Twitter: 2006-2010. No, the site isn’t shutting down, unfortunately, but it might as well be, for Sunderland striker Darren Bent has quit. Look, see! This is a terrible day for humanity.

Darren Bent, for the seven people around the world who don’t follow the Premier League, is an English footballer who currently plays for Sunderland, a team in the North-east of England. He was transferred from Tottenham, in London, to Sunderland last July. He was, until today, one of the most famous Twitter users in the world. Premiership footballer? Big deal, he has lots of Twitter followers.

Bent’s most famous use of Twitter was to tweet rage at Tottenham management for dragging their heels over his transfer to Sunderland. The Sun called it an “F- Word Rant,” but it must have worked: he’s now a Sunderland striker, and he’s not doing too bad, scoring 15 goals in 25 league appearances.

But that’s all in the past. Sunderland is in the heat of a relegation battle, currently in 13th place in the Premier League. So, in order to concentrate on ensuring his team stays up, he’s quit “the Twitter.”

He said, “People were writing stories in the papers about me from what I put on Twitter. There was a lot made of it. It became a distraction I didn’t need. I thought I would fully concentrate on the football.”

This is the most famous example of a person quitting Twitter. Miley Cyrus, Chris Brown, Tila Tequila (?), all of whom are celebrities, I guess, also famously quit Twitter. But let’s be honest: none of those people can compare to Mr. Darren Bent.

So here’s an interesting look at Internet piracy you may well enjoy. The English Premier League complained the other day that illegal Web streams of live games (from Justin.tv and the like) were eating into its profits. No profits, no Premiership, was the implied threat. Then explain this to me: WWE ran a pay-per-view event in June called The Bash, and it marked the first time the company aggressively pursued illegal Web streams (again, from Justin.tv, Ustream, etc.). According to the company’s recently released financials [PDF], by way of the latest Wrestling Observer newsletter [that's a pay site, by the way], The Bash was the third least purchased pay-per-view event “in years.”

Why should any of you care? It merely illustrates that, despite the fact that WWE had gone out of its way to snuff out piracy, such actions had no measurable, positive impact on the pay-per-view buyrate (the number of people who buy the pay-per-view). Despite the fact that there were no streams, the buyrate didn’t respond in kind.

And the idea that these jitter-prone streams, which often went down even without the long arm of the WWE’s legal department getting involved, could somehow replicate the effect and utility of actually buying the pay-per-view (in HD!) and watching it with your friends and family is ludicrous.

The Bash was positioned as the company’s bellwether: do these illegal Web streams detract from the buyrate, or is the number of people watching them so insignificant that it’s not even worth pursuing? Or, more to the point, do these streams siphon off business? Well, again, with no streams out there, The Bash didn’t seem to have benefitted at all from all those stream-less people buying the pay-per-view.

Now, WWE’s own idiosyncrasies aside—despite seeing revenue drop by some 16 percent, this past year was its most profitable ever—this whole Bash business, I think, should at least temper the Premiership’s arguments. Justin.tv isn’t going to destroy the Premiership, or any other entertainment venture out there. Saying otherwise is disingenuous.

Of course, that’s how things stand in mid-2009. If 2012 rolls around and the Premiership (or whatever sports/entertainment property you want to mention) still hasn’t figured out a way to make itself legally accessible to the Internet generation, for lack of a better term, then clearly something is wrong. The fact is that you can already purchase Internet streams of Champions League games from UEFA, and have been able to for a few years now. Yes, it requires Windows, but the fact is it’s available, which is something you can’t say about the Premiership.

It’s fair to say that the Internet is a complete waste of time. Aside from the odd virtual museum, or learning about the history of the Bantu peoples on Wikipedia, there’s very little on there that’s worth the time of day, I think. Twitter? Rubbish. Facebook? Old. Hulu? You couldn’t pay me to watch network TV anymore.

But on Any Given Saturday, from August to May, the Internet is, in fact, worth a damn. That’s because, thanks to the likes of Ustream, and Justin.tv, and any number of esoteric, China-based P2P programs, I can watch the various European soccer leagues right here on my MacBook. And as much as I’d like to see Aston Villa play Wigan this Saturday, I’d much rather see how this whole Manchester City business turns out. Unfortunately, the City game, against Blackburn, is on Setanta Sports USA, a channel I don’t have. Ustream to the rescue.

Unfortunately, that’s just the scenario that Engl… Barclays Premier League is afraid of. No, it’s not the first time the Premier League has complained about the proliferation of live football streams, but now they’re crying poverty, claiming that “digital piracy is one of the most important threats facing sports rights owners today.” I’m sorry, but I don’t care, and I would think that Sheikh Mansour doesn’t mind, either. He’s rich enough, and some guy in New York watching his new plaything squeak by Blackburn 1-0 on Justin.tv won’t upset him too much.

