Tweeted by Cat Dumas.

Sarcasm isn’t exactly lost on the Internet. Smashing Magazine tweeted this pic today, showing the W3C laying a Twitter-sarcasm smackdown — I guess they’re not quite as dry a group of nerds as I thought they were — and it had me laughing. Then I read that a company in Michigan is now trying to sell a sarcasm punctuation mark.

That’s right. Sell. They want $1.99 for it. A punctuation mark that they made up. I’m not kidding you, it’s all right here, as reported by the Telegraph.

Behold, in all its stupidity: The “SarcMark”

Alright, SarkMark, I’ll tell you how I really feel: You’re idiots. Getting past the glaringly obvious fact that there is absolutely no need for a punctuation mark to denote sarcasm, the mark looks like shit. Honestly, it looks like a third-grader drew it, on a napkin, on a park bench. It pains me to think that these people are actually trying to sell this garbage, and it pains me even more that they’re actually attempting to patent the thing.

The reasoning put forth by these geniuses: That people need some way to more concretely convey their sarcasm over the Internet. According to them, we should cater to people who are too stupid to either write sarcastically, or to understand sarcasm when it’s staring them in the face. Their slogan:

Never again be misunderstood! Never again waste a good sarcastic line on someone who doesn’t get it! Sarcasm – Punctuate It – SarcMark [X]

The [X] at the end of the slogan is where their ridiculous looking punctuation mark goes, but since you have to pay them to download it, nobody can see the mark unless they’ve installed it. This makes me happy, since it means the likelihood of ever seeing the horrid thing is slim. Normally I’d cross my fingers and hope that a thing like this fails, hard, but I don’t think these people stand a chance. Check out their hilariously skeezy site here.

Images: RunLevel6, Telegraph.

Yes, they’ve finally done it. After months of talk about incorporating the mounds of real-time data to which Google has access, they’re finally piping it all into their own search results. The sources they listed are some pretty big names: Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace, and Jaiku, among others — and that’s not counting the major media outlets they’ve also tapped to glean time-sensitive information.

See the official release for more details.

Annoyingly, of course, all anyone can say about this (aside from it’s about damn time) is that “Bing must be nudging them to be more competitive.” I can’t help but recall the fact that Google was in talks with Twitter regarding real-time search results several months before Bing ever existed.

Yep, completely and utterly missing. It’s been the better part of a day without the much-maligned pile of fail feature that Twitter’s massive ego of a CEO insisted we’d all grow to love — and they’ve not said a word about it. Unfortunately, because of their noted silence on the matter, the odds are about 50/50 that the horrid thing will be back tomorrow, bright eyed and bushy-tailed. I believe this to be the likeliest case because it’s what I don’t want to happen.

I’m still crossing my fingers.

We mustn’t discount the possibility that Twitter may actually have killed the beast, once and for all. I wouldn’t count on it — there’s that whole sticky issue of Twitter’s self-affirming infallibility being at stake here, after all.

[UPDATE]:

After hours of pleasing me with their absence, Twitter’s foul retweets are back. It was nice while it lasted.

Yes, those are “stacks” of “benjamins.”

His Twitter page was hilarious enough as it was without the G-Money MySpace retard-shot he has plastered as a background image. The MySpace theme runs throughout his scam-site too, including badges that lead back to his profile. And this really hits the mark; nothing says gaudy like a sleazy MySpace page…

WARNING: MySpace pages have been known to lower IQ, view at your own risk.

This guy is amazing. At the end of his MySpace youtube video, he gets in his Nissan 350Z and drives off, and yes, the camera keeps running until he drives down the street. He has two separate youtube videos, one for his MySpace and one as a greeter for his site. I’m sure he’d have one for Twitter as well, if he could. But these profile pages are just runners up compared to the grand-daddy of them all, his actual website.

Behold, in all its trashy glory: MiragesMoney.com

After laughing at his ridiculous Twitter background image for a solid five minutes, I clicked the link to his website, where I sat and laughed for another solid five minutes. Then I watched his terribad, self-promotional youtube video that he uses for a site-greeter, and laughed for another five minutes, and then it just got better as I clicked through to see the “Success Guide” portion of his site.

The Success Guide

This is truly hilarious; it’s his step-by-step guide to “become a baller.” Seriously.

From the guide intro:

Alright alright, so you want to pursure this make money from home thing and you want to stack $$$ like Mirage huh? You got some work to do. But hey, if Mirage can stack thousands a day then so can you. So here it is you wanna be ballers, the ultimate guide to making money online. Aka the success guide. I don’t know why Mirage did it, but I guess he just has a sweet spot in his heart for those who are struggling like he was. Now dont even think about jumping ahead in any section! Read each section diligently, join the networks he tells you to and structure everything the way he teaches and start ballin.

