Ticket to Ride

I think I get it now. It made no sense when people tried to explain it "You know, Twitter is like a mini-blog." What? But I took a ride on Twitter, and it was fun.


It started slowly. I only follow about 22 people on Twitter; most of them are tech folks and some of them are Jimmy Fallon. I'd seen lots of preparatory hoopla about the Apple introduction on Wednesday, the blogosphere has been intelligently speculating for weeks - months - years. Maybe 500 journalists were in heavy anticipation and lots of them were tweeting.  I happened to be stationed at my computer shortly before nine am when it started. 


The morning had had desultory comments of the hurry up and wait twitterers were experiencing. Right at nine things started to change. Suddenly 9 tweets appear on deck, then 7 more. Each was some version of "Steve Jobs walked onstage" As I watched in amazement, major thoughts came rolling at me in waves of tweets. The crowd immediately broadcast the specifications, the use of the word magic, the name iPad. Tweets came faster and faster, more data poured out as each twit sent out their personal characterizations of each feature or marketing point as it was revealed. I could barely keep up - I was praying my connection would hold. There were some frantic posts of failing features ( Twitter turned off lists temporarily!) Then came the price - and what an uproar!


As that settled down, I started to see a wave of comments by women - "Didn't Apple have any women on the team?" "Does Apple listen to women?" As the term #iTampon surged on Twitter someone dug up the 2006 MadTV spoof of Apple featuring the iPad - and the clip went everywhere. Later I read that there were 177,000 tweets about the Apple product introduction in the first couple of hours. I had been mildly interested, intrigued, and then totally swept away. I was exhilarated and exhausted. 


Today I found the chart below on ReadWriteWeb. This synopsis very closely matched the opinions I saw developing in the avalanche of tweets I enjoyed:

You give yourself away

The rhythm of your typing may be unique enough to forgo computer passwords in the future - and maybe even to predict when you are not yourself - whether due to stress, illness or fraud (it's not you!)


An article in NewScientist revealed some fascinating experiments by Mike Dowman and associates at the University of Abertay, UK. They ran a study of people entering the same user IDs and passwords,  recording how long each key was held down and how long between each keystroke. They then developed software that could identify volunteers by their keystroke "signature" - which was successful 97% of the time!


This detection success rate is apparently similar to other biometric systems in use, like fingerprint scan ports or voice scanners. The exciting finding is that, under stress testing, they could not only identify the volunteers correctly a majority of the time, they could also tell if that volunteer was stressed! While this leads researchers in other fields to imagine the possibilities - the bank can tell you have a gun to your head making that withdrawal, maybe we could monitor keystrokes to diagnose Alzheimer's -  I am just amazed that we give ourselves away -  broadcast our uniqueness - in these small, barely conscious movements.

Best Alt Uses - the Climate Change Dress. It's not what you're thinking

Because I love beautiful tech wear.
From Greenwala: Climate change dress
"Recently unveiled at Copenhagen's Bright Green Expo, the asymmetrical spangled charcoal number -- accented with conductive embroidery and embedded with 100+ LEDs, a CO2 sensor and a Arduino Lilypad microprocessor -- reveals minor to increasingly dynamic levels of illumination depending upon how much carbon is present in the surrounding air space of the wearer. "