By JAVIER ESPINOZA LONDON—Last month, citizenrobert was enjoying “the pleasures of slow cooking.” The month before, he was battling with “brutal” winds in Suffolk. Citizenrobert, it turns out, is Robert Phillips, the U.K. chief executive of public-relations firm Edelman, and he has been using the microblogging site Twitter to share his views and anecdotes with his [...]

By STEVEN JOHNSON Friday, Jun. 05, 2009 The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your “followers,” and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It’s not as if we were [...]

At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon – a diagnosis confirmed by my children and my way cooler friends – I find Twitter and Facebook annoying. Social media is an unavoidable reality for publishers, as we have often reported in these pages. It may even be profitable, and not just to Web 2.0 developers [...]