It only gets better from there, including a life history, written in nearly seventh-grade reading level, and many, many paragraphs of juicy internet-marketing secrets. This guy lays it all bare for the world to see, so that we can all become ballers just like him. Go ahead, cruise his pages, it’s good for about 20 minutes of uninterrupted laughter. When you’re finished, just be sure to gouge out your eyes, burn your computer, and lament the sad state of humanity to which the world has now bore witness.

After rolling out their lackluster new retweet feature not but one day ago, Twitter today announced that it’s been “temporarily disabled.” According to Twitter, they’re simply working on “a few problems” that have occurred during the rollout.

Twitter: Here’s Your Problem

Nobody likes your failed feature. The fix is simple, just remove it and act like it never happened. That’s how everyone else is acting, because it’s garbage. Thanks.

[UPDATE] Richard Barley, Community Manager for TweetDeck, was kind enough to stop by and clarify the issue last night, via comment. He made assurances that TweetDeck servers are secure, and suggested that the likely culprit here is in fact Brizzly. Apparently, in enacting their own list compatibility, Brizzly caused pre-existing groups to update back on Twitter’s servers. Now, I haven’t used Brizzly since it opened, but the first thing I did in testing the service was mirror my TweetDeck groups. All the pieces fall into place. That being said, the only thing missing is an explanation for why TweetDeck is so damn bad at syncing its groups and searches. That being said, TweetDeck is still the best client out there, because of its groups and search features.

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I awoke this morning to find that Twitter had altered lists to include TweetDeck groups I’ve saved over the past year. These lists are in name only, meaning that they showed up, marked private, bearing the names of lists that I’ve used in TweetDeck but containing no names. If there had been a direct import without my knowledge, I may not have been so annoyed; this is as pointless as it is inappropriate.

Zombie Groups become Zombie Lists.

Last night I had written about the uselessness of lists, and how they’re nothing more than half-assed mimicry of a standard feature that full-fledged clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic have enjoyed for quite some time now. I talked about the sole use of lists, as far as Twitter’s concerned, as being a way to add functionality to the terminally hopeless web interface. I said that Twitter was likely pushing to bring that interface to a level of prominence that it’s never known before, as part of their overall effort to monetize the free service.

What I never suspected was that Twitter would resurrect long-dead and buried groups from the tombs of TweetDeck’s mystery-servers. Seriously, we all know that TweetDeck’s “servers” are about as likely to be hamster-farms as rack-farms — the things are notoriously out of date. That being said, what the hell is Twitter doing grabbing groups off somebody else’s servers, let alone groups that were deleted months ago by the user?

If this isn’t ringing any alarm bells yet, think of it this way: This is the same as an email provider reaching into your email account while you’re asleep, grabbing info from other mail accounts you have forwarding there from outside companies, and then presenting you with a flashy new inbox the next morning that happens to include data gleaned from the intrusion. You never asked them for this, nor did you give permission for it. Not so innocent.

What Gives Them the Right?

The sudden appearance of my TweetDeck groups in my Twitter account’s lists this morning left me more than a little perturbed. Now, I may be wrong, and TweetDeck may have a much deeper connection to Twitter than either company has ever let on, but this feels wrong. This feels like Twitter reached into TweetDeck servers and used their control over our accounts to simply pluck our information out. Information they then use to bolster their lists in an attempt to lure naysayers who don’t know any better.

These new lists then show up alongside all your other lists as private, and count against the arbitrarily imposed 20 list cap.

You can DELETE them.

Another change that’s either brand new, or not widely known: Twitter’s now allowing users to both edit and delete lists. This change is likely due to the use of lists by media outlets like the New York Times during the recent Ft. Hood shootings. Either way, this most basic functionality is a welcome addition.

This week has been utterly ruined by the uproarious debut of Twitter’s new Lists feature, and if you can’t already tell — I don’t like them.

Here’s the issue with lists: They’re unnecessary. A Twitter list is nothing more than a group column in Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop. Only, these are meant to be public, and within hours of their open-beta launch, they’ve become nothing more than the newest Twitter-based popularity contest.

Obnoxious, Pretentious, and Over-Done.

It didn’t take long for Mashable’s own Pete Cashmore to begin publicly using lists to stroke his ego, and many more followed. Cashmore later made an appearance in a blog’s comment-section, and said he meant it to be tongue-in-cheek. The jury’s still out on that one.

Almost as obnoxious as the popularity contest, these lists have also brought about the absolutely pretentious over-use of the term curate. If I ever see the word curate in reference to lists again, I just may gouge my eyes out. These lists have managed to bring out the worst in people, and they’ve done it in record time. Conversely, they haven’t managed to do much more than that.

Or have they?

