The big blog

Well, the clock is ticking. Just a couple of hours ago, AT&T finally enabled multimedia messaging on the iPhone—a capability Apple added to the iPhone with a software update more than three months ago, but which AT&T, in a now-notorious blunder of epic proportions, failed to be ready to support. Now that AT&T is (supposedly) ready, confidence in a smooth roll-out is less than high. Especially since the rumor is going around that a test AT&T ran a few days ago resulted in a network outage and a last-minute rush to beef up capacity.

Of course, the idea of a “last-minute rush” is either laughable or infuriating, depending upon the quality of your anti-anxiety meds. A “last-minute rush” would have gotten AT&T’s network ready in time for the mid-June introduction of the new MMS feature when Apple unveiled it. The setting was one of Apple’s famous industry keynote events, and when it was announced that AT&T would not be implementing the feature until “later in the summer,” there were audible catcalls. Even the Apple execs at the event made little effort to hide their disdain.

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First, we were told to “tweet.” Then, because we all have so much free time on our hands, we were expected to “retweet.” And now—brace yourselves—it’s time to “pretweet.”

If you’ve just thrown up your hands and decided to read no further, I don’t blame you.

But, if morbid curiosity has gotten the better of you, here’s the deal. Pretweeting is the oh-so-precious name being given to the devil-spawn convergence of two of our zeitgeist’s new-dawn darlings: Twitter and prediction markets.

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