- In what’s being seen as a play to fend off Facebook and Google Plus, Twitter has given itself some new bells and whistles. An international rollout will include personal profile pages and timelines, and new ways to find tweets you might be interested in. More from the Wall Street Journal (on what it means for the company) and Lifehacker (on the changes themselves).
- The CEO of the French tech firm Atos hasn’t used email since he got the position three years ago. Now he’d like to make the company’s 74,000 other employees do the same, at least for internal emails. Instead, they might use an in-house wiki and IM, along with other tools.
- Dan Pallotta looks at the horrors of lousy, meaningless business expressions: “You will gain tremendous credibility, become much more productive, make those around you much more productive, and experience a great deal more joy in your working life if you look someone in the eye after hearing one of these verbal brain jammers and tell the person, “I don’t have any idea what you just said to me.” [HBR]
- The plans for Apple’s supercollider-shaped headquarters include lots and lots of fruit trees, as well as gardens, a fountain, and an open-air amphitheater. [Forbes]
- The Freelancers Union’s Sara Horowitz talks health insurance with the New York Times’ David Bornstein: “Many people believe that there are only two options for health care: the current, for-profit, dysfunctional, system where costs are spiraling out of control, and a single-payer system. . . I believe there is another strategy where civil society (such as nonprofits, social-purpose businesses and other institutions) create a new support system to get their basic needs met. The reality is that government is subsidizing less and less. . . it’s unrealistic to think that government will be able to fund and operate a single-payer health care system in the next three to five years.”
- From Hired Gun pal, John Vorwald: Budget Travel’s newest list of the World’s Weirdest Hotels.