No, they really haven’t. But the media felt the need to put them to work anyway — in a transprent attempt to seem up-to-the-minute hip. Mashable was quick to report on the handful of major media outlets who used lists today while covering the Ft. Hood shootings. The New York Times has even gone as far as to dedicate a whole page to showcasing their über hip collection of lists. They’ve become so abhorrently trendy that somebody even made an app just for checking them. What’s really funny about that is that it’s nothing more than a utility that creates Google Alerts for lists, and doesn’t even update but once an hour at that. None of this makes a dent in the fact that a user can simply do it all on their own to begin with.

So what practical good are they?

I mentioned earlier that lists are really equivalent to simply making a group-column in a twitter-client. The opposite is also true; you can take a list and replace your twitter-client, by using pre-existing web-based interfaces like Tweet Grid.

(Click image for full-size)

Tweet Grid allows you to array a set of feeds to create a twitter-dashboard of sorts, but you get to choose what each feed contains. Now, say you get tired of Tweetdeck constantly missing tweets from folks you have in one of your group-columns. With Tweet Grid, you can take a list with all the people you keep in that group, and then make a feed just for that list. You can also log into your account and have separately configurable feeds for your DM’s, @replies, and any searches you can think of.

What’s the advantage of this? Well, aside from saving the system resources required to run any of the larger clients, you don’t use any API calls when watching a list. You use your API calls every time a client checks in with Twitter to see what your groups, messages, @replies and searches are up to. Sites like Tweet Grid don’t waste all your precious API calls just to keep track of lists or searches. Instead of using a client to see your @replies, why not just use a search for your @name?

None of this explains why Twitter would want to introduce lists in the first place. This single instance of lists becoming useful happens outside Twitter, on a completely different site, so why would Twitter go to all the trouble to begin with?

The Bottom Line

It’s obvious that Twitter’s looking to monetize. The only reason for the nearly simultaneous introduction of lists, as well as retweet support, is that they’re about to make a serious bid to get more use out of their worthless web interface. The more people that use the web interface, the more effective future ad-placement will be. Other than that, there really is no practical use for lists. Honestly, Tweetdeck just doesn’t use enough system resources for me to get rid of that kind of full-packaged functionality, and it’s done what lists do for several versions now. This is also the part where I mention the inevitability of Tweetdeck supporting lists in the form of dedicated columns. Seesmic already does.

“These widespread abuses of printed type threaten to erode the very foundations upon which centuries of typographic history are built.”

The twitition is currently being passed around, and is extremely low on signatures. I don’t expect it to pick up… since most people don’t know or give a rat’s ass about the disgusting pile of type to even click a link concerning it. That’s neither here nor there — If you hate Comic Sans as much as I do, or even a hundredth what I do, then please, Sign the twitition.

One word of warning, for the squeamish out there; twititions do require access to your twitter account, and they do send out an automatic tweet from your account propagating the twitition. This is normal, and relatively secure.

Death to Comic Sans.

Kill it with fire.

OK, that’s fine. Every company’s goal is to be profitable, but Facebook needs to calm down. We’ve been relentlessly inundated with Facebook, over the last month especially, to the point that it feels like an assault on the senses. Too much is too much, and Facebook passed that mark some time ago. As if it weren’t tacky enough that they’ve been stealing anything they can from (much smaller) rival Twitter, it only took them 38 minutes to publish another blog post exposing their Prototypes, a direct ripoff of Google Labs.

Now, ripping off Twitter and calling @mentions tagging is lame enough, but prototypes? It’s just pathetic, I’m sorry, but call it what it is. These aren’t copyrighted words, they’re generally used in the English language, pretty frequently, and all Facebook is managing to do is come off looking like the K-Mart blue light special of the Internet. Oh, wait, that’s what Facebook actually is.

As if that weren’t bad enough, now they want to incorporate voice and video chat as well. An article, floated on Cnet this morning, seems to confirm that Vivox’s Web Voice technology will be used in an upcoming, and entirely third-party multimedia chat integration that will be site-wide throughout Facebook. The actual code-work is third-party, the initiative itself is and must be driven by Facebook, since integration at that deep a level can only be accomplished with full access to the site itself.

Why is this bad? I’m not about to say that more features and innovative concept-integration are bad. I will, however, say that Facebook doesn’t need them. There is a point when it simply becomes too much. Case in point: Facebook chat, for lack of a better word, sucks. It’s the absolute worst chat on the Internet. Adding voice and video to that worthless service is like putting hood ornaments on a Dodge Neon.

Everything Facebook does is half-hearted and barely enough to get by, and they don’t seem to be that concerned with improving what they push out to their throngs of supporting users. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because this is more or less why everyone hates Microsoft so much. It’s part of why MySpace is a complete failure, and it’s also why Wal-Mart is the single most hated commercial entity on the planet.

Too much, too fast, too low quality.

And when your woefully technologically-inept uncle starts referring to all computers as “facebooks,” you’re going to realize exactly what I mean by all this.