I love this brief essay from The New Yorker’s George Packer about the “information hell” of Twitter. Yes, I use Twitter, but I’ve got serious reservations about it, and Packer captures this:
The truth is, I feel like yelling Stop quite a bit these days. Every time I hear about Twitter I want to yell Stop. The notion of sending and getting brief updates to and from dozens or thousands of people every few minutes is an image from information hell.
Well, that’s how I opened my Star-Ledger column about the iPad: “Everything you know about computers just changed.” Not really because of the iPad itself, but because of the way you interact with it. As I say in my column, you can sum this up in one word: touch. The more I use my iPhone, the more I see touch technology, like Apple’s multitouch interface, as being the key to computing in coming years. As I put it in my column:
The iPad signals the moment when computers changed from being bulky products tethered to desktops and power cords to thin, portable devices you can carry in one hand and slip into a backpack.
Sure, there are lots of questions about the iPad, and complaints (too heavy; no camera; no Flash), but this is just the initial version, and we can expect it to get better and better. With its ability to connect to Apple’s wireless keyboard, I expect I’ll be using an iPad as my main computer.
As I’ve written in my column for the Star-Ledger, Twitter is a vast ecosystem extending far beyond the Twitter website:
Although the concept of Twitter is straightforward enough, the reality is increasingly complex. Once you start using Twitter, especially if you’re using it for professional reasons — to promote yourself or your business, say, even as you’re communicating with friends and colleagues — you’re confronted with any number of issues. How do you decide who to follow? How do you track multiple Twitter accounts? Are there ways to have assorted underlings post to your organization’s account? And how do you make sense of all of this crazy lingo, like “follow” and “tweet” (and a bunch of other terms)?
Well, Web100 has launched a new top 100 list, the Twitter 100, and it’s a great guide to making sense of Twitter and social media. The list ranks Twitter-related websites, people, and tools, and it’s a quick way to get up to speed on Twitter—or extend your knowledge of the Twitterverse. It explains Twitter lingo, directs you to people worth following, suggests the best Twitter tools, and and helps you find the best books about Twitter. Even better, the list will continue to evolve, with new items added as Twitter grows and morphs into new arenas.
That pretty much says it all, right? I’m not really much of a gadget guy—the fewer, the better—but this is one I’m gonna want. If you’re like me, and you want to keep track of tablet rumors, check out this list I wrote at Web100: “3 spots to monitor Apple tablet rumors.”
Hm, what will I be writing about in 2010 for my Star-Ledger column?
That’s the topic I tackled in my last column for 2009. I tried this a few years back, and it was a fun way to write a “trends to watch” column—essentially imagining the news before it happens. And there’s a lot to look forward to—in particular, a Google phone, an Apple tablet, and Google’s cloud-computing operating system. Read more in my column.
David Carr of the New York Times thinks Twitter is here to stay. The title of his piece: “Why Twitter Will Endure.” But he also points toward what’s scary about Twitter. As he puts it:
There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on.
ALLAN HOFFMAN 