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Editor’s note: The following excerpt is from Mastering The VC Game, a new book by Jeffrey Bussgang that goes on sale Thursday. It tells the backstory of Twitter from the perspective of founder Jack Dorsey, from his early obsession with couriers and his attempts to create a better dispatch system to his “Aha” moment with Twitter (”What if we simply set status, archive it on the Web, use SMS to do it, and it all happens in real time?”) to why the company picked Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures as its first venture investor (”I want a VC who is always thinking a few steps ahead of me”). Bussgang interviewed both men, and details how the VC and entrepreneur clicked in the second half of this excerpt. The first part recounts the tale of how Dorsey came to invent Twitter.

Jack Dorsey (a.k.a. @jack in the lingo of the Twitterverse) founded Twitter, the social networking and microblogging site where users—Twitterers—post very short (140 characters, tops) updates known as tweets. The concept for Twitter came out of Jack’s lifelong fascination with mapping the real-time movements of people and things within complex environments. “Since I was very small, I’ve been fascinated by how cities work,” Jack told me in his typically straightforward way. “I always got really excited when I thought about visualizing them, specifically around maps. What would you place on a map to show how a city worked?”

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class='feedflare' href="http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=http://mashable.com/2010/04/27/twitter-color-infographic/&title=What Color Is Twitter? [INFOGRAPHIC]&srcTitle=Mashable&srcUrl=http://mashable.com">If you were to take 40 million active href="http://mashable.com/tag/twitter/">Twitter users, and normalize their background color to a single saturation, what would be the most popular colors used on the service? As part of the release of a number of new, free Twitter data sets, href="http://infochimps.org/" target="_blank">Infochimps created the following beautiful infographic showing just what color Twitter really is.

The data for the infographic comes from the just-launched Histograms dataset that aggregates anonymous data about Twitter users such as how many users have x number of friends or followers, or how many users are in x location. The company also released new data sets (paid) about stock tickers, hashtags and URLs on Twitter.

href="http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/the-color-of-twitter.png">Click for full size image

However, the most interesting new data offering from Infochimps is actually their $350 Trust.me dataset, which comes with a corresponding API and web app: href="http://www.trst.me/" target="_blank">Trst.me. Essentially, Trst.me is a version of PageRank for Twitter users.

In a similar way that PageRank measures link influence among websites, Trst.me rank measures Twitter influence among followers — the geeky explanation is that Infochimps uses “a 30-machine cluster to produce an iterative eigenvalue solution of the sparse matrix modeling steady-state network flow on the interest graph: 50M+ users, 1.5B+ connections.”

Basically, people with the highest Trst.me rank have the most potential reach on Twitter, because they have high rank people following them.

The top ranked user in the system is Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann ( href="http://twitter.com/MufiHannemann" target="_blank">@MufiHannemann), the only person to measure a perfect Trst.me rank of 10. He’s followed by US President Barack Obama, CNN’s breaking news account, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and actor Ashton Kutcher.

As you can see, Trst.me isn’t just a ranking of raw follower numbers (or else Ashton Kutcher would be first), but rather, a ranking of potential influence measured by the reach of the people that follow you. According to Infochimps, only 6% of Twitter users have a Trst.met rank above 6.

For more href="http://mashable.com/social-media/">social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on href="http://twitter.com/mashsocialmedia" target="_blank">Twitter or become a fan on href="http://www.facebook.com/mashable.socialmedia?ref=sgm" target="_blank">Facebook

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Tags: href="http://mashable.com/tag/data/">data, href="http://mashable.com/tag/data-visualization/">data visualization, href="http://mashable.com/tag/infochimps/">infochimps, href="http://mashable.com/tag/infographic/">infographic, href="http://mashable.com/tag/twitter/">twitter

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I was less depressed than I would have expected about yesterday’s ruling that the FCC does not have the authority to tell Comcast to let us do what we want with our Internet. In part, that’s because I was expecting to lose. In part it’s because this battle is far, far from over. There’s the possibility of an appeal (although the 3:0 decision seems pretty definite), Congressional action, or reclassifying the Internet. The third is the most interesting, although it has its own risks.
I am not a lawyer and I do not understand these things well, but this ruling could spur the FCC to make a simple change in how it classifies the Internet — it’s all about the classifications, people! — which would truly change the game.

read more

Ooyala, a video platform for publishers, is testing a pay per view product with ABC for at least one show, we’ve learned. ABC’s 10 things I hate about you currently shows a 2 minute preview on the ABC Family website, and then displays a message that the full episode can be purchased for $0.99.

Paypal is the only pay option. If you click on it, a confirmation page pops up clearly showing that the payment is being made to Ooyala, not ABC. There are no commercials during the episode.

This is not a product that Ooyala currently offers that we know of, and we’ve reached out to the company for comment. Screenshots below:

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class='feedflare' href="http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=http://mashable.com/2010/04/27/black-nintendo-wii/&title=Black Version of Nintendo Wii Expected to Launch Soon in U.S.&srcTitle=Mashable&srcUrl=http://mashable.com">Sources at three different major retailers (Target, GameStop and Future Shop) have all named May 9th as the U.S. launch date for a black href="http://mashable.com/tag/wii">Nintendo Wii bundle, according to href="http://kotaku.com/5525000/rumor-black-wii-comes-to-north-america-in-may" target="_blank">Kotaku. The Canadian release will follow on May 23rd.

