The Guy Behind The Qwikster Twitter Account Realizes What He Has, Wants A Mountain Of Cash

Greg Kumparak is the editor of MobileCrunch.com, a mobile industry blog within the TechCrunch Network. Greg has been writing for the TechCrunch network since May of 2008. Greg was born in the outskirts of San Jose, CA, and now lives in the East Bay. ? Learn More

Last night, Jason went to bed a normal man, with a normal Twitter account (albeit one with a weed-smoking Elmo as the avatar), and a few dozen followers.

This morning, Jason woke up to an inbox full of messages, thousands of new followers, and wants to sell his account for many thousands of dollars.

As we chronicled last night, Netflix made a rather fundamental mistake in launching their new spin-off brand, Qwikster: they didn’t make sure they had the name locked down on all of the big social networks before making the announcement. As Jason’s luck had it, he had long owned the @Qwikster handle. He’s willing to part with it — he just wants to make sure he’ll “be making bank” first.

After over a month of silence, Jason’s @Qwikster account sprang back to life just a few hours ago and, likely to Netflix’s horror, has been more active today than it ever was before. Jason keeps touching on the idea of selling the account between poetic bursts like “I’m about to go play soccer n I got stug by a fucken bee” and “I just got scared I went into the shower turned on the water n then stuff started falling I was lik omg wtf lol”:

Jason seems to have rallied the, erm, expert counsel of his friend Gabriel (@SoccerIsLifegc7) who says they’re “not talkin til the offers get in 6 figures”.

Someone should probably tell Jason that selling Twitter handles is strictly against Twitter’s Terms Of Service, and attempts to do so can quickly result in the banhammer being dropped. Then Qwikster gets their name, free of charge.

Launch Date: September 20, 1997

With more than 23.3 million members in the United States and Canada, Netflix, Inc. is the world’s leading Internet subscription service for enjoying movies and TV shows. For $7.99 a month, Netflix members in the U.S. can instantly watch unlimited movies and TV episodes streaming right to their TVs and computers and can receive unlimited DVDs delivered quickly to their homes. In Canada, streaming unlimited movies and TV shows from Netflix is available for $7.99 a month. There are...

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Tweaking The Algorithm: Google Gives A Small Peek Behind The Curtains

Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). ? Learn More

One of the most common complaints critics (and competitors) have against Google is that the company — despite its numerous open products and initiatives — is very secretive about the countless algorithms that power its crown jewels, Google Search. In other words, search is a black box. Google’s argument has generally been that it needs to be this way — if it told everyone exactly how the algorithm worked, then it would be much easier to game, and search results would suffer.

In any case there’s plenty of mystery around Search, which is why the video posted today to the Google blog is so interesting: Google has given a quick video walk-through detailing how its engineers gradually adjust the algorithm, which — according to the video — gets tweaked more than 500 times per year.

The video is only four minutes long and is worth watching in its entirely, but here’s a quick rundown on how a change to search goes live:

First, Google engineers identify a set of “motivating searches” that aren’t working as well as Google would like them to.Next, engineers try to identify various signals (Google doesn’t really get into what these signals entail) that could be used to better answer that query.These new results are then rated by a trained worker that isn’t a Google employee.Next, the results are pushed live to a small number of users.An analyst is then assigned to objectively look at the change and how it’s performing in tests.And finally, the proposed change is presented to the search quality team, which either approves or denies it.

The video also goes into a quick anecdote about what Google calls ‘Full Page Replacement’. This refers to the times Google looks at your query, decides you’ve misspelled it, and then presents the results for the correct spelling, rather than just suggesting the proper spelling and displaying the results for the misspelled results. To test this, Google looked at how many times users explicitly clicked on the link for the results for their original query (which Google believed was misspelled) — Google decided that so long as this ‘escape hatch’ was only clicked 1 in 50 times, it was a good change. And it passed the test.

Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of...

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Twitter Founders Put Their Weight Behind A New Startup: Lift

Robin Wauters currently works as a staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found working from his home or... ? Learn More

Twitter co-founders Biz Stone, Evan Williams, and longtime sidekick Jason Goldman, recently shifted their focus away from the micro-sharing service provider to reboot Obvious, the company that originally incubated Twitter.

Yesterday, Stone announced Obvious’ first project: incubating an app development company called Lift, created by Tony Stubblebine and Jon Crosby. Obvious says it will assist Lift with “strategy, design, funding and recruiting”.

What Lift is building remains unclear, but Stone writes:

“Tony Stubblebine and Jon Crosby have created an interesting new application for unlocking human potential through positive reinforcement. We love this software for what it does, and because we’ve tried it and it works.”

Crosby says more will be shared “in the coming months”. If you’re interested in learning more now: Marshall Kirkpatrick has been sleuthing and writes about what he found on ReadWriteWeb.

Stubblebine previously worked at Wesabe, Odeo (where he worked with the Obvious trio) and O’Reilly Media and also founded CrowdVine. Crosby boasts gigs at Path, Engine Yard and Songbird on his résumé.

Lift will be billed as an ‘Obvious Company’, although the Obvious team clearly sees this more as a partnership, wherein Lift gets to follow its own path under the leadership of Stubblebine and Crosby.

Its service is currently in private alpha, but the website lets people sign up to receive more information when it’s available. Oh, and you’ll be able to log in through Twitter and Facebook.

As an amusing aside: entrepreneur and hacker Connor Montgomery, and/or Stubblebine, appear to have added some humor to the Lift website code:

(meta name=”description” content=”Lift. Achieve anything (assuming we finish building this app).”)

I assume they will. Can’t wait to finally be able to achieve anything!

The Obvious Corporation creates technology systems to facilitate the process of collaboration between people to improve the world. Obvious believes that technology has the power to affect individuals, organizations,...

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