announcement that she’s leaving her role as judge on American Idol. Ellen was atop the social network’s trending topics list at the time the trending list was disabled altogether, and then several minutes later the entire Twitter network was brought to its knees. This evening’s Twitter meltdown, the site’s first major burnup since the World Cup soccer tournament ended, likely cost Jennifer Lopez her opportunity to make it into the trending topics for what might have been the first time in the site’s four year history. Rampant rumors and gossip this evening have J.Lo taking Ellen’s place as the new “friendly” American Idol judge. The move would mark a return of a veteran musician to the judging chair vacated by Ellen, which had previously been occupied by Paula Abdul.

Twitter has since sporadically returned to life, but the trending topics list is still missing in action.

Emma Watson joins Twitter, gains 50k followers with two tweets

Harry Potter star Emma Watson has had no trouble finding an audience on Twitter, even though she hasn’t yet had much to say to them. The actress, best known for her portrayal of Hermione Granger in what will end up being eight Potter films, signed onto Twitter with her first tweet five days ago, in which she declared “Hi everyone, this is the real me!” which has since been backed up by “Verified Account” status. Despite the fact that she’s only since tweeted once more with “Thank you for all your lovely (and amusing) messages! It’s official: I have the best fans! I’m loving the London sunshine today, Emma x” she’s nonetheless gained fifty thousand Twitter followers and been listed sixteen hundred times. The numbers aren’t quite Conan-esque in terms of Twitter newcomers gaining early followers, but they nonetheless demonstrate that Harry Potter fans have had no trouble finding her account thus far.

Among the mere eight people she’s following back, the list includes UNICEF and PeopleTree. In any case, Emma Watson’s newly christened Twitter account can be found at @emwatson.

Dave Grohl sarcastically confirms new Foo Fighters album

Dave Grohl has sidehandedly confirmed that a new Foo Fighters album is on its way, after having spent the past year focusing on his other project Them Crooked Vultures. Using the official Foo Fighters Twitter account, Grohl tweeted this afternoon: “Dear Twitter, I take back everything I said before. I didn’t have a new album to promote. Love, Dave.” The remark is in apparent reference to the fact that Grohl has in the past dismissed social networking sites such as Twitter as being a waste of time.

The official Foo Fighters website has no mention of a new album. According to wikipedia (and we know it’s always right), the new album is supposedly set to be recorded in the fall of 2010. When we get our hands on more detailed information about the album – in other words, when Dave decides to tweet about it again – we’ll be sure to pass it along.

LeBron James on Twitter: “The road to history starts now”

LeBron James finally joined Twitter three days before he joined the Miami Heat, and he’s already using his nascent Twitter account to make bold proclamations about his new all-star team: “Thanks to all the fans and Miami organization who greeted me. The Road to History starts now!” The tweet came about five hours after LeBron announced that he would sign with the Heat and team up with incumbent Dwayne Wade and fellow new signee Chris Bosh in the process. Interestingly, Bosh used Twitter to document his way through the free agent process, even at one point asking his followers who he should sign with, while Wade used his Twitter account as his platform of choice for making his official announcement that he was returning to the Heat (via a linked YouTube video). LeBron James has thus far tweeted only five times, but already has more than a third of a million followers. He’s currently following zero people – not even his new teammates Wade and Bosh – perhaps they can give the Twitter newbie a lesson on how the social network works. Meanwhile, Wade tweeted a photo of some kind of mess that his dog made (no, not that kind of mess), joking that “even Sasha was celebrating” over the fact that Wade has somehow managed to bring two of the NBA’s other biggest stars, both friends of his, to his team for the next five years.

Dwayne Wade: “MIAMI. Welcome my brothers LeBron James and Chris Bosh to YOUR city.”

Dwayne Wade has officially responded to LeBron James’ announcement that he’ll be joining Wade and fellow star Chris Bosh with the Miami Heat for the next five years: “MIAMI. Welcome my brothers @KingJames and @chrisbosh to YOUR city.” Wade’s tweet is in reference to LeBron’s little-used but verified Twitter account, along with Chris Bosh’s Twitter account on which the latter has been active throughout the free agency process. Bosh reacted earlier in the evening with a simple yet elongated expression of glee. Wade managed to successfully work with Heat president Pat Riley to lure LeBron and Bosh to Miami in an offseason during which all three had been free agents.

