Hoverboards have yet to materialize. Space travel is on the outs. Virtual reality, holograms and video phones have failed to impress. You call this 2010?! It’s like the future we were promised never arrived. So what do we have? The fruitful evolution of something utterly boring but immensely useful. Databases.

Databases used to be ponderous and difficult, and had to be accessed with extreme efficiency in mind. Remember the early days of computerized library card catalogs? How slow they were? Now think of all the computing power Facebook expends making sure our updates automatically refresh on our screens. The jump from early databases to realtime social networks is a modern wonder, like trading up from a bicycle to a battleship.

Server farms host giant databases that update instantly and replicate constantly, and that can handle as many queries as all humanity can throw at them. They move massive amounts of data using hardware and software designed to be light, cheap, fast, modular, open and scalable. So much information, organized and dispensed more quickly than a human mind can think to ask for it. Through these technologies we have Google, Facebook, Twitter, Bing, YouTube, Flickr, not to mention the networks that power our telephones and our financial system.

Ten or 15 years ago, I don’t remember anybody predicting that massive databases would be the future of computing. Maybe they did, but we simply ignored them because the idea is so boring and hard to explain. Yet here we are, and we’re just getting started. Programmers and engineers everywhere are working to take all these database components and snap them together. Where are the sources of real-time data? How can you collect and organize that data? What two pieces of data become shockingly useful when married together? How do we make 2 + 2 = 16? If you have an idea, buy a book, learn a coding language and get started. For the first time, there’s computing power to spare.

Consider Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and (as of last week) Google Buzz. Time-wasters, to be sure. But recently, they’ve become a vital part of participation in many work communities. They’re how people keep up with the important personalities in their field—colleagues, competitors and trendsetters. This use—as an online, social component of business—is new. It is distinct from the more popular uses of social networks, like chatting with friends, posting personal photos, playing games and sharing funny videos. This is about work. We need a name for this.

Professional gossip – Real-time information about people in your field, transmitted through online social networks.

In some ways, gossip should be approached with caution. Things can go negative fast and unexpectedly. (Witness yesterday’s bizarre Twitter fight between Sarah Silverman and Steve Case!) There’s a lot of noise and few good ways to filter it. Often we would be better advised to do the work rather than gab about the work we’re doing.

But on balance, gossip is good. People just starting out in a field can follow a few good feeds and gain insight from experts. Actionable business intelligence spreads fast—and the most important facts spread fastest. No longer must ideas simmer for months before bubbling up through the trade press and conferences; they can can be defined, refined and debated as urgently as necessary. And, conveniently, social networks let you curate your own professional gossip channel. This gives you power to influence what other people in your work community are talking about. Given time to build up contacts and clout, you can set the agenda and shape how your peers perceive your business.

We’re all new at this. We’re going to discover some weird things as we blaze this trail. Let’s make it fun!

Here are some personal guidelines I follow when tweeting at @daryllang:

1. Don’t tweet about Twitter.

Did the first people with typewriters pound out story after story about typewriters?

2. Always build up. Never tear down.

Tweet about things you like, rather than complain about modern life’s myriad inconveniences.

This corresponds to one my personal rules of blogging: Before you hit publish, imagine the person you would least want to read the post reading it back to you aloud, slowly, with a tone of deep disappointment. This check has spared me a lot of trouble.

Related: A worst-case-scenario story about what happens when you whine on Twitter.

3. Tweet like you talk.

You can assume Twitter users come with some basic specialized knowledge — they understand RT means it’s a pickup of somebody else’s tweet, and that the symbols @ and # summon special Twitter functions. But beyond that, Twitter users are real humans who want real human thoughts, not a string of machine-readable code.

4. Only one idea per tweet.

They used to teach us to write one idea per paragraph. (Remember paragraphs?) It’s tempting to try to convey about five thoughts in 140 characters. It’s better to simmer down, wait a few minutes, settle on the one best idea, and tweet only that.

