There was a time in 2008 when Twitter really started taking off. Celebrities were starting to use it. Kevin Rose, former geek leader and entrepreneur, dissed his own startup, Pownce, by saying that he preferred Twitter. The company was on a good trajectory. That was on the surface. Behind the scenes, it was far from cozy. They were having coding issues. They couldn’t stay up for an entire day without presenting a fail whale for an extended period of time. They were, in essence, a tech company that was getting too popular for their own good and couldn’t figure out how to bring everything together. Then,…

Twitter built its empire around brevity. There were others in the microblogging field, most notably Jaiku and Pownce, that offered a longer format than Twitter. Conventional wisdom at the time was the the shortness of Twitter was its weakness, but it turned out to be its greatest strength. Now that they’ve introduced Vine, the Twitter app that allows users to upload 6-second videos and post them in their stream, it would appear that their hope in the world of video is that “brevity is the soul of wit.” Did they cut it a little too short this time? Is 6 seconds enough time to put together a compelling…

Kevin Rose has always been known as an “ideas guy”. His ventures haven’t always paid off as well as they could have with Revision3, Pownce, and Milk all selling for less than many would have thought and with Digg dropping out of prominence in the social news arena, but he’s tasted success with all of them at one point or another. Google is banking on that by moving him to Google Ventures after trying him out on the Google+ team for a short stint. Rose has had success in picking winners with a portfolio that has include Twitter, path, OMGPOP, and Foursquare. Three-year-old Google Ventures claims to have…