SAN FRANCISCO — When Ryan Kuder lost his job last week, everyone knew it. That's because he chronicled the experience of his last hours at Yahoo Inc. through a stream of electronic dispatches laced with gallows humor.
Using Twitter, a service popular in Silicon Valley that allows users to broadcast short messages to an unlimited number of people, Kuder posted periodic updates of his final, caffeine-fueled day as a senior marketing manager at the Internet company, starting with his last commute to the Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters and ending with margaritas at Chevy's.
"Ironic that I just got my PC repaired yesterday. Won't be needing that anymore."
"This is a serious downer. Trying to drown it in free lattes. Which I will miss."
"Dear BlackBerry, What great times we had. I'll miss you. At least until tonight when I stop on my way home and buy an iPhone. Love, Me."
Like so many other personal experiences transformed by the Internet, getting canned need no longer be endured in quiet, isolating shame. Technology is allowing people to turn a traditionally private trauma into a quasi-public event, drawing quick moral support and even job referrals. "This is something that used to be shared over the dinner table. Now the whole world can watch and participate," technology forecaster Paul Saffo said.
As the pioneering Internet portal wrestled with an unsolicited takeover bid from software giant Microsoft Corp., Yahoo proceeded with previously planned cutbacks. It's saying goodbye to 1,100 employees, including 236 at its headquarters, 91 in Santa Clara, Calif., 111 in Burbank and 52 in Santa Monica, according to a notice the company filed with the state.
The event transfixed the high-tech community. Most people who work in Silicon Valley, with its booms and busts, have experienced a mass layoff.
"The appeal of this is that some people are watching with morbid curiosity, and all sorts of other people are wondering whether they will be next," Saffo said. "In the Internet business at times, there seems to be only two kinds of employees, those who have been laid off and those who haven't yet."
Twitter is a service that notifies your friends, by mobile phone, instant message, e-mail or on the Twitter website, what you are doing at any given moment. These messages of 140 characters or less, called tweets, are sent to anyone who subscribes to or "follows" your Twitter stream. Though it hasn't broken into the mainstream, Twitter is popular among the technorati: Nearly 1.2 million users visited Twitter.com in December, according to ComScore Inc. But Twitter, which is owned by San Francisco-based start-up Obvious Corp., doesn't disclose how many subscribers it has.
