Untangled

And so it was that Steve Jobs revealed the iPad, just as it had been foretold by the prophets on the web. And it was good.

Oh sure, the regular crowd has its regular complaints. In today's media marketplace there are two sides to every story. It goes a little something like this: 'Some people love the x, while others have their doubts about it. Could it be that x is what will bring about the end of everything that is good in our known universe? Could it adversely affect the unknown universe?!?!?!?!?!' It is as if critical thinking skills have become totally passe and undesireable in the modern mass media.

Basically, the iPad is a big iPod Touch. It's an iPhone without the phone. It'll be able to use 3G - and VOIP, so it could be phone-esque.

It doesn't have a camera, which is a little bit of a bummer because you can't video conference with it. And when was the last time you video conferenced? Everybody always thought the future was going to be filled with video phones. Turns out that the future is all about texting, be it email or SMS.

It doesn't have multi-tasking. Yes, Apple figured out how to multi-task with System 7. Is it annoying? Yes. But since we all know it is coming eventually, whoopee.

Apple put out a computer that is truly for 'the rest of us.' It is a simple, straightforward slab that is simple to use, and simple to configure. Geeks won't like that they have to go through Apple and their App Store submission process to sell their wares is what I'm hearing - only since they're making money doing that already... isn't that a moot point?

The more interesting thing is the software aspects of the device. No, not the lack of multitasking. The new stuff. iBooks and iWork.

iWork is really interesting in that it is a suite of full fledged productivity Apps, nothing limited about them. (Okay, Numbers is still not a full-fledged spreadsheet, but it does what most people do with a spreadsheet.) And people are creating real apps for the iPhone and will do even more with the extra screen real estate and CPU power of the iPad. Already we've seen some really innovative apps for the iPhone. Apps that will compete with what's left of the big box software makers out there.

 iBooks is the other really big change. Apple is opening up a digital bookstore, a la iTunes for music and video. It uses the ePub open format so in theory books that you buy can be transported to other devices. We'll have to see how that works in practice. I was a little surprised there wasn't more emphasis on the format of the books. ePub isn't known for how it handles graphics and media within text. After learning that, I understood why magazines weren't a focus just yet, although the New York Times app looks to be a great implementation of a media and text rich content delivery vehicle.

If the open ePub format enables book portability, well, hot diggity! Popularizing an open ebook format will do wonders for making ebooks more readily available. That should in turn make a low cost device like the OLPC2 a more viable platform for getting books into the hands of kids around the world. This may not be the intent of the iPad and iBooks, but it has the potential to effect this change.

Oh, and the accessibility features? Not mentioned. But since the iPhone OS already has those features, there wasn't much left that needed to be covered.

So, in sum, nothing very revolutionary, but more evolutionary. But the evolutionary steps have the potential to really change things in this consumer space.

So, I got my hands on that cool new product out of Silicon Valley this week. It is affordable, small, lightweight, portable and will change the way that millions of people will read.

The iPad? iSlate? iTablet?

No, sorry, but we'll get to that. I'm talking about D.light's Kiran solar powered lantern. It has been designed to replace more expensive and dangerous kerosene lanterns for lighting where electricity is unreliable or unavailable. It is slick and will get plenty of use in my household where electricity is quite reliable.

Apple's new tablet is supposed to debut tomorrow, and it will change the way a lot of us think about, consume and interact with information and media. It will be a game changer, no doubt, as Apple's big products always are. Rumors are that book, newspaper and magazine distribution will be coming to the iPad and this will be a good thing for those industries as well as for those of us who want these materials in digital format. A Wired or National Geographic subscription with videos and photo galleries embedded in the articles? Nifty. The possibilities are infinite.

Hopefully, the new Apple iPad (or whatever it ends up being called) is solar powered. And maybe once the price comes down, it can fill a need that the OLPC project has tried to fill for a while now. (No, that won't happen immediately, but today's cool new gizmo is tomorrow's ubiquitous product. See: cellphone.) Hopefully they will avoid some of the accessibility issues that have hindered Amazon's Kindle recently - which is probable, given their previous experience with the iPhone in this area.

