Category: technology

It’s here and it works. Despite a notable bug that means you have to disable/restart to get it to work, I’ve found it to be genuinely useful and usable. So far, I’ve used it to calculate areas, find facts, send emails, setup a reminder and do pretty similar things to those I use wolfram alpha for. Voice command curve-fitting could be very tedious though 🙂

No coincidence of course as Siri uses alpha at the backend for much of the “personal assistant” knowledge finding tasks I’ve described. There’s some cool tricks described here at iphonehacks.com. The morse code feature is particularly geeky/nerdy and I’m looking forward to trying it out with my colleague and ham radio enthusiast, John Ronan, on Monday.

Whenever I hear someone over the age of 30 explaining how some new technology or techno-craze is “useless/ pointless/ stupid/ timewasting/ boring/ foolish” etc. I make a mental note to look up that technology and learn more about it. I’m over 30 myself so I’m accepting a degree of techno-fogeydom has creeped into my outlook. I even dismissed twitter as a distracting waste of time. It _is_ distracting but that isn’t the point.

Twitter fulfills a social need. We’re wired for verbal communication and twitter provides us with a convenient way of filling that need that is different in its brevity and reach from other mechanisms. Few enough people connect to those they don’t know personally on facebook but twitter behavior is different. In many ways this is liberating and innovative. By keeping tweets to short bursts of 140 characters we accept a convention that limits our ability to abuse network trust with long and indulgent messages. That’s what blogs are for. When I look at my friends twitter usage and compare it with my own it’s clear that many of us use it to break dunbar’s number. Our casual twitter relationships greatly outstrip the 150 person friend limit that’s more obvious on facebook. Twitter is nothing less than a social revolution. A quick ideas mart… One that, according to Nielsen ratings, subscribers spend a rapidly increasing amount of time using.