Steve Rubel starts the week by reassuring the world that the social web is speeding ahead despite a slowing economy. His advice: "Digital marketers who continue to plan campaigns months in advance and
then unleash them will lose relevance. The more-successful programs
going forward must feature real human beings. They will need to be
dynamic, adaptable and able to turn on a dime depending on where the
live conversation goes. That’s no easy feat and it will require brands
and agencies to rewire themselves for speed. Get ready to race."

To some degree, this echoes what Tim Bray said at FOWA earlier this month and in greater detail on his blog – dispensing advice on the kinds of organizational behavior that are appropriate when things are lousy. Recommended reading for anyone wondering quite how their venture is going to weather the crunch.

iHate iGoogle, say the punters

Based on its Q3 performance, Google is probably confident it can ride out the downturn; as Jeff Jarvis notes:
"The analysts are stumped because they are not judging Google as a new
kind of company in a new kind of economy. It’s different."

But not all its antics have been met with appreciation – there’s been a swathe of mixed reaction to last week’s iGoogle launch – Lifehacker readers seem unconvinced and elsewhere on the interwebs,  the sentiment is that iGoogle blows goats.

Jack Schofield at The Guardian gave iGoogle a whirl and found it to be "a bit of a shambles, even by Google standards".

Lumping Yahoo and Google into the Facebook pretender camp, Schofield said: "Also, Yahoo has also screwed up
big time on the alias/profile front, and is taking a huge amount of
abuse on its blog. One comment on Yahoo’s post is as follows:

Making
a second rate copy of facebook while breaking everything else people
come to yahoo for is a good way to go out of business.

I
wonder if this may also apply to iGoogle. It does look as though
Google’s long term aim for iGoogle is to be a crappier version of
Facebook."

There are already hacks to make iGoogle less painful to use,
and some users are seeking refuge in changing their language settings
to UK English; Google always rolls out new features to users with US
English settings first.

Twitter attracts superstar, promises business model sometime next year

From @stephenfry to @therealbritney
- the latest celebrity to take to the Twitterverse has all the blogs
fairly flapping with excitement. The singer’s comeback from that
turbulent patch of her life lived out on the public stage is marked
with the resurgence of her online presence; in addition to her Twitter
account, Jack Schofield reports: "Britney also has a YouTube video channel, a social networking site, [and] an email newsletter."

Arrington weighs in: "I’ll say this, though. This is solid gold for Twitter. A few more of
these and it will be hard to argue that it isn’t going mainstream."

Hopefully Twitter will be able to exploit this sort of cachet when it eventually announces its business model early next year. Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodget sticks his neck out
to predict: "Twitter could eventually be worth more than $1 billion.
Why? Because they’ll figure out a revenue model eventually, just like
Google did."

So no pressure then.

- Basheera Khan