IT Buoy

The iPad pre-order madness began this morning at 5:30 a.m. PST, but has the bloom fallen off the iPad for Seth Goldstein ? The co-founder of SocialMedia tweeted earlier this week that he’s “no longer amazed by the ipad” and attached a blog post stating, “The Blackberry has always been the best device for reading and writing email.” *** Good thing Anna Kendrick’s character from “Up in the Air” didn’t try firing people via VoIP while up in the air. Federated Media chairman John Battelle tried to talk to his kids on iChat while on a United Airlines flight, according to his tweets , and was told “cameras not allowed.” (Coincidentally, the film showing in-flight was … “Up in the Air.”) Prompting two “WTF?”s from Mr. Battelle. *** Just in case you’ve been living under a router, South by Southwest (SXSW) kicks off this week in Austin, Texas, where entrepreneurs and established names from the music, film, interactive, and tech world converge for geek speak, panels and parties. It’s where Twitter entered the scene in 2007, where @Foursquare started to make its mark in 2009, and where everyone, this year, will be looking to the next noteworthy consumer technology service to move beyond the tech crowd, reach critical mass and still grapple with profitability. Laura Fitton , CEO of oneforty.com , tweeted about the must-use Twitter apps for SXSW, while Chris Dixon , co-founder of hunch.com , offered a “ sxsw panel picker helper ” Author and video blogger Gary Vaynerchuk is just bringing “ straight thunder .” Hopefully, by “thunder,” he means bandwidth

Note: This post was originally published on OPEN Forum . It is republished here with permission. By now you’ve probably read or heard of stories of employees getting fired or tweeting their way out of a job offer , by saying inappropriate things on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

This is a report from our premium subscription research service The Internet Analyst.

Celebrity entrepreneurs are nothing new. But, in the 15-or-so years since the dot-com revolution, only a few famous faces have successfully ventured into the digital industry. And some of them might surprise you. Read the rest of this story

A patent granted to Facebook this week for the site’s “news feed” could have big implications for other social-networking companies. Facebook The patent, which was first reported on the All Facebook blog , is for “dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network.” Such feeds are crucial to many social-networking services — MySpace, Google Reader, Twitter and LinkedIn come to mind. But it wasn’t immediately clear whether the patent would apply to all of these sites. Facebook’s news feed has changed a number of times since the patent was filed in 2006, and some aspects of Facebook’s system might not be included. Nick O’Neill at All Facebook suggests that the patent does not cover the posting of status updates and that Twitter would thus not fall under its umbrella. Instead, he says, the patent covers a news feed based on “actions,” such as joining a group or adding a friend. But such a patent would still affect a number of sites. Much of the activity that occurs on LinkedIn, for example, is related to career actions, not status updates