Chris Bosh on LeBron James Miami Heat signing: “Yeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaa!!!”

A day after announcing that he’s joining Dwayne Wade’s Heat in Miami, Chris Bosh had this to say on his Twitter account about the LeBron James announcement that he too will be joining the Heat: “Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Bosh’s reaction came on the same day in which he and Wade had undergone physicals in preparation for signing their new contracts with the Heat. For his part, Wade hasn’t tweeted since LeBron’s announcement.

Microsoft Kin canceled, even Kin spokesman Questlove wasn’t using one

The failure of Microsoft’s Kin phone came as a surprise to few, but the swiftness of the device’s cancellation just weeks after launching has caught the tech world off guard. In fact, television ads for the device can still be seen airing, as Microsoft had apparently booked a long term TV ad campaign for the device before seeing just how non-existent initial interest was in the device. But the swift death of the Kin was forecasted by the fact that even spokesman Questlove, who appears in the ill-fated television ads, doesn’t use a Kin himself; according to his verified Twitter account, the Roots bandleader uses a BlackBerry. That doesn’t mean that Questlove didn’t necessarily have a Kin in his other pocket. But there’s rich irony in the fact that the Kin, a device which was specifically marketed as being a social network savvy phone, was being passed over by its own spokesman when it came to Twitter duties, in favor of another kind of phone.

“Dog eating contest” and misspelled Schwarzenegger trend on Twitter

In one of the more unintentionally humorous entries into Twitter’s trending topics list in some time, those tweeting about today’s hot dog eating contest saw the conversations misinterpreted by Twitter’s automated trending algorithm such that “Dog Eating Contest” found its way into the trending list instead of “Hot Dog Eating Contest.” Meanwhile, for reasons that have to be fully revealed, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger also briefly found his way into the trending list, but misspelled along the lines of “Schwahzenegger.” Today’s trending topics showed that Twitter’s ability to auto-generate the trending topics list can sometimes be as humorously inept as Twitter users’ general inability to spell the names of any popular individual; the death of Golden Girls star Rue McClanahan earlier this year saw a misspelled version of her name enter the trending topics at that time.

Is Twitter worth having around with only eighty percent uptime?

Twitter’s increasingly troubling technical difficulties in 2010, which have only gotten worse as the year has gone on, now include not only near-daily outages but a new problem today in which recent tweets can disappear even as replies to (and retweets of) the vanished tweet remain. While actual statistical measurements might reveal different results, it feels as if Twitter is now suffering from one experience-altering problem or another at least one out of every five times that I go to use it. And it makes me wonder whether it’s still worth the hassle. Frustration in the abstract is one thing, as all consumer technology comes with some level of convolution built in: no one’s computer is quite fast enough to keep up with all the various things they want to do with it at full-speed, iPhones don’t have the storage capacity that many users wish they did, and so on. But when technical limitations move beyond mere frustration and spill over into significant interference in what you’re trying to do, it’s a different story.

Home electricity is a form of magic that we take for granted, but if it suddenly only started working eighty random percent of the time, you’d have a different on it altogether. You’d likely still try to milk it for what you could during the uptime, but eventually you’d have to start rearranging your daily routine under the assumption that it won’t be there when you need it, instead shifting more favor toward things that don’t require electricity. If you had a car that only started up in the morning on eighty percent of days, you’d have to get a different job closer to home, or learn the bus routes (and get up an hour earlier every morning just in case you ended up having to spend the extra time taking the bus that day).

Or you just get your car fixed or buy a new one, provided you could afford to do so. Twitter is different in that we, as users, have no control at all over how reliable it is. But before you start arguing that having a car is a more basic necessity than having access to Twitter (and you’d be right in most senses of the argument), consider that any tool, once sufficiently depended upon, becomes a basic necessity in its own right. Because the telephone has been around for longer than most of us have been alive, we tend to think of it as an absolute necessity, and we become outraged when its reliability slips to even a mere 99.9% uptime. But I interact with far more people that I care about (personally and professionally) per day on Twitter than I do over the phone, and because Twitter had moved into an area of near-100% reliability in 2009, I never thought much about how much I’d come to rely on it – much in the same way that I never thought much about my dependence on electricity until I moved into an old house in which the electricity flickers at least once per day. Fortunately the power very rarely actually goes out, rather it just threatens to, often enough that it frequently reminds me of how glad I am that the power didn’t actually go out.