As for a product that will be a truly global gamechanger for 2010? I'd put my money on the d.light Kiran. The kind of impact that it is designed to create is simply on a different scale than that of a new Apple gizmo*.

(*This of course does not negate the technogeek-lust I have for Apple's unnanounced wonder-toy. Rest assured that I will get my hands on one soon! And when the big announcement turns out to be iPhone OS 4.0... I'll get over it.)

Me? I don't text much. It's not that I don't like it, I just don't like paying for it. Email works just fine for me on the go anyway. Plus, I'm a fan of Strunk & White and there isn't an edition of Lmntz o Styl just yet. Plz canz I by a vwl? It is as if e.e. cummings took over our thumbs.

So far, however, more than $22 million has been donated to the Red Cross for Haiti earthquake relief. Thatz sum srz bnjaminz! Global X, as usual, was ahead of the curve. It is stunning to me that so many people have been enabled to donate so immediately and effectively in this manner. Count on good people doing good things - and bet on the fact that most people are good.

Sadly, there are Haiti relief donation scams popping up here and there, reminding us as always that we are our own worst enemy. Stick with the folks you know who are working in the region. Such as:

• Water.org
• Partners in Health
• Free the Children
• Peace Dividend Trust

Okay, so you're not going to lose weight this year. Again. Give in, enjoy the cookies, the cake, the ice cream.

You thought maybe spending more time with your family was a good idea, huh? Until you invited your cousin over to watch some football and he spilled bear on your couch. They're family. You have to love them, but you don't have to subject your furniture to their fluids.

Maybe you're a smoker and have decided to quit? Listen to the siren call of that nicotine. 'Smoooooooooke me. Just one little puff...' You don't have the resolve. Go light it up like a chimney.

But don't renig on your promise to back it up. It's not hard, it just requires doing it. It's not expensive either. I saw a 1.5TB external drive selling for less than $100 the other day. Buy two and rotate. This year, as I do every year, I implore you to follow through on this one new year's resolution. Back it up.

We sent out our newsletter this week, but unfortunately I couldn't find free wifi in Gibraltar. I found plenty of monkeys, but no wifi. So this post is coming to you from aboard a boat. A Social Edge first!

Anyway, here's a monkey picture.

Next week, my post might be coming from a plane. Who knew wifi was easier to find while mobile than while on the ground?

So, looks like Hopenhagen was a bust. Next time, how about holding a climate meeting a) during the summer and b) near the equator. Oh, and c) don't invite countries that really have no incentive to get anything done.

Turns out the biggest roadblock to saving ourselves from ourselves is, well, ourselves.

It's a theme I have heard all year long. People want x and in order to do so they are going to destroy y. So in order to save y, you have to find for z, and it had better be something better than x or they aren't going to want to hear it. 'Maldives are drowning? So what. Let 'em. Not my problem. I've got a GDP to worry about.'

It's not enough to save the world. Somebody's going to have to be able to make a buck at it too. As a matter of fact, it is going to have to be a lot of somebodys'.

Instead of dealing with a bunch of dis-incentivized politicians, how about sending entrepreneurs next time. Let them share ideas back and forth and build products that are more wickedly cool and more environmentally sound than the junk we're paying for now.

The exclamation point in the title is needed. Not because I think global warming is a myth, but because inevitably when I hear the naysayers say it, they are screaming. They are passionate about the fact that humanity is being duped into believing that humans are making the world uninhabitable for humans. Okay, fine, let's assume that argument is true and start the discussion there. Al Gore is a sanctimonious windbag! Global warming is a myth!

So what?

As all those tree huggers gather in Copenhagen to try and save the world from this Myth!, what exactly is it that you object to? You have a problem with them wanting to act on what 99% of the scientific community is telling us is occurring? What horrible things are they trying to do to the poor unsuspecting world?

Let's see... they'd really like it if we could stop polluting the world a bit. Develop energy technologies that aren't finite, and are abundantly available at any longitude or latitude. Drive cars that don't require the burning of fossil fuels.

So your problem is that you prefer oil derricks to wind farms? Refineries over solar panels? You would blow a mountain top off rather than use a hydrogen fuel cell, or - dare I say it? - ethanol? You can't stand the thought of not being able to drive a car that gets 5 MPG?

Do you object to industry finding and developing new technologies to sell in the marketplace that are cleaner than what we are using currently? Are you sitting in traffic, watching the exhaust from the vehicles in front of you and thinking hey, this is the best we can do?

The U.S. space program managed to figure out how to put a man on the moon in about a decade. Tangible benefits of having been to the moon? Well, we did get some pretty cool pictures, right? And some moon rocks. Those are cool. But the process of figuring out how to do that meant creating a lot of things that we take for granted now. Like Velcro. Doppler radar. Ultrasounds. Tang.

A push for greener technologies will allow us to better our quality of life while preserving the planet for the generations to come. Maybe in the process of developing a car battery that will extend the range enough for me to drive across the continent without stopping at some smelly gas station, that same technology could be used in making my iPhone battery last a whole day without requiring a recharge. Or maybe traffic congestion could be dealt with by developing better and cheaper video conferencing to allow for more telecommuting. Oh, the humanity!

But instead, we are left dealing with people who still find it too difficult to push a trash can AND a recycling bin to the curb. And really, if you bring up the whole cow farting thing again, I'm going to stop being polite and ask you to join me in becoming a vegetarian. Help me make the sky blue again or I'm coming after your filet mignon.

When I think about the world I want to leave my kids, it doesn't include congested freeways, peanut butter colored skies or wars over economic resources. As lovely as the smog enhanced sunsets in my hometown in Southern California are, I'd gladly give them up for blue skies the rest of the day.

So really, what's the worst thing that can come of all this huffing and puffing about climate change? A new flavor of Tang?

When the whole Product (RED) campaign started, I was intrigued and thought, what the heck, if people are going to be buying things anyway, why not give them the option to slightly alter their purchase and have a portion of that money go to a worthy cause?

Granted, the Gap clothes weren't *ahem* my style. But maybe that's just because I'm old. There is a (red) iPod shuffle at my house though.

So there are products that, when made (red), can work their way into ones everyday life.

And today I saw another one that makes sense. For me at least. I don't know how the back end of Shazam works, but I do find myself using it from time to time. I used to know every song that I heard on the radio but alas, it appears that father time is catching up with me.

And so (SHAZAM) RED makes sense for me. Now the next time I chaperone a high school dance and one of the other parental unit like people asks 'what's this noise kids these days are listening to?' I'll be able to whip out my iPhone, tag the song with (SHAZAM) RED and tell them "It's Kardinall Offishall, featuring Akon," while feeling doubly smug about it.

I did something this past weekend that is hard for a geek like me to do. I unplugged.

Thursday was Thanksgiving here in the US, and I had a quick little holiday on the coast in California in an area without cell phone reception. (My plan is with AT&T, so this wasn't as hard to do as one might think. Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week. Don't forget to tip the wait staff.)

WiFi was available nearby, but was spotty at best. I was able to check email each day to make sure that things were up and running still on Social Edge, but I didn't respond to any inquiries and didn't check any web sites for news, info, or anything else. My phone became a timepiece and a camera, and I delved into some old-school technologies - books and board games.

At first, it wasn't good. I felt like I should be checking on this. Or that. Or... wait, why was that so important exactly? Turns out, it could all wait. By the second evening I had stopped reflexively fondling my phone, wishing that it would magically pick up signal.

There's something about always being connected that makes us very reluctant to let go of what it is we're focusing on. There are plenty of pluses and minuses to being connected all the time, and one of them is that you can address a problem at anytime from just about anywhere. But it also means that when you are working on a solution to a long term problem, never letting it leave your consciousness can mean never looking at it from a fresh perspective.

Having enjoyed the tranquility and allowing everything to fall away for a few days, when I returned to the office yesterday and started remembering where I had left off the week before I saw new solutions to age old problems present themselves. In retrospect, they were so shamefully apparent I am shocked that I hadn't seen them before, but understand better now that sometimes to change your perspective can require averting your focus for a while.

So unplug. If I can, as tangled up in the interweb as I am, you can too.

Google has announced the addition of automatic captions to YouTube. In the accompanying video, the narrator mentions that sometimes the transcriptions are not completely accurate, but they are 'better than nothing.' Not the greatest endorsement of a service that has such extraordinary potential.

The automatic captioning is being rolled out with a handful of partners for feedback, so I would encourage users to give Google/YouTube your feedback so that they can make improvements and get this feature rolled out site wide. Not only will this allow the hearing impaired access to a much wider range of the video web, it also does translations opening that same content to speakers of different languages than the content originator. Add in the search capabilities that transcripts allow and this is an amazing step in increasing the usability and find-ability of video content.

Another feature that isn't as splashy but is also an immense timesaver is the auto-timing feature mentioned in the same announcement. You can add transcripts to your videos, and YouTube will parse them into captions that match up with your video. As anyone who has added captions to video can tell you this is an incredible time saver.

Sometimes, small is beautiful and you'll never hear me argue that fact. But sometimes it takes the scale of a Google to make changes of such wide scale impact occur.

Stanley Kubrik's 2001: A Space Odyssey is a quaint vision of what the future will be. Back in 2001 I video taped it when it was playing on basic cable. VHS was still a seemingly viable technology back then. I had been meaning to watch it since I was a kid. It seemed important somehow. So I hit play, sat back, watched the movie and fast forwarded through the commercials.

It is possibly the longest movie of all time. Okay, at 141 minutes, it isn't even close, but it sure felt like it. Maybe it was the minimal dialogue. I love that movies from this era played with the expectations of their audience, but in retrospect, some of the filmakers efforts didn't stand the test of time. And once you've seen History of the World Part I, you can never look at what came before in quite the same way again.

I got to the part towards the end at the stargate when it stopped and started rewinding. It would be years before I would watch those last few excruciatingly tedious and confusing moments. As the result of archaic technology, I had been left wondering if the end of the movie would make sense of what came before, but no such luck.

Now we are past 2001, and still, no ubiquitous space tourism, and no homicidal computers. Instead, we are stuck with computers that all too often we would like to kill. Especially at work. At home we are stuck with what we can afford, and we make compromises accordingly. At work, we're at the mercy of our IT specialists.

A large portion of the world, for varying reasons, is still stuck using technology that came out or was around in 2001. You are still more likely to find PC's running Windows XP - released in 2001 - than you are Windows Vista or Windows 7. Exchange Server has been updated a number of times since then - but is your IT department up to date? My guess is that if your organization is still using Exchange, it's probably not Exchange 2010 - or even 2007.

Why is this? Simply put, change is hard. You can make all the arguments for change that you want - at the end of the day, no matter how difficult your archaic technology is behaving, updating it requires work. And let's face it, no matter how well an upgrade to a new machine or system goes, you'll find some way to grumble at the IT staff anyway.

Having been away from the IT world for a few years now, it seems inconceivable to me that so many users are facing the same issues as they were oh so long ago. We've fixed those issues, right? I mean, more often than not, I answer my email from my phone. I went out of town a week ago, and was dissapointed that I haven't quite gotten comfortable with leaving my laptop behind when I travel for pleasure rather than work because I haven't tested access from my iPhone for everything I might need to do. And I haven't updated the web site editor to allow it to work on the iPhone as well. And yet, there are people who are still having to deal with Outlook Web Access when they want to get their work mail remotely? Or can only access their files via VPN?

If your employees sneak off to a coffee shop to utilize the free wifi - and the firewall-free network - you might want to revisit your IT policies. If they hand out personal email accounts to work contacts rather than your company email, you might want to see about replacing your mail server. If everyone has a Mac at home and you're handing out XP desktops, hmmm... might want to think about that.

And let's be honest. Most of what you use your work computer for these days is email. Occasionally you'll do some serious word processing - you know, a letter with paragraph indents - or you plan on torturing an audience with a bullet ridden slide set. Perhaps your big task of the day will require you to misuse a spreadsheet to make a list of some sort. If that's all that you or your users are doing, maybe you should look into Linux based netbooks. They're cheap, relatively user friendly and do all the basics. If not now, maybe next year when Google Chrome OS is out in the wild.

There's no good reason to buy too big or too small these days. You can get systems that are up to date and meet most every need without killing your budget. And you can do it in ways that lift your ongoing costs by moving your data closet out into the cloud. It'll make your users happier - and more productive.

iPhone apps have evolved, as have Apple's rules about how developers can make their wares available. Originally, of course, the only apps were the ones Apple put on there, and web apps were the only way that developers could put there wares into iPhone users' hands. Then came regular apps, be they apps that people paid for free apps. A lot of the free apps were supported via advertising.

I'm guessing that these ad-supported apps were fairly successful. Otherwise, Google buying AdMob for $750M wouldn't have made much sense.

From an end user perspective the prospect of downloading a free app to try out was appealing, even if it meant deleting it later to replace it with a full-featured version - or an ad-free version.

Then Apple opened things up and allowed for in app purchases. You could add the ability for users to buy things inside of your app. But this didn't apply to free apps. Now they've opened it up to free apps as well.

I'm looking forward to seeing this capability used more, so that you can buy a free, ad supported or limited function app and upgrade it without having to download a new app, delete the old, etc. I have an app on my iPhone that I made an in-app purchase for and was briefly worried that after a restore from a backup the in app purchase I had made was gone. But, just like with a full app, when I went to purchase it again it recognized that I had already paid for it and downloaded the add-on for free.

I'm also hoping that we start seeing more non-profits find a way to take advantage of this capability. A free app could be downloaded that gives an overview of the organization, pertinent, related information and then request donations via an in app purchase. It'll be nice too when there are enough apps developed for Apple to consider making non-profits a separate app category.

The latest New York Review of Books has two prison related articles, one by Peter Mathiessen on Leonard Peltier, and another on the state of the U.S. prison system. Depressing stuff.

Peltier is considered by many to be a political prisoner, and there are obvious and extensive problems with his conviction. He was denied parole in July and won't be eligible again for 15 years, when he's 80. How one incident can be viewed so differently by the same court system is a mystery to me. The other two people who were tried in the case were found not guilty on the grounds of self-defense.

Whether or not race played a part in the Peltier case - he is a Native American and an AIM activist - it is increasingly hard to deny that race and incarceration in the U.S. are not related. More than 50% of the U.S. prison population is African American, and another 20% is Latino. Those numbers are obviously not on par with the ethnic make-up of the population.

Add in the fact that the U.S. has by far the highest percentage of its population behind bars of any country in the world and it's easy to see that something is very amiss. A shift in emphasis from rehabilitation to punitiveness has made sentences longer and prospects upon release dimmer. If you ignore race, the other commonalities that appear in the prison population are poverty and a lack of an education. Funny, it seems that wherever you go, if there's poverty there's a less educated populace and more crime.

Rehabilitation should be easier, better and cheaper than ever before. There is this new fangled technology out there that can connect people to information faster and cheaper than ever before. Something called the internet. There are online universities. There's Wikipedia. There are a trillion unique URLs and more than 100 million web sites. Not all of them are as informative and useful as, say, Social Edge, but it's not all dancing hamsters out there either.

The next time you here somebody talking about how net neutrality is an infringment of a corporation's right to free speech, ask yourself why it's so important for corporations to limit their customers' access to information. Ask why more people aren't up in arms because we don't all have equal access to the internet and the educational opportunities that such access affords.

Technology and easy access to information isn't enough, however. Our attitudes and priorities have to change before any real change is possible. Poverty, education and justice are issues that social entrepreneurs tackle every day in order to make the world a better, more equitable place. At some point, however, the haves are going to have to be convinced that there are better ways of eliminating the have nots than incarceration and separation. They have to realize that making everyone's lives better is in their own best interests. Segregation is never a reasonable, sustainable solution, be it as a result of race, religion, class, economics or any other differences that people have. A society that truly values and invests in equal opportunities for all and rehabilitation for those who miss out the first time around is a society that doesn't need to put 1 of every 150 of its citizens behind bars.

Yesterday may not have been the day the music died, but it was the day that GeoCities closed its doors. Or had them shut by Yahoo! who once paid around $3,000,000,000 for the privilege of being caretaker to this dotcom era dead weight.

Once upon a time, when Under Construction banners still seemed as cool as digital watches once were, GeoCities was a bustling little neighborhood. Sure, the sites were god-awful ugly, but they were user generated and they were plentiful. Then MySpace came along and took the really ugly user generated web site business away from them. Why? Because GeoCities never evolved. So when a new site sprang up with new capabilities and features, the community moved on leaving behind a virtual wasteland of blinking graphics and annoying midi tracks. (Go ahead. I dare you to click that last link.)

No, I'm not really lamenting the loss of GeoCities that much, and I won't miss MySpace when and if it follows suit. The backs of my retinas are relieved.

I am sad, however, that GeoCities never adapted, it never grew up. It never changed. Sure, it is daunting to view something that is successful as something that needs to be changed, especially if you're a caretaker and not the original innovator. If you don't figure out how to adapt, then your best hope is to ride out the maintenance time and land somewhere new before the numbers go south. And they will go south. It's the fourth law of the internet: Thy numbers shall go south as soon as you stop aggravating your userbase with seemingly needless changes. Or something like that. Turns out that the people who object the loudest when you make changes are the first ones out the door when something new and shiny comes along.

How long until we here the same news about MySpace? Probably long after it leaves our consciousness. A dead community can hang on for years in the background, finally falling when nobody is around to hear. Facebook? Twitter? All depends on how they change and adapt. Millions of eyeballs today won't mean much if some brilliant new community swoops in with new ways of connecting that are easier and more relevant to users.

It's not just large communities that this happens with. It's your communities as well, the eyeballs that are focused on your organization and how you have proposed to go about changing the world for the better. If you have an audience and they're listening to you right now, great! But don't be afraid to offer them something even better. If you don't, someone else will.

This week we're talking about Global Dignity. I'm reminded that around the world, women have a harder time gaining respect than men do simply because they are women. You would think that the high tech industry, being a relatively new marketplace, could have escaped the old patriarchal trappings and moved forward in a more egalitarian way. But alas, that is simply not the case.

If you haven't read Leila's take on her Tech Crunch 50 experience, I'd recommend giving it a go. Two different problems here come to mind. First, the fact that women at a tech conference were assumed to be 'booth babes' is pathetic and disheartening.

The second is that 'booth babes' continue to be hired to hand out chotchkies at tech conferences. I was appalled at MacWorld this year to find that some companies seemed to have recruited their booth personnel from Hooters. I was doubly offended because I realized that I was their target audience! I'm a middle aged male geek, and as such these vendors are presuming that I'm so hard up for female companionship that a pretty girl in short shorts is the best way they can think of to entice me to buy their retread tech gizmos and outdated software.

You want me to drool at a tech conference? Show me some well formed code, not a shapely young woman. Better yet, how about some drool worthy new hardware? Believe me, a 27" LED screen, a multi-touch mouse and 16GB of RAM capability are more likely to make me break out my credit card than a beautiful girl and a squeezy toy.

I mean seriously, that new iMac and Magic Mouse? Wicked. Totally drool worthy. No stillettos necessary.

Of course, nothing says respect like a lap dance, eh? Yahoo! seems to think they have a handle on what Y!ou want, and evidently if Y!ou are a hacker Y!ou want a lap dance. Really? Who thought this was a good idea? Not only is this degrading and insulting it's plain old fashioned lazy. Y!ou couldn't think of anything more interesting to do at your conference? No better way to highlight your technology and the products your employees put to market?

No wonder your company name and the word beleagured seem to fit so well together. Yahoo!, Y!ou seem tired, played out. Just like this stunt. Can we all please agree that we're better than this, collectively and individually?

It finally happened. A new version of Photoshop was released and I downloaded it digitally. I've been waiting for this to happen for a long time, since the heady days for the behemoth software app developer - the mid-1990's. You don't find too many of them around anymore. A few huge monoliths are still rolling around like the dinosaurs they are, having consumed the rest via merger or acquisition.

Okay, it wasn't a full desktop version, but a free iPhone Photoshop App. It was small, free, and didn't require delivery or a trip to the store to pick it up on a disc with a ten pound book that would remain forever sitting on a shelf unopened. (Note: Apple finally figured out that they didn't need to include manuals a couple of years ago, culminating with the latest release of Final Cut Studio. What had previously weighed upwards of 50 pounds is now liftable by even the most slender of video geeks. And a new Missing Manuals series of books for O'Reilly. Also available as iPhone Apps.)

Still, the boxes remain in the desktop market. Sure, a lot of really useful software apps are available for purchase and download online now, but not the big boys. And why? I downloaded and installed a nearly 1GB software update yesterday. I can do the same with movies too. No need to go to the rental store anymore.

Hopefully the fact that Adobe is finally in the iTunes store is a sign of things to come. They were demoing some new features recently that looked more interesting than any I'd seen introduced in a while. Hopefully they'll release it digitally. Maybe even in an iTunes App Store for desktop apps. No more discs, no more boxes, no more trips to the store, no more UPS truck delivering it to my house and/or office.

Sure, some would complain that the tech industry cares more about the environment than it does for truck drivers. I'd say it's about time they took advantage of the available technology to make desktop apps work more like internet apps and small apps and iPhone apps - before we move all of our work into the cloud just for the sake of convenience.

The environmental benefits would be a nice little side benefit, no?

On Friday we thought we were being victimized by some kind of SPAMbot that was adding followers to our Twitter account en masse. It was an easy mistake to make, and we weren't alone in our assumptions. Since we started tweeting regularly about six months ago, we had amassed almost 5,000 followers. On Friday, we passed 5,000. Then 6,000. And on and on it went. As I write this post, we're nearing 24,000 followers. About 5 times as many people are following our Twitter feed as they were on Monday.

So, what happened? Twitter added us to their Suggested User List along with a handful of other social entrepreneurial minded folks, some of whom you may have heard of if you hang around here very often. A couple of their pics can be found over in the left hand column. Thus were we granted that most precious of internet commodities: attention. We have also seen a marginal increase in our site traffic since Friday, but it doesn't look like all of our 15,000 new friends have stopped by our so last decade communication medium, our site here at socialedge.org.

Obviously, the people who are discovering Social Edge through Twitter's suggested user list are a bit different than the first 5,000 who showed up. For some this might suggest that we should alter our Tweets in order to accomodate and retain these new followers - but why? Our mission hasn't changed, and our goals via our Twitter account and our site remain the same. If all we wanted to do was garner traffic for traffic's sake, you would see a lot more posts about Matt Damon, a slew of Tweets about Oprah's Book Club or maybe even a political rant or two.

We love that Twitter has exposed their audience to the social entrepreneurs lurking in their halls. I think it is safe to say that their decision to do so resulted in a bit of giddiness around the office here. Okay, fine, to be clear I was giddy. It felt like a Sally Field moment to me. I may have danced and that might have been embarassing at my age. Of course, I have to qualify that as an IT guy I was relieved to find out that it wasn't a SPAMbot just as much as I was happy that people were following our Twitter stream.

The big question, as always, is more about what will we do next? And by we I mean the field of social entrepreneurs and those that prattle on about them. Twitter is the new tool for gaining exposure and traction, and yesterday's tools - Flickr, YouTube, iTunes, Google AdWords and the like - aren't any less important than they were. As these tools mature - Twitter included - it will become more and more difficult to rise above the fray and distinguish ourselves from everyone else. We won't be able to do that by jumping up and down and begging for attention. We'll do it by steadily moving ahead with our work and remaining true to what it is we have set out to do.

If you've been to our team page, you know that we're a mixed platform bunch when it comes to our mobile devices. The Blackberry is fabulous as a phone and power email device. The Palm Pre is a nifty little full-featured communication device, great for texting from darn near anywhere. The iPhone is a wicked little portable computer with apps galore - but is saddled here in the U.S. with an AT&T network that provides its owners with embarrassment on a pretty continual basis as users with other phones on other networks are actually able to make calls while we're staring at the No Service message instead of coverage bars.

All that said, there are starting to be some apps showing up on the iPhone that address our little non-profit corner of the world. Are you a Kiva devotee? Kiva Alerts lets you browse loan requests on the go. (The maker, BetterLabs, also has Twitter and Facebook interfaces for Kiva.) It's not ideal, but it's a start. When you get to the point where you want to loan to the entrepreneur it takes you to the Kiva web page within the app. Nothing wrong with that, but it would be nicer to be able to log in to an app and have an interface customized for the mobile screen. It would be nice as well to be able to see my lender info, and keep up with my loans.

Another that has shown up is The Extraordinaries. This one is a bit more polished, and a more complete solution. It lets users volunteer 'on demand and on the spot.' 1Sky is a part of the program and you can tag their photos or write about climate change for them right on your iPhone. You can also catch up on their Tweets or watch a video. Read up about the org. Small tasks for non-profits while you go about your day. Ideal for those moments at the airport when you're waiting to go somewhere.

So, two apps. It's a start. Anybody know of any other apps that are in this space? Anybody know of a good app that they'd like to see built?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - I am petrified of doing demos. Sure, the normal public speaking phobias apply, but mainly, I'm terrified that my presentation will be SAD: A Stunningly Awful Demo.

So when I see someone offer things to avoid, I like to share them with others in the hopes of a) making it more pleasant for them to give presentations and b) reduce the chances of having to sit through their SAD preso myself. Me? I'm quite fond of the "Death by Corporate Overview" presentation. Or, more accurately, I've built up an immunity to them. It's inevitable, and it has simply become time when I can concentrate on aligning my chakras or going over my to do list in my head. Anything to keep my snoring from being audible.

Knowing what not to do is only half the battle, however. Knowing what you should do is just as important. The best advice I found in this list of avoidable offenses was to do your homework. If you feel like you've given the same presentation to a slew of different audiences, it's probably because you have. Do your research, learn about your intended audience and what you want them to come away from your presentation with. Deliver on that and avoid wasting time on everything else. Connect with your audience by knowing them and joining them in the journey.

Seth Godin has a post about how going back to square one is better than continuing down the wrong path. I agree with him - to a point. Especially since square one, as he describes it, is the 'last spot you were in where you had a chance to find the right road.' That's not really square one now, is it? That's backing up, looking at the map and asking for directions without going all the way home and starting over at your computer with Google Maps.

Can you ever truly go back to square one? Perhaps if you haven't learned anything along the way it is possible, but if that's the case you weren't paying much attention and are probably still standing right where you started, so you're not really starting over so much as realizing or admitting that you never really went anywhere.

If you keep having to go back to sqare one over and over again, maybe you need to consider a new starting place, a new square one. Or perhaps you can start in the same place but identify a new destination. You may not be able to change where you've been but you can always change where you are going.

Most times, sqaure one is irrelevant, as it is simply where you are. Square two? That's the important one. Make it count.