Fellow speaker Monty Metzger used his Flip camera to capture a brief interview about the basics of the book, available October 19th.

Note: I correct myself, but the book contract was in fact signed in late June. I did leave Adobe to work on it full time in July and submitted the first draft on August 3rd. This pattern complies with the DollarApp strategy of: 1 person, 1 month, 1 feature.

My speech at FITC Mobile was about the “one-dollar-app opportunity”. Although I currently have one dollar’s worth of app with the Hypertext Edition, I believe I’ll continue adding value and ship it for a bit more than a dollar. More news to come.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Twitter Co-creator Dom Sagolla to publish “140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form.”

Printed by John Wiley & Sons, the book is scheduled to appear in bookstores in the US and Canada on 10/19/09. The product of four years of research and writing, this field manual to social media has three major features:

1. The definitive history of Twitter, from an insider’s point of view
2. New grammar rules for short-form writing, and a catalog of writing styles
3. Inspiring quotations from comedy to poetry from some of the best writers, including the Twitter creators

Three ways to think about 140 Characters:

• The equivalent of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style for today’s social media & marketing messages
• A handbook to help you develop your own unique short-form writing style with simplicity, honesty, and humor
• The authoritative approach to Twitter, written by its creators to include other social networks like pure text messaging

For marketers and business owners, social media is an increasingly important avenue for promoting a business-this is the first writing guide specifically dedicated to communicating with the succinctness and clarity that the Internet age demands.

140 Characters is a much-needed guide to the kind of communication that can make or break a reputation online. Appearing alongside the printed edition, an abridged Hypertext Edition will also be published specifically for iPhone by DollarApp in San Francisco. For more information please visit http://www.140characters.com.

Press Inquiries

• press@140characters.com (Dom & Wiley PR) – 415.287.7775 (Dom)
• Book Jacket Art
• Author’s Photograph
• Author’s Biography

Book Premiere

Tuesday October 20, 2009
7:00pm
BookShop West Portal
80 West Portal Ave.
San Francisco, California 94127

Press & Blog Coverage of 140 Characters

• Teknision: Celebrate the Short Form (08/20/09)
• La Informacion: Casi 300 páginas… para aprender a twittear en 140 caracteres (08/19/09)
• Haraka Haraka Haina Baraka: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tweetie (08/14/09)
• Christian Science Monitor: Sued for a tweet: How not to deal with complaints on Twitter (08/01/09)
• [video] YouTube: @dom on ‘140 Characters’ (08/01/09)
• Wall Street Journal: ‘Twitterature’ to Hit the Bookstores (06/24/09)
• [audio] Strange Love Live: Live from Bar Camp! (05/03/09)
• Christian Science Monitor: Oprah tweets, Twitter arrives (04/17/09)
• [audio] @ThePodcast: Interview with Dom Sagolla, The Guy Who Helped Create Twitter (04/08/09)
• [audio] Westwood One Radio: Twitter Turns Three (03/21/09)
• [video] Nightline: Sign of the Times (02/26/09)
• New York Times: Anatomy of a Tweet: Twitter Gets a Style Guide (02/13/09)

While I was at the Sarasota International Design Summit,

of course I posted to Twitter about it. Local one-man news crew David Leonard caught my message and visited the conference in order to interview me. Here is the article (corrections in italics), originally posted to the 10Connects site:

Sarasota, Florida – Dom Sagolla knows the value of a dollar. The founder and developer of DollarApp is creating applications for the iPhone that are just a buck.

“It’s like they say, ‘I’d buy that for a dollar,’” the 34-year-old designer said. Dom is just one of many speakers who gathered for the 2008 Sarasota International Design Summit hosted by Ringling College at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. Designers from Google, Microsoft, Herman Miller, and others presented work and discussed the direction of social networking in the real world, online and from mobile devices.

It was one of those events that were under most people’s radar. I found out about it on Twitter. I put in a search on robots within a 50 mile radius of Tampa and caught Dom’s post.

“Checking into the Ritz-Carlton in Sarasota, Florida — turns out this Design Summit is high class.”

It turns out Dom was one of the originators of Twitter; #8 in fact.

“Jack Dorsey envisioned twitter as a messaging service to keep people in touch where ever they were in short bursts and stay connected and share ideas,” said Sagolla who is #8 of more than a million subscribers to Twitter.

“There are almost genres of users who tweet what they are eating next or what they thought of what they ate or what their cat is doing. I am more of a journalist.”

It was fun talking with David, who is doing a great service to the Tampa Bay area, and it’s always fun to turn other journalists on to Twitter.