Amazon signs Woody Allen; Twitter has a field day

Steven Loeb · January 13, 2015 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/3b5d

Twitter responds with #WoodyAllenTVShowNames, including "Family Guy" and "Parks and Molestation"

On Tuesday, Amazon made a pretty big announcement: that it had signed Woody Allen to create his own television series for the platform, in which he would write and direct each 30 minute installment. This is exciting news, especially for Allen's fans, but also for anyone who has been following the recent streaming revolution.

Woody Allen is a huge get for Amazon; if the site can lure him in, that means that it  can get just about anyone it wants. It portends other perhaps reluctant artists also making the leap.  This is going to be really cool to watch. Plus, his show will likely be excellent as well.

Of course, there's another side to this: Allen's legacy, which is not exactly clean. There are these allegations you may have heard something about, in which he was accused of molesting his daughter (it should be noted that he was never actually charged for this but many have decided to boycott his films over it).

Then there was that other incident, in which he had an affair with his teenage stepdaughter (yeah, he didn't ever adopt her, blah blah blah, it's still weird and pretty creepy). In response, some have already come out against Amazon for signing someone with that kind of baggage hanging over him, saying it is an affront to victims of abuse. 

Given Allen's history, and the fact that the show is currently being called Untitled Woody Allen Project, just take a wild guess what happened next on Twitter, a.k.a the place where nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is ever forgotten and no opportunity for mockery is missed.

Yup. That's exactly what happened. I give you, #WoodyAllenTVShowNames.

I'm a pretty big Woody fan (and defender) but I have to admit that  these are really, really funny!  Some of them made me literally laugh out loud.

This reminds me of the incident a few months ago, when Bill Cosby posted a tweet asking fans to meme him. Twitter immediately took the baton and ran with it, coming up a whole host of memes, all referencing the rape accusations that have dogged Cosby for years, and have recently bubbled up to the surface again.

All of this should serve as a reminder to anyone who has ever been seen as doing anything wrong (be is at serious as the accusations against Allen and Cosby, or at simple as accidentally saying someone's name wrong): social media will define your legacy, and it never, ever forgets.

Shoutout to Mediaite for picking this up.

(Image source: blogs.indiewire.com)

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What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests. 

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.

How is Twitter built?

Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes. 

We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.

How do you make money from Twitter?

There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.

In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet. 

At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.

Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.

 

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We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users. 

We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.