• Bnet.com, Friday, September 2, 2011 9:30 AM

Twitter launched a video commercial touting itself last week but it got razzed for playing on the earthquake that hit the Washington, D.C./New York area earlier in August. The new ad is a big change from one it ran last year in which Twitter was a virtual friend, helping a young man make choices for his date that night. That ad has 4 million views.

In the new ad, "a smug New Yorker receives a tweet notifying him that a quake has struck D.C. He lifts his coffee mug off the table and a few seconds later his office shakes from the temblor," writes Edwards. "The major problem with the new ad is that, to get it, the earthquake has to be fresh in your mind. Since it struck, however, Hurricane Irene has replaced it in the headlines. The quake -- and the Twitter ad -- remain stuck sometime in late August 2011, trapped by time and increasingly irrelevant."

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