Re: Twitter

You know it's a sign of something big, or a pre-cursor to something big when you look at something and think:

"Who are all these losers?"

Funny you should say that -- I had same reaction. Maybe we're both just culturally adrift ....

Haha, presumably you're referring to myspace? I had a similar reaction to this service though I didn't phrase it quite the same. My feeling is that some type of presence information service will take off some day but it will be based on voice messages: most people will not repeatedly mash tiny smartphone keys for a trivial service like this. The enabling technology might be when speech recognition gets good enough that most voice messages are easily and accurately translated to text. What's funny is that you can listen to the CTO of their webhost explain the service to his CEO and some other techies, who then proceed to rip into such services (15:55-30:20 min. into the mp3). Although they may not say the same now: the webhost CEO now writes twitter novellas.

As for it getting big because you said "Who are all these losers?", I think that, truthfully, if you kept track of every time you said that about a service, you'd find that the success rate of such services is abysmally small. Every once in a while something sticks to the wall but it is rare.

The trend in CRT sales makes sense when you consider that a CRT weighs a ton and takes up a huge amount of space. Once LCD and other flat-screen TV technologies hit a price point comparable to CRT's; this implosion was inevitable. An industry that will be affected by this is the office furniture business; for decades cubicles have been designed around having a huge chunk of space to hold the CRT; I would like to see some fresh designs that take advantage of flat screens to make cubicles more pleasant.