Ownership—Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.

Now I’m no big city lawyer, but it seems to me that while your tweets remain your intellectual property, Twitter could still, given the terms of the TOS, publish a book of the greatest tweets and profit from it without reimbursing users. However, given the controversy over Facebook’s revised TOS earlier this year, Twitter users and those who value privacy should be able to take comfort in the fact that if they delete their account, Twitter won’t own the deleted tweets.

“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.

Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”

Sure, teenagers and college students made MySpace and Facebook what they are today, but young people also have a ton of time on their hands to customize profiles, add “about me” information, browse profiles, and so on. Older folks usually have responsibilities like careers and kids, and so they don’t (or can’t) devote the same amount of attention to keeping updated.

The great thing about Twitter, however, is that it doesn’t require much of a learning curve or time commitment to participate. Even better, it’s been built to work on mobile devices, so users can check tweets and update on the go. Given this dynamic, it’s no surprise Twitter has been embraced by older users, who are able to get a lot out of a service they don’t have to put a lot into.

Sometimes there’s a logic to this. It made sense for Google to create its own mobile phone OS, for instance, because there were few great operating systems that would deliver the Web to phones—and Google’s future depends on the Internet being available everywhere, all the time. Thus you can think of Google’s investment in Android as a kind of loss leader—it gives away the OS for free in the hope that billions of people around the world will one day use Android-like phones to click on ads at the gym.

But the Chrome project is unencumbered by any such rationale. If 20 percent of the world’s computer users switched from Windows to Chrome, would that help Google’s bottom line? Sure, all those people would now be using Gmail and Google Docs—but they could have been doing that in Windows, too! An MBA might describe the Chrome OS as a wasteful customer acquisition expense; Google would be wiser to use all the cash that it’s pouring into developing the new program for advertising instead. But a gangster would call this move what it really is: The point of Chrome OS—the only point of Chrome OS—is to screw with Microsoft.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t welcome a slick, lightweight non-geek friendly OS for netbooks (where Windows doesn’t usually make sense), but I too had a difficult time figuring out where Google was coming from on this one.

There’s a lot to love in this news report about online newspapers from 28 years ago. Dialing the rotary phone to connect to the modem, citing a whopping 2,000 – 3,000 computer owners in the Bay Area, waiting two hours to download the content of a newspaper (and paying $5 an hour for the privilege)… Still, they weren’t far off in predicting how most of us get our news today.

Who knows where we’ll be in another 30 years?

When you’re new to the social media scene, the number of sites you need to monitor may feel overwhelming. Fortunately, Mashable has a great post about free tools that will have anyone up and running with online reputation monitoring on blogs, blog comments, Twitter, message boards, and more. Definitely worth a look!

Twitter has been pretty stable lately, and the Fail Whale hasn’t made an appearance for me for what seems like at least a month. Even though the service has made great strides recently, and has attracted a lot of mainstream attention from news outlets such as CNN, @biz and @ev are concerned with the service’s “sustainability,” which is understandable. Although when I use ad-supported Twitter programs like Twitterrific for the iPhone, it makes me think that Twitter could include in-feed ads, charge for premium accounts (maybe with a raised follow limit?) or throw banner ads up without upsetting the user base.

Still, I appreciate that Twitter is devoted to getting its act together before figuring out how to make money. But with swelling numbers of users and investors breathing down their necks, how long can they afford to do so?

Google has made great strides in creating applications that live on the Web, but the chief problem with that concept is that if your browser crashes (a not-infrequent occurance), you risk losing your work. It looks like Chrome will address this issue by minimizing memory leaks and allowing users to kill processes that hog memory via a task manager.

Of course, the project will be open source. I wasn’t able to find a release date for the beta, but if you know anything, feel free to comment.

UPDATE: Well, that was quick! Google released Chrome about a day after I put this up. Walt Mossberg has the definitive review.

Executives would grumble. After all, good reporting costs money. The infrastructure that supports the production and distribution of news, be it print, radio or television, is extremely expensive – It’ll be impossible to compete when everyone is a reporter and can instantly broadcast or publish around the world. Plus, there’s only so much ad money to go around – if advertisers flock to the little guy, that’s fewer ad dollars for the big companies! Not to mention the loss of revenue that comes in from the “for sale” and “want” ads!

The time traveler, if he were savvy, would agree, but with a few caveats. While it’s true that things will change a great deal in the next quarter-decade, he’d say, you’re missing the big picture. Wouldn’t you want your content distributed instantly and inexpensively, all over the world? (I can travel to Europe and still read live updates of baseball games at the Web page of my hometown newspaper.) Despite the new influx of opinion leaders and “new” media personalities, don’t people still need and crave local news? (All news is local news, after all.) Won’t new means of content distribution provide new ways to deliver advertising? (There’s a reason Google wants in on the mobile phone market, and it’s not to sell handsets.)

Finally, don’t you realize that quality reporting will always cost time and money, something usually out of the reach of everyone but news organizations that can afford it? (People can only have an opinion about the news if there’s news to opine on.)

After leaving executives with those thoughts, when the time traveler returned to the present day, would anything have changed? Could the big media companies have figured out how to leverage all of these opportunities, or would we continue to hear stories about major media outlets, from those with national reach to those in major local markets laying off personalities because of the rise of the Internet and social media?

I wonder sometimes.

The most apt description for MySpace I’ve ever heard is that it’s like a terrible club with gaudy decorations, expensive drinks and awful music – but your friends hang out there, so you find yourself hanging out there, too.

Today was “International Delete Your MySpace Account Day.” I understand the reasoning here, but for me, it’s hindered by one important fact: MySpace is the most popular social network in the world. It’s important to understand MySpace because of its size and popularity. Like it or not, MySpace isn’t going anywhere, a fact that becomes especially evident when you compare it to the technically-superior competitors that have come and gone as MySpace has thrived.

So, although I was tempted to delete that rarely-visited, poorly-maintained private profile of mine, I ultimately decided to keep it. I’ll endure the drawbacks and hope MySpace gets its act together as other networks catch fire.

I remember the first entry on the list, JenniCam, being quite controversial back in the late 90s – a fact that seems quaint in light of what’s available online today. Still, it’s an interesting look back on how online video has evolved over the last decade.