In contrast, Twitter is now in some state of reduced usability at least one of the various times per day in which I attempt to use it. And even with Twitter still being so new of a concept that dismissing it as a waste of time is still a favorite pastime of aging late night talk show hosts, I’ve come to rely on it just enough that its newfound unreliability, which has only gotten worse over the past few months, now has me wondering if I should now start planning out other ways to keep in contact with people I care about in other parts of the country. In many cases, Twitter has become my primary way of keeping in touch with them even during times in which more in depth communication might not fit into the schedule of anyone involved.

Unfortunately, unlike replacing an unreliable car with a different car, there’s no “other Twitter” to turn to and never has been. There are always the fledgeling Twitter competitors, but they come and go, and almost no one that you know is on them anyway so it wouldn’t be a real substitute, just a low-payoff addition. There’s Facebook, which for all its faults does offer nearly 100% uptime, but it’s so not Twitter in terms of the ability to quickly surmise, communicate, and keep tabs; Facebook feels more like Twitter in bloated slow motion. There’s the new Google Me, which doesn’t really exist yet, and sounds more like a Facebook alternative than a Twitter alternative, and besides, Google’s social efforts are almost uniformly unsuitable for anyone but geeks. There’s email, which at this point is my most valued method of remote communication, and the only form of digital communication that I would be completely unable to live without – but is further bloating up the size of my inbox and the inboxes of everyone I know really the solution?

The catch-22 of Twitter is that it’s opened up my world to allow me to have (and maintain) so many more valuable relationships than would otherwise be possible, whether it’s the person I met once face to face during my travels and have since been able to keep in touch with, or the person I met through Twitter and later developed a real world relationship with, or some other variation. Without Twitter, there would literally not be enough hours in the day to keep in touch with all these people, and I would lose many of those relationships. Maybe the answer is to just keep waiting and see if Twitter can dig itself out of the hole that it’s managed to dig itself so deeply into in 2010. After all, the company is finally accepting advertising revenue after years of foolishly refusing to, so maybe now it’ll have some revenue to invest in building ample forward-looking infrastructure instead of its history of always trying to play catch up. But my Twitter experiences in 2010 have nonetheless left me suddenly feeling exactly the way I did about Twitter back in 2007, when I first started using it: amazing, groundbreaking, but way too unreliable to be depended on as anything other than a sometimes-there toy. And while I have no intention of scaling back my reliance on Twitter just yet, the continual problems with it this year have left me to conclude that it’s best if I don’t become any more dependent on it than I already am.

Lady GaGa is the most popular person alive (according to Facebook)

Lady GaGa has become the first living person to reach ten million fans on Facebook, or to use the service’s new 2010 technology, “ten million people like this.” On reaching the landmark, GaGa tweeted “Thank u so much little monsters for following me on Facebook! 10 million friends of mine who are now connected to each other” and she also posted a brief video on her Facebook page thanking fans. The late Michael Jackson has more than fourteen million Facebook fans, but GaGa is the first person to reach the mark while still alive, narrowly outpacing President Barack Obama, who at this moment only has about 9.5 million Facebook fans.

Interestingly, Lady GaGa is merely the third-most popular Twitter user, with Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher both having more than five million followers and GaGa having a mere 4.7 million, although the growth rate of each of their follower counts suggests that GaGa could surpass them both on Twitter before 2010 is over.

It’s a far cry from a mere year and a half ago, when we put Lady GaGa on the cover of Beatweek Magazine (yes, we were the first) and many of you said “Who’s that?” In any case, you can read our original cover story interview with Lady GaGa right here.

Twitter is dying in 2010 – what’s killing it?

Twitter is dying in 2010, unreliable to the point of quickly regressing back to the “toy” status that the social network faced back in 2007, an ignominy that it earned back then for the same reason that it’s staring the same fate in the face today. The site’s reliability, which had improved dramatically over the past two years to the point of being essentially a non-issue, has now slipped back into the proverbial toilet. Twitter’s “status” page, once forgotten due to the fact that it was no longer needed, has posted a stunning twenty-one service updates in the past month detailing the various and sundry ways in which service has failed. From a Twitter user standpoint downtime is now expected, tweets go missing, searches time out, and posting a tweet now comes with the very real possibility that you could be literally talking to yourself.