5. Delete bad tweets.

This medium is so ethereal that nobody expects (nor wants) a perfect permanent record of your tweets. If you feel regret, learn new information that changes your opinion, or think of a more effective way to say something, go fix it! You’re the boss of Twitter, Twitter is not the boss of you. And if you ever feel otherwise, take a moment to re-center.

6. Never call yourself a Twitter expert.

It takes 10 years to become an expert in something. Twitter is less than five years old.

Note: I realize that by tweeting a link to this post, I have broken rule number 1. So, um, I hereby grant you permission to break these rules. Whatever!

OK, I admit it, I’m psyched about the Apple announcement tomorrow. And I don’t even work in print any more.

Spend any time with people who do and you can feel the excitement like static electricity. Newspapers, magazines and book publishers almost universally expect Apple to announce a new hand-held computer tomorrow that will breathe life into their ailing businesses.

• Carr: “The tablet represents an opportunity to renew the romance between printed material and consumer.”
• The Journal: “With the new tablet device that is debuting next week, Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs is betting he can reshape businesses like textbooks, newspapers and television much the way his iPod revamped the music industry…”
• The Times: “With the widely anticipated introduction of a tablet computer at an event here on Wednesday morning, Apple may be giving the media industry a kind of time machine — a chance to undo mistakes of the past.”

Consensus seems to be that the Apple gizmo will do for print what the iPod did for music! How’d that work out?

(more…)

When I first heard about Blippy, the site that lets you broadcast, Twitter-style, every purchase you make with your credit card, I reacted like any sane person. “Stupid idea,” I thought. Pass.

A few days later, it occurred to me that this is actually a really smart idea. You see, Blippy isn’t for me. But it’s perfect for college students.

I’m about to generalize here, but I think I’m mostly right. Today’s college students love to use credit and debit cards. (Years ago I remember watching in horror as a student in line ahead of me charged a single bagel. Now I get the sense everybody in every college town buys everything with plastic.) Students also love to share every snippet of information about their lives online (see: Facebook). And above all, they love being in constant contact with their parents, who are often long distances away.

Enter Blippy. It’s about charging everything and sharing everything. And you can imagine its usefulness to parents who want to track how their kids are spending their money. It’s tailor-made for college students and their families!

Why is this good for Blippy? Because college is where many consumers begin forming their communications habits. I entered school in the pre-Facebook, analog-cell-phone era, so I’m still a little bit conservative about what I share online, and even how often I call home. I was groomed to think there’s a meter running whenever I make a long-distance call, ticking off a dime a minute. It’s a powerful feeling to shake, even in the age of unlimited long-distance. People just a few years younger than me have adopted radically different habits. They’re more likely to call home several times a day, rather than once a week. Students who started using Facebook in college are now adults using Facebook at work. (Clutch move, Facebook.)

I don’t know exactly what sort of business Blippy will become, but a real-time data stream of what people are buying has obvious value. Potentially, it’s vastly more useful than Twitter. The hurdle is getting a large segment of the public to voluntarily sign up for it. It sounds like the hurdle could be solved first among college students. Blippy just needs to rope in the kids and bide its time.

“An ocean cable is not an iron chain, lying cold and dead in the icy depths of the Atlantic. It is a living, fleshy bond between severed portions of the human family, along which pulses of love and tenderness will run backward and forward forever.”

—Henry Field, writing of the first undersea telegraphic cables, quoted in The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage.

Item! ESPN and Discovery launching 3-D TV networks.

There’s lots of buzz this week about 3-D TVs at CES. I don’t buy the hype. Here are 5 reasons 3-D TV is a non-starter.

