Beyond Blinking Lights and Acronyms

Is Twitter Dying? - An Update Tue 26 Jan 10

Recent Media Reports Highlight Decline of Twitter

A couple of media reports regarding Twitter caught my attention due in large part since they raise some of the same issues I have raised in earlier posts.  Mainstream media CNN has an article "Has Twitter Peaked?" while the IT trade magazine Computerworld has an article "Twitter now has 75M users; most asleep at the mouse".  Both discuss the growth of Twitter but also the large number of people that try it and drop it.

I raised the same issues in June, 2009 with "Twitter's Dilemma" and again in December with "The Death of Social Media" (which discussed social media in general including Twitter).  It's interesting to see I'm not alone in wondering if Twitter is on the decline and perhaps the founders have squandered an opportunity to monetize their creation.

How Technology Enhances Collaboration Wed 20 Jan 10

The unheralded benefit of tech collaboration: resolving disagreement.

Padmasree Warrior, Cisco's chief technology officer, wrote a thought- provoking blog post recently entitled "The Next Generation Collaborative Enterprise". While the NGCE label sounds like just another marketing package (Cisco is a hardware vendor, after all), Warrior's article is definitely worth reading.

One comment she makes almost as an aside is particularly noteworthy. "It is important to point out that collaboration must not be confused with consensus or teamwork. Collaboration does not mean everyone must agree before any decision is made. Nor does it suggest that there is no room for individual creativity," Warrior writes. So true, and so very well stated.

I would take this a step further and say that a prime role of technology in collaboration is to highlight and even foster disagreement. Rephrasing Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street, I'll go as far as making the seemingly incongruous statement, "disagreement is good."

How To Buy An E-Reader Wed 06 Jan 10

With several models on the market, ''test drive'' an e-reader before you buy it.

The e-reader market long dominated by Amazon's Kindle has matured into a mainstream technology with viable competitive brands and a large, but still growing, choice of books and publications available. E-readers were arguably the hot tech gift on most holiday gift lists.

Amazon recently announced that not only was the Kindle the most gifted item ever on Amazon.com but that "On Christmas Day, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books." I suspect most people are likely to download a book upon receiving a Kindle to try out their new "toy," whereas an Amazon gift card to buy a hard copy book is likely to be set aside for later use. And so, I'm reluctant to determine a trend based on a single datum point, but it is interesting. The growth of e-books as a percent of total book sales will be the interesting trend to watch over time.