Longtime Twitter users are bound to shrug and wonder what the big deal is, as downtime and unreliability defined Twitter as a platform back in its early 2007-2008 days, with the service having never been properly reliable from the start and then having been completely mowed under by the mainstream/celebrity invasion, and only truly getting its act together in 2009. Newer users who joined Twitter after it finally did figure out how to stay routinely up and runnin are now getting their first taste of what it was like to be a Twitter early adopter. Of course back then, having as many as five thousand followers was almost unheard of; for a time it was believed that Robert Scoble could crash Twitter simply by tweeting, as he did in fact have five thousand followers in contrast to the typical user, who had a few dozen (in contrast, today Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher have five million followers apiece).

So what’s gone wrong? Twitter status updates to a good job of describing what’s not working, but rarely state why it’s not working, suggesting that the folks at Twitter either don’t want to say or simply don’t know. However, the onslaught of unreliability seems to be traceable back to the day a few months ago in which Twitter was hacked by the loophole which caused users to be able to force other users to follow them back; as an emergency counter measure all accounts were frozen such that no one could follow anyone and all follower/following numbers were temporarily reset to zero. Even after the embargo was lifted, it feels like Twitter’s reliability has never been the same since.

While June 2010 is shaping up to be the worst month in Twitter’s history, here’s hoping they can figure out what’s wrong in terms of reliability and still pull it out before users begin jumping ship. In the mean time, however, Twitter is dying in terms of being a reliable useful tool and has instead been relegated – for now, at least – back to the undesirable status of a sometimes-working toy.

Phony iPhone 4 antenna controversy spreads to phony Steve Jobs Twitter

Trumped up controversy surrounding the invented “iPhone 4 antenna problem” has reached a new level of absurdity, as the London Daily Mail has written a headline entitled “Apple boss Steve Jobs reveals iPhone 4 may be recalled” which turns out to be based on a quote from a fake Steve Jobs parody account on Twitter. But that didn’t stop the Daily Mail from cobbling an entire slam piece together repeating the “finger pattern experiment” carried out by geek tech pundits on launch day in which they attempted to get the iPhone 4’s antenna signal to weaken slightly by placing their fingers just-so, and then falsely reported is as an “antenna problem.” Except in this case, not only did the Daily Mail write about an invented “controversy” as if it were real, it also quoted an invented Twitter account as if it were really Steve Jobs – a Twitter account which, by the way, is clearly labeled with “Of course this is a parody account” in the bio at the top of the page. Was the geek writer of this article so desperate for the “antenna controversy” to be true that in his enthusiasm he overlooked the fact that Steve Jobs is well known not to actually be on Twitter, or was it just an honest mistake? And more importantly, how much longer will we have to endure these continued geek meltdowns in which their actions continue to slide more closely toward insanity as a result of the fact that Apple’s products are aimed at the mainstream at the expense of said geeks? As we’ve pointed before, this is far from the first time the launch of a new Apple product has caused geek headline writers to go out of their minds; here are a few historical highlights.

The Daily Mail article is here. The fake @CEOSteveJobs Twitter account is here. The good folks at MacFormat, who caught this latest little geek faux pas before we could, are here.

Nike plugs #USA Soccer with Twitter’s second “promoted” topic

The #USA hashtag on Twitter, signifying support for the nation’s World Cup soccer team, has been elevated to the level of “promoted” trending topic on Twitter, and it’s apparently Nike who’s writing the check. While the promoted tweet simply reads “#USA” hovering ones cursor reveals that the topic has been “Promoted by Nike Soccer” in what becomes Twitter’s second-ever such advertising venture after the Disney-Pixar movie Toy Story 3 debuted as the inaugural promoted topic earlier this month. Meanwhile, Team USA star Landon Donovan has managed to make Twitter’s trending topics list of his own accord without anyone needing to write a check, as his name is charting second just above Mick Jagger who has been spotted in attendance at the World Cup.

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