Social Shorts

The huge tech news today was Netflix’s big split. They’ve been taking hits ever since they announced their price “restructuring,” and the stock has fallen some 24% from its peak in the not-so-distant past. Their response was to spin off the DVD-by-snail-mail division into a new subsidiary, named Qwikster. This should allow them to write off parts of their expenses separately to make investors happier. It sounds like a savvy business move, right? Well, they forgot one thing.

Now, I never graduated from a fancy business school, but I don’t think associating your struggling new company’s image with a chain-smoking Elmo was what CEO Reed Hastings had in mind. Twitter has rules to prevent account squatters, but the account is fairly active, and it was created long before Qwikster was a gleam in Hasting’s eye, so I doubt Twitter is going to go out on a limb for them.

Was this just a massive oversight? I guess we’ll all see how this develops in the coming days, but one thing is for sure. Jason Castillo is poised to become a very rich kid.

We all know how Mike Monteiro feels about lawyers. I think he’s serious, dude. Give him a call.

—- UPDATE: Sept 19th

@Qwikster has an offer! I’ll let the tweets speak for themselves.

And @chrisremo designs the new Qwikster DVD packages.