Sunday morning tech nuggets

Miscellaneous trappings of my morning spent reading RSS feeds:

• As I recently tweeted, twitter is everywhere in this weekend’s news.  I think I literally saw over a dozen references as I scanned my feeds this morning.  In my experience, the site is still having rather frequent and severe performance/availability problems, and I’m only tentatively sold on the notion, but I’m getting kinda into it.  In particular, I think its opportunity to provide super-lightweight transport-flexible connectivity could unlock all kinds of creative uses for ubiquitous connectivity.  If that is indeed the direction this goes, we’ve just scratched the surface of the mash-ups and other sorts of info-feed integrations twitter should enable.  Things like geotwitter are neat novelties, but aren’t going to change my daily habits, which seems to me to be the definition of this being The Next Big Thing that’s been predicted.  The meta-view of twitterverse is interesting (as mappr is to flickr or zeitgeist is to google), but again amounts to little more than another gee-whiz shiny thing on the intarweb.  Crassly commercial as it may be, twitter/woot strikes me as a closer example of how twitter could become the centerpiece of a new information ecosystem.
• Social networking is trending to eclipse pr0n in as %age of Internet "site visits" (details here if you have an Economist subscription).  As pointed out in this commentary, though, lots of social networking is used for sex…
• Microsoft apparently continues the "open source infringes patents" form of FUD.  Honestly, I’ve largely stopped paying attention.
• Google history is offering to track all of your browsing for you.  Erm, I think I’ll pass for now.  I think both their reasons for wanting to do this and my hesitation to let them do it are fairly obvious on the surface.  Ironically, it’s mostly the the ability of google search to pretty reliably conjure up whatever old link I might want that makes this service feel like an unnecessary intrusion.
• Speaking of google, they’ve apparently acquired their way into the online meeting space.  I’m sure I’m not alone in welcoming the possibility of a google-quality WebEx alternative.  No linux version at the moment, unfortunately…
• As a token earth day nod, I’ll pass along Make magazine’s link to New Scientist’s coverage of a working prototype of a desktop printer modified to print circuits!  This is potentially really exciting — I’ve started to do the homework to make custom PCBs at home, and the traditional techniques look both relatively cumbersome and very nasty, from a materials-required point of view.

It’s an absolutely beautiful day here, so I think I’ll go AFK for a bit and enjoy the fresh air with my family.