Not every team is bankrolled by petrodollars from the Middle East, and this is why the Premier League is freaking out. If the League can’t turn to Sky or ESPN when it’s time to negotiate rights contracts and say, “We guarantee that X-Number of people watch every single Premier League game,” why would Sky or ESPN shell out hundreds of millions, if not billions, of pounds? It’s always helpful to keep in mind that these guys, Sky and ESPN and others like them (R.I.P. Sentanta UK,) are buying an audience when they buy the rights to Premier League games. They then sell this audience to advertisers, which is how their money is made.

Right, so if the Premier League cannot guarantee Sky and Co. and audience, how can they charge a premium? In other words, the more people that watch these games, for free, on the Internet, the less of a legitimate audience they have. No audience, no contract with Sky, no money in the League. That’s how the Premier League sees it, at any rate.

In other words, the Premier League is afraid that Sky’s money well will dry up.

Not that any of this matters. Just wait till April, 2010, when Premiership footballers are taxed to death, and then flee to Spain. At least the weather is better there. On some days, I hear, you can even see the sun! Imagine that.

New season, new ball. The three big football leagues—England’s Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, and Italy’s Serie A—begin in just a few weeks, and Nike has developed a fancy, new ball for them that’s loaded with all types of hi-tech goodness that may pique your interest. It’s called the T90 Ascente. Goalkeepers will hate it; flashy forwards will love it.

What’s so damn special about the ball? The Nike bullet points are: “360 Sweet Spot,” “Longer Range,” “Increased Visibility,” “Higher Accuracy,” and “Greater Speed.”

Breaking those down, the “360 Sweet Spot” refers to the way the ball reacts to being kicked. Usually, footballs have a “sweet spot,” like the “meat” of a baseball bat, that you’re trained to hit for maximum speeds, accuracy, etc. Apparently the T90 Ascente doesn’t have a “sweet spot,” per se, rather that the whole ball is a sweet spot. That is, wherever you kick it, the ball will react as if you’ve kicked the sweet spot. Good news for Quaresma. (Why do sports compilation videos on YouTube always have terrible music?)

Longer range? That’s pretty obvious, right? The ball is constructed in three layers, and this somehow makes the ball travel two ball lengths longer than previous Nike footballs.

Increased visibility. You’ll notice the patterns on the ball; it sort of looks like the scanner from Half-Life 2:

Anyhow, the patterns are such that they create a “flicker” as the ball spins. That’ll be helpful on those awful, gray winter days in Liverpool.

If you actually had the ball in your hands, you’d see that its surface is textured to a degree that’s probably a little different than the last ball you kicked. Nike calls it “micro-textured,” which basically lets air flow around the ball more smoothly, creating less resistance, etc. You know, like the dimples on a golf ball.

The T90 Ascenete is also faster than previous balls, traveling at about 22.19 m/s (72.17 feet/s). Something to do with the three-layer construction.

All this talk of multi-layer construction reminds me of the great Razor Blade Wars of the past decade. “Our razor has three blades.” “Well our razor has four blades.” “Ha! Our blade has five blades!.

And, uh, if you speak Spanish, watch this video. It explains the technological wonder of the ball.

Nike has its own video, in English, that I can’t embed. (Though, if I were feeling crazy, I could probably just swipe the Flash file then upload to our CG YouTube account. No thanks.) It’s here if you’re interested.

About 15 minutes ago I wrote “Goalkeepers will hate it; flashy forwards will love it.” But now I see FC Barcelona’s goalkeeper Víctor Valdés praising the ball in that Spanish video. Figures.

You’ll recall that, about a year ago, we decided to make captchas—those things you find on Web sites at login that require you to decipher and type words or numbers—our raison d’etre. Two days later we stopped caring (though it is incredibly annoying to have to deal with a captcha, as you see up there, when trying to log into my router—is a spammer or other evildoer going to bother with my dumb router?). So imagine my delight this morning when I read that Google is hard at work developing a new type a captcha, one that, hopefully, won’t drive us crazy anymore.

Rather than having you decipher words and numbers, Google’s new captcha has you interacting with pictures. Let’s say you’re trying to log into animalsthatremindyouofcelebrities.com For the captcha, the Web site would serve you a row of upside-down pictures, maybe of a tree, a car and a bird. Your job, as a human being trying to log into the site for a quick laugh, would be to select and flip the picture of the bird; it is an animal site, after all. (This is obviously easier accomplished with a touchscreen phone like the iPhone or Palm Pre.) Once the bird has been flipped, you’re in.

It sounds a heck of a lot easier than some of the other captchas I run into on a daily basis. More than once have I tried to log into a message board or whatever, failed to correctly interpret the captcha, then said, “oh, forget it, I’ll just go somewhere else.”

(Unrelated: if Newcastle goes down, how long till they get back into the Premier League? My guess is never: the club is a shambles, and they’ll be kicking around the Championship for a little while. That’s if they do, indeed, go down today. It’s 12:30pm as I write this and nothing has been decided yet.)

In short, I abhor captchas; may Google reinvent the whole concept.

Enjoy your weekend!