Pictures, words, ideas. If one picture equals 1,000 words, how many ideas does it generate? Is there a transitive property there? I had time over the weekend to pick up two unrelated pictures. Each covers something entirely different. Both are full of ideas.

The first, a chart by Seth Godin:

From Seth Godin

This is one of those things that must have been hard to come up with, but makes sense when you look at it. A map of communication. On the horizontal axis of the chart, from book on one end to a conversation at the other. With a book, the writer writes it at one point in time and the reader reads it at an entirely different time. With the telephone and coaching, both parties of the communication, sender and receiver, are involved at the same time. On the chart’s vertical axis, how much bandwidth is involved, from mail and graffiti at the low extreme, to movies and coaching at the high extreme.

The Second, from Buzz Networker:

From bizzia.com, buzzworker

This one is fascinating to me. As always with this kind of research, accuracy depends on how they sampled, but even if it could be off by a bit, it still gives a big picture of the main social networking sites (which is what I assume the acronym SNS stands for) usage by age. I have no conclusions to draw, but maybe you do.

Committees don’t make great software. It takes a single person, an author. Maybe he gets some help. Teams don’t do it. Nobody sees the whole elephant.

I’m pretty sure I heard that basic sentiment first in about 1986, from Dave Winer, who was then the author of a Macintosh outlining program named More (now he’s better known as the de-facto father of blogging).

What reminded me of this over the weekend was my son emailing me about Jeff Atwood’s Software Engineering: Dead post on Coding Horror. In his post, Jeff’s looking at this article by Tom DeMarco, author of Controlling Software Projects, a software management classic.

What DeMarco seems to be saying — and, at least, what I am definitely saying — is that control is ultimately illusory on software development projects. If you want to move your project forward, the only reliable way to do that is to cultivate a deep sense of software craftsmanship and professionalism around it.

The guys and gals who show up every day eager to hone their craft, who are passionate about building stuff that matters to them, and perhaps in some small way, to the rest of the world — those are the people and projects that will ultimately succeed.

That sounds to me a lot like what Dave Winer was getting at about 25 years ago. And if it takes a single user, someone writing code and working the application because he or she wants to use it, then that’s hard to manage.

And if you’re interested in software quality, creativity, and management, you might want to look at an exchange between user interface designerDustin Curtis and an interface designer at American Airlines. It starts here with Justin’s rant about the hostile interface on the AA website; and gets more interesting here with an AA interface designer’s answer.

However, there are large exceptions. For example, our Interactive Marketing group designs and implements fare sales and specials (and doesn’t go through us to do it), and the Publishing group pushes content without much interaction with us… Oh, and don’t forget the AAdvantage team (which for some reason, runs its own little corner of the site) or the international sites (which have a lot of autonomy in how their domains are run)… Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that AA.com is a huge corporate undertaking with a lot of tentacles that reach into a lot of interests. It’s not small, by any means.

And apparently frustration was had by all.

And it certainly won’t make you wish you had a creative or design oriented position in a large company.

Two guys wrote the original spreadsheet (VisiCalc), one, Paul Brainard, wrote the main part of the first page layout program (Pagemaker). One of the more interesting facets of a lot of Web 2.0 work is that the programs are smaller, written more by authors, less by teams.

Somebody asked me recently how my background relates to programming computers, and software. That’s hard to explain, given that I majored in Literature as an undergrad, then got an MA in Journalism, then an MBA. None of that says programming.

In my case it was like falling in love. I first used word processing when I was still with United Press International (UPI) in Mexico City, back in the 1970s (it was an early Atex system). Then, when I got accepted to business school they gave me a teach-yourself-BASIC programming book, and told me to learn it before the school year started.

Flickr cc by Jana_aka_BADGRL

Programming, making the computer do things, was fascinating to me. It was like making real things, but with a touch of magic. Do the code, press run, and when it did what I wanted, filling the screen with my results, I loved it. I ended up with a part-time job helping fellow students with the computer in the business school basement, and building my own computer from parts (for you really old-time computer geeks, that was a CP/M computer and an S-100 bus).

What reminded me of these good old days was yesterday my daughter Megan sent me this: Someone At Apple Has A Sense Of Humor. The MobileCrunch report cites this piece of code deep in the iPhone, where you’d only find it by trying to hack around the main stuff:

00009 @interface UIViewController (UIViewControllerClassDumpWarning)

00010 – (void)attentionClassDumpUser:(id)fp8 yesItsUsAgain:(id)fp12 althoughSwizzlingAndOverridingPrivateMethodsIsFun:(id)fp16 itWasntMuchFunWhenYourAppStoppedWorking:(id)fp20 pleaseRefrainFromDoingSoInTheFutureOkayThanksBye:(id)fp24; 00011 @end

What that says there is “Although swizzling and overriding private methods is fun, it wasn’t much fun when your app stopped working. Please refrain from doing so in the future. Okay thanks bye.”

