Technology Futures

There are two kinds of spam--the obnoxious stuff that is clearly junk, and then what I call "legitimate" spam, although the word "legitimate" is probably not the right word to describe it.

Every morning, I have to wade through a bunch of email from legitimate firms offering legitimate services--business seminars, webinars, conferences, deals on their products. All real stuff, but also stuff I'm rarely interested in.

Email is a powerful tool that really has transformed the way we work, but we still don't have good, well understood rules for using it. In my view, most of these companies are abusing their email privileges by bombarding me with their email promotional offers. They think that sending one email or a week or even one or two a month is no big deal, but every firm that ever glompfed onto one of my email addresses is doing the same thing, which leads to the daily clogging of my inbox. And what that means is that I rarely bother to read any of them.

And in our personal lives, we also still don't have a good grasp of when and when not to use email. Look at this mess with the Governor of South Carolina. Somehow the private emails between him and his Argentine "friend" became public, and they are barely safe for work. What the heck was he thinking? If you are going to have an affair, at least have the good sense not to document it in electronic missives that often end up being backed up in numerous places beyond your control. If anyone thinks that using a Gmail account with a fake name somehow provides some protection, think again. Any electronic service provided by firms like Yahoo, Microsoft, or Google never throw away anything, because those emails can be mined for marketing info.

I don't know if Sanford was using Gmail to correspond with girl friend, but if he was, I can almost guarantee that ads for cheap travel to Argentina were popping up every time he logged into his Gmail account.

I'm reminded of the crusty old sergeant in "Hill Street Blues," who ended the morning staff meeting with the same admonition every day: "Be careful out there." The Internet is a messy place--businesses that want to attract customers need to be careful about spamming--even if they have the best of intentions, and we need to be careful about whom we correspond with and under what conditions. Email, like diamonds, can be forever.

A story in the New York Times about the decline in blogging suggests the future of Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking tools. It turns out that only about 5% of all identifiable blogs have been updated in the past 120 days. Put another way, 95% of blogs have been abandoned for all intents and purposes. I have always maintained that blogging is about writing, not about publicity or fame. If you like to write, blogging is easier (though not necessarily easy). If you don't have writing in your blood, blogging is just plain hard work.

Fast backward seven years to 2002 as the blogging craze was taking off, and if you believed all the techno-pundit hype, we were all going to be bloggers. I never believed it, and we are now going through the same overwrought hype with things like Facebook and Twitter. Five years from, both tools will still be around, but most people will have moved on and will use Facebook and Twitter for a few well-defined and generally narrow purposes, and that's it.

Google Squared is an odd little Google experiment that the company just released, probably to try to counter the even odder Wolfram Alpha search tool.

Each tool is different from each other, and each tool tries to apply analysis to search requests, as opposed to the "old fashioned" search that just dumps a list of unfiltered results in your lap.

Wolfram Alpha comes from the company that developed Mathematica, an extremely powerful piece of software used by mathematicians, scientists, and math teachers and students. Alpha tries to provide quantitative analysis to search requests. This works quite well if you enter things like math formulas or chemistry formulas. But if you enter something like "Blacksburg Virginia" it decides you must be interested in two places: Blacksburg, Virginia and Virginia, Minnesota, and computes the distance and straight line flight time between the two places. Huh?

Google Squared tries to take search requests and turn them into a tabular format. This seems to work quite well if you are shopping for something, but many other search terms I tried seemed to confuse it.

I downloaded and installed Hulu Desktop this weekend, and I have seen the future of TV. The folks that designed this paid careful attention to the user interface, and the overall look and feel of this software is terrific. It is easy to browse, and you can drill down quickly into a specific area (e.g. Movie Trailers, TV Shows). I have a feeling the designers spent a lot of time looking at the iTunes Store and Apple's Cover Flow interface, because there are not only similarities, but improvements.

If I was a cable company senior manager, first I'd spend some time curled up in a fetal position bawling for Mommy. Then I'd call an emergency meeting of my staff and create an emergency task force to find a new business to get into, like becoming an open access digital transport provider. Once I did that, I'd call Hulu and make a deal to carry their "TV" programming.

Other losers: Google. Google senior execs should also visit the curled up fetal position, because Hulu has completed short-circuited the Google game plan. Hulu has cut out the Web browser, meaning Google will never see a single penny of ad revenue from Hulu Desktop. YouTube, which is a Google company now, is also a big loser. Compared to the stunning quality and ease of use of Hulu Desktop, YouTube looks like some old TV show from the sixties in black and white. In other words, YouTube looks old and tired.