1. The Internet. Barring any huge leap forward in technology, 3-D video (which requires a steady, high frame rate) is incompatible with Internet streaming (which adjusts frame rates depending on your connection speed). As such, 3-D TV is a naked ploy by the entertainment industry to push viewers back toward buying DVDs and cable subscriptions, rather than enjoying free online video. It won’t work. Trying to steer the freeloaders back to paid video once they’ve figured out Hulu and Netflix and torrents is pushing water uphill.

2. Glasses. Nobody has solved the 3-D glasses problem. Are you and your buddies going to hang around a sports bar watching football, drinking beer, eating wings, while wearing identical sets of flimsy plastic glasses? No. Glasses are for squares.

3. Production costs. It’s waaay more complicated and more expensive to produce TV shows in 3-D than in 2-D. Amateurs can’t do it. But for years, the trend toward digital video has meant cheaper TV shows, often with user-submitted content. This has been both good (CNN’s iReport) and bad (“Jon & Kate Plus 8″) but there’s no sign that really expensive television is due for a rebound.

(more…)

Hey media people: Didn’t this decade suck? So many good brands are out of business, so many good people are out of a job. The media crisis of last two years has been worse than simply a recession-related thinning of the herd. We’re witnessing a famine. Entire species will go extinct.

No serious person expects Denver or Seattle to ever have two daily papers again. Broadcast is suffering (can anyone justify The Jay Leno Show?). Ad agencies are in various states of chaos (BBDO Detroit!). Crowds still flock to the movies and concerts, but CD and DVD sales have evaporated (along with Tower Records and the Virgin Megastore). Online content seems like it’s in the fast lane to mediocrity.

Gone are the “Citizen Kane” days when owning a broadcast license or a printing press automatically made somebody rich and powerful. Fans of good reporting—the hard, watchdog stuff—are standing in shock as we witness the collapse of journalism.

What the hell happened?

To understand, let’s first remember that we are in the early stages some fundamental shifts in human communication. The networked computer represents a social disruption as significant as the oceangoing ship, or the airplane. Historians won’t be able to put this into perspective for some time.

But for now, I think we can look back on the last 10 years and see two important trends that accounted for the implosion of mass media.

(more…)

I can’t decide who comes out looking worse in this devastating Onion video—Friendster or archeologists!

Related post: Friendster 2.0

Since around 1999, I’ve had my computer connected to my stereo to play music. If I’m having company over and I want to program an evening’s worth of music, I create a playlist. The software and my music collection have both improved in the last decade, but the technology has remained essentially the same.

Until right now. Saturday night I had a holiday party and some friends figured out how to use their iPhones to connect wirelessly to my computer and hijack my playlist. Using DJ mode for iTunes (a feature I didn’t even know existed) they were able to make requests and queue up songs. It just worked.

Using your iPhone as a remote control for a computer might seem like a parlor trick (as if I have a parlor!), but I think it foretells bigger things. For most of your ordinary computing tasks (e-mail, reading the news, playing music), your iPhone is just as powerful—and easier—than your typical desktop or laptop computer. Theoretically, a device like an iPhone could be connected to a larger display and a keyboard and occupy the place on your desk where your computer sits now. When that starts happening, look out. Everything will be smooth scrolling, auto saving, and seamless connections to the network. Hard drives and file trees will go the way of command prompts and IRQ conflicts.

The future of computing is light, fast and collaborative, with users pulling data from the cloud rather than saving it on energy-intensive hard drives whirring away on their desks. It won’t matter where the songs are physically stored, the music will just seem to flow through your iWhatever to the speakers. Which is a little bit scary. I’m not a fan of ceding control of my stuff, and handheld computing usually means trusting companies to store our data. (Will Google, Amazon and Comcast be around forever?) But there’s probably no stopping it. It just makes too much sense.

Apple will keep improving the iPhone, Google is working on its own smart phone, and some viable e-reader/tablet thing is bound to arrive eventually. The handheld device is going to become the machine that connects us to everything. Now, if we could only come up with a name for it that didn’t sound as clinical as “handheld device” or “smart phone.” How about “computer”?