the never ending question...

...What is twitter? Every time I visit my family, in between eating and Aidan and I playing with my iPhone, we start talking about technology and its impact on society this question always comes up. They all get blogs, podcasts, and some of the other aspects of web 2.0 but twitter seems to confound everyone. The "In Plain English" series from Common Craft does a great job of simply explaining twitter as a utility.

But the strength of twitter goes beyond what is explained in the video. Twitter's open platform has allowed people to develop using the API. Twittervision is a perfect example, it allows you see all the public tweets visualized on a world map. Twittermagnets is an application developed as a crowd sourcing poetry project.

Twitter also allows for great data mining and there are a ton of tools can help visualize this. There are lots of ways to see what people are saying but one of my favorites is Cursebird which shows all the tweets that have curses in them and which curses are the most often used. Apparently, I curse like a bad golfer which is not very good assuming good is cursing a lot.

Twitter also allows you to follow some really smart people who are not tweeting about them mundane happenings in their lives but rather interesting stuff they are passionate about.

• Steven Johnson - Writer/economist
• Malcom Gladwell - Excellent writer and generally smart guy
• Mark Cuban - Owner of the Dallas Mavs and winner of the Yahoo! lottery, oh and really smart guy
• Saul Williams - Talented musician, writer, and actor

There are a lot more famous and non famous people that great to follow and you can follow your friend and know exactly when and how many times they went to the shake shack.

Ray Kurzweil

There is a documentary coming out about Ray Kurzweil called The Transcendent Man that looks really interesting mainly because Ray Kurzweil is an amazing and fascinating person. He is one of the people who deserves the title of Futurist. Over the years he has made a lot of predictions about how technology will evolve and change the way we live and most of what he has written about has come true. His predictions for the future seem amazing and unfathomable but based on his track record it is pretty clear that he thinks on a different level than the rest of us. This is one documentary I will definitely check out: