Yesterday Apple announced that its annual developers conference will take place in San Francisco from June 8th – June 12th. I think it is going to be a HUGE day for the company, here’s why.

Snow Leopard

At last year’s WWDC, Apple announced that its new operating system codenamed “Snow Leopard” would be released in “about a year.” While developers have been privy to pre-releases of Apple’s Snow Leopard operating system for quite some time, those distributions have been stripped of several features that many are expecting.

Snow Leopard is alledgedly a performance OS with little UI changes. Essentially it is trying to be the world’s most advnaced OS by tweaking under-the-hood performance to streamline efficiency and allow for the most powerful applications a personal computer could use. But now there are rumors of sweeping change with Macs.

Among the changes under consideration for the new build is a striking overhaul to the Mac OS X user interface, which is expected to surrender its platinum theme. Apple has reportedly been working on this new interface since day one, despite public claims that Snow Leopard would forgo forward-facing improvements for a focus strictly on performance issues.

Previous reports state Apple would eventually wrap Snow Leopard in a new interface rumored to go by the code-name “marble” as opposed to the current “aqua” look. Details were sparse, but speculation pointed to the adoption of the smoother iTunes-style scrollbars and a move towards a darker chrome motif for application windows alongside an inverted menubar with light text on a dark background.

Apple will definitely push its new Quicktime X and offer specific sessions will target how to get the most from Apple’s developer tools in terms of performance and efficiency, how to debug and analyze applications as they run with Dtrace, how to build solid user interfaces, and how to port existing code from other platforms to the Mac.

Expect Apple to show off the final build of Snow Leopard and make it available for shipment before back-to-school starts in August.

Snow Leopard is a long work in process that is going to trump the Windows 7 OS due for release later this year.

New iPhone Software

We learned about the new iPhone software a couple weeks ago. Among the new features:

Copy & Paste text - When you double-tap over text, you will get a “cut, copy, and paste” bubble dialog. Double-tap again and a “paste” bubble will appear if there’s anything stored in your clipboard.

Copy & Paste photos - You can also copy and paste photos. Now you will be able to select multiple photos by tapping the action button, copy some of them, and paste them in an email, ready to send.

New Spotlight -  iPhone OS 3.0 will allow you to search across the entire information contained in your device, no matter where, as soon as the information is supported it. If an application is written to support the new Spotlight, its data will also be available in the search.

3G Tethering - This feature will allow you to connect your iPhone 3G to a laptop, to use it as a modem to access the internet. Carriers still have to sign-off on it, and probably charge more for it. None have announced it yet.

Landscape keyboard - Apple has added the landscape keyboard mode to other applications, like Mail, SMS, and Notes.

Multimedia messaging - A big one to send rich content to people without mail-enabled telephones: The new MMS function will allow you to include everything, from images to sound to vcards (no word on video, however.) Personally, I find these usesless having email, but some people seem to want it.

Improved stocks application - The stocks application now allows you to read related news, so you can enjoy yourself learning about the latest market scandals, stock crashes, and executives getting bonus packages from government aid while their companies sink into hell. Thank you, Apple.

Voice memo application - Obviously, allows you to record voice or any other sound, so you don’t forget any idea or want to play James Bond.

Use your iPhone/touch to control peripherals - A new API will let you use your iPhone or iPod touch as a control to your accessories. For example, the iPhone can be used to control a speaker or your DVR. Pretty neat.

Turn-by-turn directions - Developers will also be able to create turn-by-turn applications using the GPS information from the iPhone and combining it with their own maps, without depending on 3G connectivity or Google. You hear that? That is Garmin slamming shit around headquarters.

Push notification finally coming – Applications will finally be able to receive messages from the intarwebs automagically, so you can have an Instant Message application and have your iPhone vibrate or make a sound when a new message comes in, even if the application is not running.

iPhone OS 3.0 will be a free upgrade to all iPhone users, including the first generation (not all features will be supported in the first generation, like Stereo Bluetooth support). iPod touch users will be able to but it for $9.95. I expect it to be available immediately.

A New iPhone

Palm investor Roger McNamee is confident that the Palm Pre will be so good that even Apple iPhone totting fans will jump ship. In an interview, McNamee said, “You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two-year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone.” He then went on to make the bold assertion that, “Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.”

I guarantee it Apple took note, and exception. Apple doesn’t have a problem releasing new iPhone hardware almost every year and despite the ton of features the 3G has, there can always be more. And it looks like a new iPhone every year is becoming more of a tradition than anything.

And the original two-year AT&T contracts will begin to expire starting this summer. Gonna want those people to stay around AT&T.

Some possible features:

Much faster than 3G speeds. Let’s be bold and say 7.2 M/s.

Video Capture

Better camera (5MP)

Video-Conferencing Capabilities

New Design?

There isn’t much news available but right now everyone else is trying to play catch up, trying to make that phone that kills the iPhone. Some have come close, but not one has done it yet. This summer will be prime hunting season for manufacturers. You will see some top model phones come out. If Apple and AT&T still want to dominate the market, they need to release a brand-new iPhone. It is that simple.

An 10″ Apple Tablet or a rumored ‘Apple Reader’

There has been many rumors of a tablet touch screen Apple product to compete with Amazon’s Kindle and to help the dying print industry of newspapers and magazines. There is obviously a huge market for such a product if it is any good, so I’ll at least throw this one out there, but Apple has never been open about its desire to create this sort of device. So don’t hold your breath.

Steve Jobs

There are many who believe that Steve Jobs will simply never return to Apple. Be it poor health or just a deserving quiet retirement away from the company he cofounded with Woz. Media reports on his health treatment have been sparse but his initial leave of absence called for a return “at the end of June.” 

If there is indeed new iPhone hardware, new iPhone software, and a brand new OS – I can’t imagine Steve won’t want to be there laying the foundation for the future of his company. This is shaping up to be such a landmark day for the broader appeal of the company, it is only fitting that Steve bridges the past and future at Apple by delivering this keynote. Maybe that is the optimism talking, but it would be really nice to see the man healthy enough to do what he loves to do one more time.

When Facebook had its two BIG layout changes (Feeds and last summer’s profile tabs), most people pissed and moaned. People hate change. That is fine. Both of those updates made Facebook better and eventually people came around to love their Facebook experience and couldn’t imagine going back.

When Facebook changed again almost two weeks ago, I was hesitant to criticize. I actually advocated the change to people who complained to me. I wanted to like the change, and I had trust in Facebook with their two previous upgrades.

Not this time.

After having poked around all the new nuances and features, I’ll jump on board with the other 94% of Facebook users – The new Facebook sucks.

Why?

Perceiving Twitter as Such a Serious Threat is a Mistake

Facebook is developing a serious case of Twitter envy. It’s not hard to see how the popularity of Twitter is influencing Facebook’s attempts to remold itself and adapt to the web’s changing social network landscape.

Twitter has between 4 – 5 million users.

Facebook has ~500,000 new members sign up every effin day and ~250 million users.

You do the math.

So Zuckerburg, Inc got scared and went trying to buy Twitter. Failed. If you can’t buy em, copy em! Changing the Facebook model to reflect real-time internet is a great idea.

Really, it is. The internet is going real-time, in real-time, really. In fact, the previous Facebook had an awesome little tab on the home page called the ‘Live Feed.’ It showed in real-time, everything your friends did, that they allow you to see based on their privacy settings. And if you wanted to see recent photos uploaded, you hit Photos! Amazing right?

Now all they want to show you is current status updates a la Twitter. Well, they had this little tab called ‘Status Updates’ where you could do that! So why in the fork did they take away features? And guess what? The new status stream isn’t even real time! You have to refresh for updates (At least in Firefox and Chrome). Wasn’t that the whole point of the change?

The Actual Design Sucks

Often a new website means a cleaner design with better user functionality and more features. It usually harnesses new web tech and loads quicker. Just take a look at the redesign of Mint.com to know what I mean.

One of the best parts about Facebook’s originality  is that it took one look at Web 2.0 design trends and kicked them in the face. There were no round corners, no shadows and no glossy surfaces. Just clean cut design with great spacing between elements.

The width of the new site is 960px, but most pages can’t fill the space. The content in Application pages are 640px wide, Advertisements are 160px, but they are aligned to the far right of the page, this leaves a gap in between the two of 120px. Are bigger ads coming? Who cares if you’re smart and using Firefox with Ad Block.

There was nothing wrong with the previous design. It was almost flawless. If Facebook does go the way of larger advertising as their monetization strategy, they are just plain dumb and deserve to fail. Advertising alone killed MySpace and spurred Ad Blocking in every browser.

People Use Twitter to Follow Celebrities

Duh! Twitter is all about stalking people. Pretty plain and simple. Anyone that uses Twitter is either laughably overly self consumed or a celebrity with actual interest in their going-ons. So Facebook was wise to change the ‘Pages’ features and add a tab for Public Profiles. But that is all they should have changed! I could still have my feed with people I actually care about, and then click the public tab to view what Ashton Kutcher was doing today or what scripts Will Smith is considering or whatever.

People Use Facebook More Genuinely

Facebook is a real live account of our lives. We put everything up and actually follow people we see our daily lives. Never before on the internet has a site provided so much trust that people give up so much information about their daily lives. With access to such a powerful database, it really is amazing they remain unprofitable.

Zuckerberg, Inc. needs to start worrying more about a profitability long-term strategy rather than a fad startup with no lasting appeal.

And alienating users while a competitor emerges is also probably not a good idea.

EDIT:

Facebook has just posted a lengthy letter to its users on its official blog detailing some of the changes we’ll soon be seeing on the site’s recently-redesigned homepage.

This post stems from the Michael Phelps post I had a while ago, when I said it was time America started having a serious discussion on why marijuana was still illegal. Well, it’s high time (pun?) that we have the conversation.The stoner community is clamoring to say it: “Yes we can[nabis]!”

Turns out, with several drug-war veterans close to our new President’s ear, insiders think reform could come in Obama’s second term — or sooner.

The Michael Phelps ‘crisis’ was such a laughable offense that no one (in private) even blinked an eye. As everyone knows by now, Phelps was photographed smoking from an Olympic-sized bong during a University of South Carolina party last November. Phelps has apologized for behavior that was “regrettable and demonstrated bad judgment,” and has promised never to be a lesser role model again.

It was debated whether or not Phelps would be charged, as some at that party were, because the law is the law. And that is the problem.

Our marijuana laws have been ludicrous for as long as anyone has been alive. Between 40% to 60% of Americans, depending on your source, openly admit (so it is probably closer to 65%-80%) having tried marijuana at least once.

The US, in fact, boasts the highest percentage of pot smokers among 17 nations surveyed, in this study, including the Netherlands.

Were Phelps to run for public office someday and admit to having smoked pot in his youth, he would be forgiven (Like our current and former American Presidents). Yet, in the present, we impose monstrous expectations on our heroes.

And I don’t write this blog at random. Marijuana legalization is currently at the forefront of American debate. After generations of defending marijuana possession laws on moral, ethical, and religious grounds,  all of a sudden thanks to our economic crisis, more and more (40% of the country), thinks it is time to legalize marijuana.

Allow me to digress quickly: In February, Bill Maher said on his HBO show, “When FDR came to office in 1933, one of the first things he did was repeal prohibition. He said we can’t afford this anymore. He said look, ‘we’re serious now.’ We’re going to make serious changes and people like liquor. Well, in this same country decades later, people like pot.  If we ended that prohibition, that would be a giant pooling of money.”

That ‘socialist’ FDR saved the United States banking system quickly in his presidency based on the mistakes of his predecessors. Sound familiar? When he wrapped his financial rescue plan he famously said, “I think this would be a good time for a beer.” Two days after the bill passed, Milwaukee brewers hired six hundred people and paid their first $10 million in taxes. Soon the auto industry was tooling up the first $12 million worth of delivery trucks, and brewers were pouring tens of millions into new plants.

Fast forward to the current prohibition and economic crisis. President Obama said in 2004 that the war on drugs had been “an utter failure” and that America should decriminalize pot. Last July, President Obama told Rolling Stone magazine, that he believed in “shifting the paradigm” to a public-health approach: “I would start with nonviolent, first-time drug offenders. The notion that we are imposing felonies on them or sending them to prison, where they are getting advanced degrees in criminality, instead of thinking about ways like drug courts that can get them back on track in their lives — it’s expensive, it’s counterproductive, and it doesn’t make sense.”

Meanwhile, famed Libertarian and Harvard Professor Dr. Jeffrey Miron wrote in an article that marijuana legalization would generate between $10 and $14 billion in savings and taxes every year — conclusions endorsed by 300 top economists, including Milton “Free Market” Friedman himself.

And while President Obama was not yet in power, he utilized his Change.gov website to ask Americans what they were most concerned with to help him build his set of new priorities once in power. The public’s No. 1 question: “Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.? Issue numero uno.

President Obama has already stated, “The Economy is job number one”. A real option, as Dr. Miron noted, is marijuana legalization. If 85% of all illegal narcotics seized in the United States is marijuana and $20 billion is spent annually, the legalization of marijuana will cut $17 billion annually from the United States federal budget.

Almost universally academics, economists, and politicians all agree that the drug trade is simply not working. It overpopulates prisons, wastes tax dollars, and does little in the way of educating or stopping narcotic use/traffic.

California is currently in a movement to introduce legistlation for the legalization of marijuana and if you live in California, what would you rather have? Pot smokers whose cases are tying up the legal system? Or better health care and roads thanks to a marijuana tax?

But alas, the answer from President Obama’s administration is — as it has been for years — a flat one-liner: “President Obama is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana.”

Nevertheless, the marijuana community is guardedly optimistic. “Reformers will probably be disappointed that President Obama is not going to go as far as they want, but we’re probably not going to continue this mindless path of prohibition much longer,” says NORML executive director Allen St. Pierre.

All I am saying is that the economic case for legalizing marijuana, and for lower the drinking age actually, is as compelling as it has ever been and that, in a time of great changes in the interaction between government and society (Hello corporate regulation), it would not be the worst thing in the world to have a serious national debate on the topic. I was inspired to ignite this conversation by the Phelps case and hope you carry the debate onward in your life.

Phelps may be an involuntary hero to this charge, but his name and face bring necessary attention to a farce in which nearly half the nation are admittedly guilty. It’s time to recognize that all drugs are not equal — and change the laws accordingly.

When people talk about “the best player in the game,” two names come up more than any others these days: Kobe Bryant and LeBron James.

In fact, no one else is really even worth discussing. Wade, Paul, Duncan, and maybe Howard or Dirk, are all the elite of elite; but no one in the NBA can touch Kobe or Lebron since Michael. Fact.

The popular water cooler argument these days amongst NBA fans is, “Who is better?” “Better” isn’t much of an argument. If they had to play 1-on-1, Lebron would win because of his size and strength, but that doesn’t mean he is better.

If I am running an NBA team and tomorrow I need to win a game, I’m taking Kobe on my team to get that Win. Here’s why:

Clutch

He’s proved time and time again on the biggest of stages that he can come through in the clutch. there is absolutely no chance whatsoever that he will get rattled, panic, lose track of the clock, let an ounce of doubt enter his assassin’s psyche. Obviously, Kobe can score under pressure, but he’s also got all the tools if the play breaks down. He has the resourcefulness and athletic ability to create his own shot or make a great pass to anyone on the floor. And he’s the best tough-shot shooter in the game. Ever.

He’s a Better Pure Scorer

He can score in every way imaginable. LeBron doesn’t even have a consistent midrange game yet and his 3-point range remains streaky. Getting him to give up the ball isn’t even all that hard because he’d rather make the pass than the shot from anything outside of the paint. Kobe can make his own shot from anywhere on the court, with anyone guarding him, and you believe that the shot will go in. Plus, he’s a better free-throw shooter and beyond the arch is much better. I mean, the dude dropped 81 in a game. As a GUARD! JC.

Killer Instinct

The key difference between them still was best expressed by LeBron himself in an interview with ESPN The Magazine: He doesn’t have that instinct to go out and metaphorically kill everyone the way Kobe does. If Kobe smelled blood he’d want to dig deeper into the wound. Lebron is growing in this department but can’t match Kobe.

Defense

Although the gap is closing rapidly, if I still had to take one of the two to man-up a one-on-one with 10 seconds left, I’m taking Kobe. His experience and hustle shore up the defensive edge.

Verdict

This write-up is more a celebration of Kobe’s longevity than a direct comparison of the two. If I had to take a projected career, I’m taking Lebron, even if Kobe has his rings already, because Lebron has no ceiling. There is literally, no cap on his potential. He very well could be considered the best player ever within a few years. Yeah, scary.

But if I am forced with one of the two tomorrow, I’m taking Kobe. The gap is closing ever so rapidly so I am pumping out this blog tonight because there is no more guarantee that I’m taking Kobe tomorrow. There is no pure offensive talent in the NBA in decades like Kobe, but anyone that has seen Bron Bron (And I was live for his first Triple-Double) knows that King James is lurking.

But Kobe > Lebron for this day.

It won’t be for much longer.

Hands down the best advertising of the year. Enjoy your Pi Day!

Radio/TV personality Adam Carolla has created his own daily podcast after his popular radio program was canceled. I urge everyone to support one of the funniest guys ever on the air as “new media” becomes just “media.” Direct link. Adam getting kicked off the air was a tragedy — or was it? I have a great feeling about this podcast format. He is doing this for FREE out of his own expense for his fans. Please support him and tell every Carolla fan you know.

If you watched Man Show or Loveline, you know the genius of the man. So this is a worthy plug. /viral blogspam shame

When I got the news yesterday that Terrell Owens was joining the Buffalo Bills, I immediately called shenanigans. I was in an underground parking lot frantically trying to get service on my phone to check online.

Owens Agrees to 1-Year Deal with Bills

GTFO.

The Bills don’t sign high profile free agents. The Bills don’t even think about taking on players with off-field baggage. The Bills don’t spend money when they should. Terrell Owens? A Bill?

Let’s be honest, where’s the downside? This is an NFL team that is in a small group with Detroit and Oakland that represent failure in the NFL. Perennial losers. Afraid to take chances. An organization that doesn’t understand the new NFL and the team’s record has shown for that.

They’ve gone 7-9 for three straight seasons. They haven’t gone to the playoffs in nine seasons. Their front office essentially stayed the same. They continue without a traditional general manager. The pro personnel director and top college scout remains in place. The only way the Bills could expect new results to try something completely new on the field.

Bringing aboard the biggest lightning rod in the league oughta help.

Why it is a great move:

Buffalo Becomes Relevant Again

From a business and marketing point alone the deal is great. ESPN highlights. NFL Network coverage. Can you imagine the circus that is going to be St. john Fisher come Training Camp? The fans who left after last season’s frustration will be replaced by fans curious to see the TO circus. I’d be willing to bet Buffalo sells out every game.

The Front Office Has a Swagger

Bills fans are reacting differently to this deal because we simply don’t have experience with big time deals. A small market brings smaller spotlight. but the positive here is that the new Bills brass, led by Brandon, aren’t afraid to pull the trigger and adapt to the new NFL. This should be highly praised.

The Offense Gets Better

Slice it anyway you want, TO is a freakish talent and puts points on the board. Lee Evans has never had a decent guy across from him to free up his looks. Marshawn Lynch will not be seeing 7 in the box with TO and Evans split wide. And Trent Edwards has a dynamic playmaker to make his job a hell of a lot easier. Now we don’t have to be afraid about passing on 3rd and 8.

It Is Only a One Year Deal

The price tag is amazingly cheap compared to other contracts being made with wide receivers. Getting Owens cheaper than Laveranues Coles just signed with Cincinatti, and at one-year deserves praise regardless if people believe Buffalo overpaid. TO will generate alone much more than his salary in new interest in the club. And coming from TO’s turbulent locker room relationships in the past, if he acts up at all, Buffalo cuts him free after the year to go find work elsewhere. He has to prove to be a team guy if he wants to play in the NFL next year, it is that simple.

Owens is the last guy people would expect the Bills to sign, precisely the sort of player they wouldn’t have courted in years past. But the Bills must be applauded for trying something different. How do you think Bill Belicheck and Bill Parcells took this news? They had to be just as shocked as anyone.The Bills badly needed another offensive weapon to aid the development of their young quarterback and to help themselves in a very competitive division. It is refreshing to see this initiative from the team. The status quo just wasn’t going to cut it anymore.

So put me on board the TO bandwagon.

Never thought I’d see the day.

Wednesday night on the Daily Show, John Stewart absolutely laid the wood to CNBC and Chicago correspondent Rick Santelli. Basically he called out CNBC for what they really are, propoganda spewing quasi “journalists” who attempt to push markets.

It will probably be down soon since Viacom doesn’t take too kindly to GooTube. So here is the Hulu link. And here is the Comedy Central link.

The truth is that the folks at CNBC were cheering on irresponsible behavior for years because it is their advertising lifeblood. I dare CNBC to answer Stewart’s criticism.

If Jon Stewart keeps it up he could go down as one of the most relevant comedians ever. What he is doing goes beyond just cracking jokes. He is exposing the insanity of the current political and social paradigms. If only the Daily Show was on a main network so more Americans would watch and appreciate it. I think a lot of middle aged people are turned off by the fact that it is on Comedy Central. Really…is he the most trusted man in America?

I don’t know where the lines of entertainment and journalism are being drawn right now. Why does it take a comedian to do a journalist’s job in this place? Because Jon Stewart is intellectually honest and has an internal moral compass? Is Stewart just the last *true* journalist out there?

The Daily Show is at it’s best in times like this. Don’t spout your political opinions all the time. Show the stupidity/hypocrisy of politicians and mainstream media by SHOWING the video evidence. Props to the Daily Show writers and researchers who accumulated all of the footage. Thanks for providing context, which the other news networks habitually avoid.

This is a 100% true account, as unbelievable as it is, of a girl that I know.

This girl works at a gas station. One day, around lunch, she was having lunch behind the counter, delivered chinese food to be exact.

A man came in to pay for his gas. When he saw her eating the chinese, he said, ‘What’s your fortune?”

Caught off guard, she said, “What?”

“Your fortune from the cookie” the man replied, “What’s your fortune?”

This girl opened it up and amused by the irony said, “It says ‘Smile!’.”

The man enthusiastically said, “Well then smile!”

She hastily replied, “I would be smiling if I was still in bed.” She had been short on sleep that day.

So the man asked her, “So were you smiling when you woke up in bed this morning?”

My friend frowned and said, ‘Well not this morning. I’ve had a rough couple of days.”

The man curiously followed up by saying, ‘What’s wrong?”

She told him that she had been in two separate car accidents in the past two weeks. That her back still wasn’t feeling right and that she needed to come up with $1,000 to get her car fixed so she could freely commute to school and work.

The man looked at her and said, “I’m awfully sorry about that. Things will turn around soon. Good luck to you.”

With that he left to return to his car and my friend went on to help another customer with a lottery ticket.

The man returned into the store and tossed something across the counter toward the girl. She looked up at him quickly with a smile and he left again. She went on helping the lottery customer assuming, as many do, he was just passing along some piece of garbage he wanted her to throw away.

When her view of the paper was no longer obstructed, she noticed it was a white envelope.

She turned it over and in big black letters wrote the word, “Smile!”

She opened the unsealed envelope to find 10 $100 dollar bills.

Quickly she went outside, only to find that the man had gone.

I am amazed at the selflessness of this mystery man’s gesture of goodwill and wanted to share the story with you readers. If you are that man who helped this young woman in need, rest assured that every cent of the money went to fixing her car, and that she is forever grateful.

In such unknown economic turbulence, it is really easy to start clinging to every penny on the fear that one day you won’t have any left. But what we must realize is money isn’t real. It doesn’t have any existential substance. No one ever left this life with their checkbook.

But this story is worth more than the $1,000 this man so graciously (and anonymously) passed along. Pay it forward. Share this story. And remember that we’re all in this together. Empathy for our common man must be not only preached, but practiced.

I consider myself an above-average Facebooker. I update my Facebook status 5-8x per week and no more than twice a day. When Facebook overhauled their interface last year, many people were initially upset that Facebook had once again messed with their product. Yet, Facebook felt obligated to change the core of Facebook’s usability of the ‘Wall’ to meet (and challenge) the growing threat of Twitter’s explosive 2008 growth. In fact, by some accounts Facebook aggressively attempted to acquire Twitter this past Fall but the two couldn’t come to terms on valuation of Facebook’s privately held stock.

The deal with Twitter, if you’ve never heard of it, is essentially a website to update your ‘status’. It has gone mainstream, BIG TIME. It can be looked at in many ways of use. Microblogging, online chat, etc. What were once AIM awya messages are now online aways for anyone to see, at any time. There isn’t any denying that Twitter’s most beneficial aspect is its instant accessibility. There is heavy sentiment that Twitter-like technology could essentially render IM and email obsolete.

But as instant communication and information proliferates, issues with Twitter have sprung. One potential issue is that Twitter makes potentially private situations instantly public.

There are countless situations in which everyone in the room assumes privacy or even “Vegas Rules” (what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas). But when someone is twittering about those situations, the event suddenly becomes public, often very public.

Tweeting makes those messages almost instantly searchable by anyone in the world. You don’t even need a Twitter account to use the Twitter search feature. Moments later, the messages are indexed and available on Google.

And unlike, say, blogs (lol), Twitter posts go viral fast. Users do something called “re-tweeting,” which means they paste a message someone else posted, add the letters “RT” to the front, then re-broadcast it to their own followers. Then some of those followers re-tweet, and so on. By this serial re-tweeting, Twitter posts can spread to hundreds of thousands of Twitter users in minutes. Many of those users are bloggers, reporters, and others with access to other forms of broadcasting.

Is that fair to the other people in the room who believed the situation was private? Some might argue no, it’s not right to publish private events and conversations. But others would say, yes, it’s 2009 and microblogging has become an integral part of human culture.

One of the earliest controversies involving Twitter was the live-blogging by a father of his daughter’s birth, which may have included more medical detail than some followers, or possibly his wife or doctor, may have expected.  Is that okay?

Is it okay for reporters and editors to tweet live events? By doing so, the news is already out there by the time colleagues get out of the event and back to their laptops. Is that fair?

The big argument really seems to be whether Twitter is the greatest thing to ever hit teh interwebs or whether it is just a huge waste of time.

Here’s where I stand. I have a Twitter account. I don’t use it to ‘tweet’, instead I follow a select few public figures that yield my interest. I don’t see myself ever becoming an active Twittererererer, it just doesn’t make sense from an efficiency standpoint. I am a huge proponent of anything new and anything better. I like the idea of Twitter, I just don’t like the way people use it. And that is why it ultimately won’t persevere the ever progressing technology of communication.

Back to the Facebook comparison… the difference between the two?

A Facebook status may be something along the lines of, “Daniel is spending the weekend in Tampa!”

A Twitter status flow would be more like, “Dan is getting on the plane for sunny Tampa!” – “Dan really loves JetBlue’s flight accommodations!” – “OMG, Dan just saw an old lady pick her nose!” – “Dan wishes airlines had better beer selections.” – “Dan has arrived in Tampa! It’s 88 here!” – “Dan can’t wait to meet up with friends and hit the beach!” – “Dan is waiting for his luggage to come out of that stupid machine.”

Get my drift?

Just because it is so accessible and easy, people go overboard with their Twitter updates. Not that I am not interested in the lives’ of people I care about (I routinely check the status updates of all my ‘friends’ on Facebook), but there are only so many hours in a day to stay on top of these things. And who wants to sort through all the crap Tweets often include looking for substance? Thanks, but I have enough to do. An occasional Facebook status is preferred from my standpoint.

But alas, the truth is that an answer to this Twitter question doesn’t exist yet. Stay tuned.