The black Wii will be identical to the white one except for the color (there won’t be any differences when it comes to the gameplay), with a bundle that includes not only the Wii, a Wii remote and Wii Sports, but also a copy of Wii Sports Resort and a Wii MotionPlus upgrade for more precise controls. The bundle will reportedly be priced at $199.

Nintendo’s previous home console (GameCube) and its current portable device ( href="http://mashable.com/tag/nintendo-ds">DS) have been made available in numerous colors, but this will be the first time the Wii will get a wide release of a non-white color in the United States or Canada. The black Wii has been available in href="http://kotaku.com/5278279/nintendo-selling-black-wii-in-japan-this-summer" target="_blank">Japan since last year.

Although Nintendo hasn’t officially confirmed a launch date, it seems likely we’ll soon see the black Wii soon given there are sources at multiple retailers and the product is already available overseas.

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Tags: href="http://mashable.com/tag/nintendo/">Nintendo, href="http://mashable.com/tag/nintendo-wii/">nintendo wii, href="http://mashable.com/tag/video-games/">video games, href="http://mashable.com/tag/wii/">Wii, href="http://mashable.com/tag/wii-remote/">wii remote

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class='feedflare' href="http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=http://mashable.com/2010/04/27/1millionshirts-wants-tees/&title=1MillionShirts Leverages Social Media to Help Clothe Africa&srcTitle=Mashable&srcUrl=http://mashable.com">A new clothing-themed charitable campaign from the guys behind lucrative social media marketing exercise href="http://mashable.com/2009/08/12/iwearyourshirt/">I Wear Your Shirt is looking to get unwanted T-shirts out of your closet and onto the backs of a million people across Kenya, Uganda, DRC, Ghana, Liberia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Swaziland and South Africa.

The href="http://1millionshirts.org/" TARGET="_blank">1MillionShirts project, launched this month, is asking for used (but decent) T-shirts to be sent in with a one dollar bill to help with container costs. The shirts will then be shipped to Africa to help clothe folks in need.

As you’d expect, Jason and Evan are using social media to help promote the campaign with a href="http://www.facebook.com/1MillionShirts" TARGET="_blank">Facebook page that is already racking up Likes, a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/1millionshirts/" TARGET="_blank">Flickr tag to gather all relevant pics and the href="http://twitter.com/#search?q=%231millionshirts" TARGET="_blank">#1millionshirts Twitter hashtag to spread the word via Twitter.

While the project is thus far U.S.-centric, it’s starting to generate some momentum across the pond too. The team is currently looking for a company that can help store and/or ship the T-shirts in the U.K. If you or anyone you know is interested in helping out, please contact project ambassador href="http://twitter.com/alexhardie80" TARGET="_blank">Alex Hardie.

“We understand that t-shirts aren’t the first thing you think of when you hear people are in need,” says the team, “but we also know what it takes to ask people to donate money.” See the video below to watch Jason explain the project in his own words and to find out more about the campaign before heading to your closet to weed out some spare tees to send in.

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Tags: href="http://mashable.com/tag/1millionshirts/">1millionshirts, href="http://mashable.com/tag/iwearyourshirt/">iwearyourshirt, href="http://mashable.com/tag/social-media/">social media

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class='feedflare' href="http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=http://mashable.com/2010/04/27/hulus-uk-expansion-grounded-for-now/&title=Hulu’s UK Expansion Grounded for Now&srcTitle=Mashable&srcUrl=http://mashable.com"> href="http://mashable.com/category/hulu">Hulu’s plans to expand to the United Kingdom appear to have been abandoned, meaning the service will likely remain exclusive to the United States for the immediately foreseeable future.

href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7639763/Hulu-abandons-UK-plans-after-broadcaster-talks-collapse.html" target="_blank">The Telegraph reports that the expansion to the UK failed to come to fruition because negotiations with British broadcasters fell through. At one point last year, insiders believed a deal between href="http://mashable.com/2009/08/24/hulu-uk/">Hulu and ITV was possible, but even the ITV discussions have ended, to say nothing of any hopes for content deals with the BBC.

Both ITV and the BBC operate their own web video distribution sites — the href="http://mashable.com/2009/09/10/watch-tv-online/">ITV Player and the BBC iPlayer— so they’re not in a rush to make deals they fear would undermine their own projects by sharing content. ITV executive Ben McOwen Wilson href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7474322/ITV-will-not-sign-a-content-deal-with-YouTube-or-Hulu.html" target="_blank">told the paper that, “Hulu is a major success in the US but the UK TV market is a different place. It is much more consolidated, which mean there are fewer online locations than in the US, which users need to visit to get access to their favourite content – therefore there is less need for aggregators.”

Hulu is one of the best repositories for free, streaming television on the web, but it has only been available in the United States to-date, much to the ire of web TV fans in other countries. While there are already ways to legally watch many shows online that are broadcast on UK stations, some web viewers might have hoped that a UK version of Hulu would carry some of the U.S. programming that’s not available through the BBC iPlayer or similar services.

That would have been unlikely even had the deals gone through. U.S. networks and studios already make good money by inking content deals with local stations in other countries, so they likely wouldn’t be keen to undermine those business opportunities by streaming the content to those regions online.

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Tags: href="http://mashable.com/tag/bbc/">bbc, href="http://mashable.com/tag/hulu/">hulu, href="http://mashable.com/tag/itv/">itv, href="http://mashable.com/tag/television/">television, href="http://mashable.com/tag/tv/">tv, href="http://mashable.com/tag/uk/">uk

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