My actual programming was mainly in the 1980s, when “hacking” was a good thing, and those of us who worked with personal computers could feel like we were some kind of an in crowd at times. I did do some real code for Business Plan Pro’s first version, and, before that, I wrote code for the early Business Plan Toolkit using spreadsheet macros. Error messages could be kind of fun.

I’d like to brag about some of the more amusing error messages I left, but, sorry, I’d play with them during testing but I always chickened out and cleaned them up to look more professional (and, sadly, dull).

And that also reminds me, as well, of how programming was so often a one-person job back in the 1980s. I’d do it for myself, first, use it, and then productize later. That’s a lot different from the teams of programmers everybody uses today. But things, including the computer programs, were a lot simpler. Not as good, either — not by a long shot — but simpler.

But I searched Google for funny error messages, and a lot come up. You can click the link to see for yourself, or maybe just use this one, which seems like one of the best.

Ah yes, the good old days. How quickly time passes. My youngest graduated from college last weekend. She can barely remember life before cellphones, and can’t remember life before personal computers or VCRs, because both of those were born before she was.

A graduation is a milestone event, and milestone events generate this kind of thinking. How much the world has changed, and how quickly. When I graduated from college in 1970:

1. The university had a computer in a basement that took up the space of an SUV and had way less power than an iPhone does now. Computer science students programmed it with perforated cards.
2. The dorms had one phone per floor. Long distance calling costs were significant. I was in the Midwest, so I’d call my parents in California once every couple of months.
3. We wrote letters. We read letters.
4. We used typewriters for every college essay, paper, and assignment. We’d often retype an entire page to correct an error. Sometimes we’d reword things to make the pages end or begin with the correct word so we could insert an additional page.
5. Four-function calculators existed, but nobody we knew had one. You could have bought a new low-end car for the price of two four-function calculators.
6. I did my sophomore year abroad, and the university sent us from New York to Europe on an ocean liner. That was cheaper than flying.
7. We wrote checks when we had to, used cash most of the time, and we got the cash from the bank teller window, not an ATM.
8. Credit cards were rare. Our parents had them.
9. Television was broadcast over the air. We watched in real time or not at all. We had 5 or 10 channels to choose from.
10. When we were driving we listened to the radio, or cassette tapes.

And that’s just technology, or a smattering of technology.  When I think of social evolution, and environmental deterioration, the end of the cold war, the rise of terrorism, polar ice caps … like we used to say: “far out, man.”

I love twitter. What blogging is to email, Twitter is to instant messaging (IM) … and then some. You can follow me on Twitter as Timberry. I’m like a fish with a shiny new thing. And, with due respect to the MSNBC line (if you don’t get it, you’re too old) — I’m 61. But that’s nothing: my 89-year-old dad is on Twitter too.

Consider this picture of Twitter usage published earlier this month on TechCrunch:

Something’s happening there.

1: Vocabulary

But first, some vocabulary (just to get it straight): Twitter is web publishing in 140-character snippets. A tweet is one of those snippets. To tweet means typing those snippets into Twitter. To follow is what you do (takes a click) to get access to somebody’s tweets. A follower is somebody who follows you. To retweet means to take somebody else’s tweet and tweet it again, giving them credit, to your followers. Your followers can also be called tweeps, or sometimes tweeple.

Is it all too cute? Avoid the now-famous Stephen Colbert gaffe with the wrong verb.

2: I Hate Twitter

About Twitter backlash. The Daily Show take on it, Samantha Bee ignoring the interview while peering into a cellphone keyboard, was hilarious. The Twitter Facebook users accuse it of twitterizing itself.  The Google search for “twitter bashing” turns up half a million hits. “I hate Twitter” is good for more than 18 million.

