Monday, March 03, 2014

Twitter Need Not Be Facebook To Do Well

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase
It Turns Out Twitter’s Not for Everyone

Twitter need not be a mainstream product used by half of humanity to do really well as a business. Instead of trying to imitate Facebook (O, we also show you pictures in your stream!) Twitter could just deepen the relationship it has with its users.

If Google can help me search through the web, Twitter should at least be able to help me search through all tweets that rest on Twitter's servers. But it does not do that. That one feature alone would take Twitter into the stratosphere. I might not need a Dropbox. Twitter would be my Dropbox for the most part. Most stuff I like to save come in the form of URLs.

If you were to force me to pick between Facebook and Twitter - and I am glad you don't - I would pick Twitter.

So if you can be so well positioned for both search and social, and you were mobile before mobile became mobile, what gives? Beats me.
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The Natural User Interface And The Differently Abled

English: NASA StarChild image of Stephen Hawking.
English: NASA StarChild image of Stephen Hawking. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I think the Natural User Interface, of which the touch is just the beginning and gesture is the next big step, though not the final step, not by a long shot, is a big gift for all of us, but it might be extra promising for the differently abled. Senior homes can make use of drones and robots. Voice commands would cut language barriers. The Internet is not meant for English only, and should not dump you into your particular language silo. You communicate, let the Internet translate.

The keyboard, if you think about it, does feel unnatural.

The ultimate is being able to command your computing environment with your eye movements, Stephen Hawking style.

At some level we are all differently. A lot of start wearing glasses early on. As soon as you put one on, you have gently stepped into the differently abled zone. Smart, robotic limbs are not a challenge anymore. They are not innovation challenges, they are simply now scaling challenges.

Your brain is one of the last parts of your body to give up on you. Which means the NUI taken to its logical conclusion will allow us to raise the retirement age. And since retirement is voluntary anyways, a lot of us could hope to live long productive lives through NUI.

Education remains the great unsolved mystery of our knowledge age, ironically. The industrial era education engines/structures don't recognize concepts like people learn at their own paces with their own styles. That individualization is now possible. But there are old institutional structures that get in the way.

There are enormous implications on education and health because a knowledge economy puts a major, unprecedented emphasis on human capital. Human capital is a concept much bigger than human rights because it takes human rights for granted.
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