My friend Ben Kunz just blogged The brilliance of Sarah Palin: Response mechanisms, activate and I just had to reply.

Well timed? Definitely.

Sound strategy? Questionable.

Sure, she has, once again, drawn the spotlight to herself. Nobody has doubted her ability to do that. But she did it at least a year too early to really matter for a 2012 run.

She will fully energize her strongest supporters. But she all ready had that. However, she's made her moderate supporters question her motives. And she's made her critics laugh out loud.

Now she has the media waiting with bated breath for her next message. The one that explains why all of this makes sense (because, really, nobody gets that just yet--her supporters are assuming she is a sly fox playing out a carefully planned gambit, but everyone else thinks she's ready to go make some money or getting out of the way of some as-yet-unknown scandal.) But the trouble is... when she delivers her next message, everyone will be listening very, very closely. It had better be a darn good message. One that resonates far beyond the boundaries of her strongest supporters. But what are the odds of that?

If she's really bailing to go make money or to dodge a scandal, whatever, good for her. But if she is jockeying for the presidency, she'll now be the mayor of a small town who quit in the middle of her first term as governor running for the highest office in the land. That'll be a challenge.

Why not remain governor, run for the senate, put the experience question to bed once and for all (by actually getting some experience)?

My hunch is she does not really have her eye on the presidency at all. There's something else driving her agenda.

When I heard Twitter had a new followers page UI, I was hopeful that it would solve some of the follower management tedium.  While it does do a little, some fundamental issues remain:

1. There is not enough detail (in most cases) to make a follow/no-follow/block/spam decision. I’d like to be able to get more details about the user without visiting their profile page.
2. There should be a “block & report as spam” button.
3. There is still a “referral spam” incentive for spammer to follow everyone under the sun. IMO followers should not show up in the followers page publicly by default (or at least there should be an option for this). I don’t want dozens of porn sites, gambling sites, get-a-million-followers-a-day sites, etc. linked to from my followers page but with the current toolset, it is tedious to keep them off.

Don't get me wrong, I like the new followers page better than the old one.  But I'm still looking for some refinements because follower management is still too tedious.

[This post is based on a comment I originally left on blog post by @LiveCrunch.]