So here are some good reasons to hate Twitter:

1. Twitter clutter. The “I’m having dinner now” or “I’m going home now” inanities. I did that too when I started, as if I were telling family members “arrived in Denver airport.” I get it now: Nobody cares what you’re doing. Tweet something interesting, or nothing at all (note to self: and don’t try to make cute contractions for Twitter clutter. Doesn’t work.)
2. Twitter selling. Ads are ads, even at 140 characters per tweet. Infomercial I don’t mind, when there’s actual info — happens a lot — but there is selling going on. (The good news, though, is that you only get that once. Don’t like it? Stop following. A lot like changing the channel. If you don’t follow them, they don’t bother you).
3. Tweeting at meals, in conversations, or at meetings or movies or events is really annoying.
4. Tweeting while driving is at best stupid, at worst, manslaughter.
5. People collect followers. The more, the better. The Twitter version of counting friends in Facebook. Now we have some Web applications designed to get you more followers. Ugh. People measure themselves and compete on number of followers.
6. It’s really distracting. It gets in the way of getting things done (of course, that’s actually a good thing disguised as bad; the same would be true of everything fun or interesting except work).
7. I hate it that Steven Wright, the comedian, master of the one liner, isn’t on Twitter (that’s a good thing too, because maybe he’ll start.)

3: I Love Twitter

Consider this an enthusiastic hooray for relationships in 140-character snippets. Crazy as this sounds, ironic indeed, but some of my Twitter friends feel like real friends to me. When they tweet their latest blog posts, I go, I read, I comment. When I tweet my latest blog posts, they go, read, and comment. They recommend me to others. I recommend them. I ask for recommendations, they respond. Sometimes it’s just “I liked your last blog post” and sometimes it’s “does anybody know a restaurant in Portland that does Thanksgiving dinner?”

I blog a lot these days. I care about other people in the same general topic areas. It’s nice to follow them on Twitter.

So, then here are some good reasons to love Twitter:

1. Keeping up with some professional relationships. I know that seems incredible, more so if you knew me. I’m kind of a hermit. I hate cocktail parties. But I like keeping up with people in Twitter.
2. Fascinating real-time constantly scrolling updates on interesting new blog posts, news, issues. I follow some people whom I respect, and they point out interesting ideas, posts, etc. I work in tweetdeck, and it’s like having a scrolling world of interesting little tidbits.
3. Writing. Sometimes good writing. Good tweets are amazing. See number 5, below.
4. Publishing. Think of it as publishing short snippets to people who want to read them.
5. Someone’s tweets get repetitive, or become sales pitches, or just Twitter clutter? Unfollow them. It’s as satisfying as changing the channel.
6. Taking responsibility: people with real names and real pictures. You can’t delete a tweet.
7. Maybe Steven Wright will get on Twitter in the future.

4: Twitter in Business

Seems like almost everybody on Twitter is a social media marketing expert offering to show the rare non-social-media-marketing experts how to make money on Twitter. Seems that Twitter can be good for people in the expert business. But is it good for business? Or, the question of the last month or so, are you an idiot if you’re in business and not in Twitter?

Twitter is no more good or bad for business than telephones, letters, conversations, or pies in the face. The medium isn’t the message; the message is the message. I have lots of twitter friends who are straight, like it, keep in touch with it, and — lo and behold — that’s good for their business. But is being in Twitter good for business? Nope.

I can’t figure out Twitter and relationships. It’s oxymoronic, and, sometimes, just plain moronic. But it brings me closer to blogging and Web people I like and respect. Paradox, I suppose.

5. A Few Good Tweets

At its best, it really is writing, and a new kind of self publishing. For evidence, I call on David Petheric (clarocada on Twitter) and his post Top Tweets of 2008 on DigitalBiographer.com. He gets the credit for the collection, and I’m choosing just a few:

• brandmilitia: Sometimes the fastest way to screw up a company’s social media strategy is by letting the marketing department run it.
• chrisbrogan: Just made a VC choke somehow on my speaker’s fee. Tough times for startups in 09, kids.
• copyblogger: I’ve got to go on a carriage ride through Highland Park tonight with 4 kids and 3 lawyers. This is why God gave us scotch.
• boris: “Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.” — Jorge Luis Borges
• SaraD: Accidental Death & Dismembership Insurance. I passed on that. I choose Membership.
• mathie: I need a pair of headphones. Or a shotgun and at least 5 cartridges. Or an office of my own.

There: see what I mean? Good stuff. It reminds me of something that came over the teletype 38 years ago when I was on the night desk at UPI in Mexico City. Rumor had it he put this onto the service and walked out for good. His tweet, 38 years ahead of its time, was:

“Too much work, too little money. I quit.”

And, what the heck, my favorite tweet from my 900-some tweets:

Gray cold comfort. Clouds pressing the forested hills downwards, covering the tops. