The good news: Jack Dorsey, the handsome programmer ousted as Twitter's CEO yesterday, can put his nose ring back in and stop seeing that CEO coach he hired. The bad news: His cofounder, Ev Williams, who's replacing him as CEO, is sugarcoating Dorsey's exit. Dorsey is not going to be working in Twitter's office, and his coworkers are saying their tearful goodbyes; he's effectively out of the company, though he retains the title of chairman and what is presumably a large stake in the messaging startup. So why did Dorsey get fired?"This has nothing to do with the economy," Fred Wilson, a partner at Twitter investor Union Square Ventures, told The Deal. True enough — but it does have to do with Dorsey's incompetence. One industry insider says he botched several acquisition offers — one by nattering on about his original idea for Twitter as a messaging service for ambulance drivers and bicycle couriers, an idea he still wanted to pursue after a Twitter acquisition.

Jack Dorsey, a programmer who's famous South of Market, is stepping down as Twitter's CEO. Why? Ev Williams, who's taking over, has a long, involved explanation about changing times and changing roles, and how Twitter was spun off from this loser podcasting startup he hated working on, and that's where he met Dorsey, who came up with the idea for Twitter as an in-house communications tool. Boring! What he really means:Williams is the guy who sold Blogger to Google. Everyone wants to hear from him, not some software engineer he hired. Dorsey is now "chairman," which is Valleyspeak for "founder we don't know what to do with."

Vancouver-based NowPublic is ostensibly all about citizen journalism. But since Guy Kawasaki sold Truemors to it and signed up as an advisor, it's becoming better known for publishing flattering lists of "influencers," supposedly ranking them according to various social media metrics. The first "Most Public" list focused on New York, but a new list for the Valley and San Francisco is "coming soon." And by virtue of being included in the latest edition, we received an early copy as a press release. Who comes out on top? Ubiquitous attention slut Robert Scoble, naturally. Full list after the jump.

Twitter's founders are waging a behind-the-scenes war with Blaine Cook, the blogging service's former chief architect. The subject: Who's responsible for the service's perpetual outages. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington ran a series of leading questions about Twitter's infrastructure, attributing them to "people who say they’ve seen Twitter’s architecture." I don't think that's true, if only because I received a similar set of questions, before Arrington's post went up, from a source who identified himself as a "friend of Blaine." In their official response, Twitter cofounders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone — they're the two one always forgets about, because they're not as interesting as Evan Williams — go out of their way to avoid naming names.

Don't call Ariel Waldman a "whore" where Google can hear you. That's the only firm conclusion we can draw from a confusing fracas that left even Twitter cofounder Biz Stone unsure who can call whom a whore on the service. Waldman, a blogger and community manager at quasi-rival messaging site Pownce, called out Twitter for allegedly failing to uphold its own terms of service, setting off an online firestorm.

Twitter nearly downed Valleywag's liveblog of the Steve Jobs keynote yesterday at Macworld. And apparently we weren't the only ones affected. "We seem to be up at the moment, but we had a flood of traffic around the Macworld Keynote this morning," Twitter developer Alex Payne wrote in a Twitter-dedicated Google group yesterday during the speech.

So my boss is at Macworld right now and he's expecting Twitter's Jack Dorsey to take the stage in a matter of minutes. Of course, you should be hearing about this from him in our liveblog of the event. But we used a Twitter embed. And it's broken. And, depending on when you're visiting the 'Wag, it's either not working or loading really slow. Break a leg, Jack!

Why is Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, "looking forward to a big week"? It could be that Twitter investor Fred Wilson is in town. Always exciting to have a board member around. But more likely, Dorsey is anticipating tomorrow's keynote, where Apple is expected to announce a built-in Twitter app for the iPhone.