David John Mead

Slick future visions from Microsoft

Tonight I headed over to Office Labs from Microsoft. There you’ll get a glimpse into some of the “What If?” things being considered by going to the Envisioning section.

I particulary like the Productivity Future Vision video, which builds on the surface technology currently being played with-taking it the next step with ’smart paper’ (near the end of the video).

One thing I can’t get into is the whole false ‘perspective’ thing. I’m not sure why folders have to stack in 3D when the rest of the display shown work so well ‘flat’.

Technorati tags: future, vision, microsoft

Is this the end of Twitter as we know it?

As a reader of Simon Willison’s blog, I came across this tool that he created with Natalie Downe – Tweetersation.

Now this tool lets you combine peoples conversations on Twitter in one time line.  Pretty cool.  So I can now just enter a few peoples names or id’s and I can see the whole conversation I caught the tail end of.

How does this fit with the title? Well, more and more I’m seeing Twitter being absorbed into or used by other tools/applications.  Most Web2.0 social sites let you post to or display from Twitter.  Other people are building tools to show the mood, locale, to search and monitor, and general pull or push whatever they can through the API.

So is that what Titter should resolve itself to be – Just an API to hang communication on?  Maybe that could be it’s business model.  How many people are actually logging in to the Twitter website as opposed to using it through something like HelloTxt or their phone, Snitter, Flock or Twhirl.

As netizens shift from shiny object to shiny object I believe Twitter will still be there.  I just don’t think we’ll be as aware of it’s presence as we are now.  It’ll just be that thing we use to communicate.

Technorati tags: twitter, api, future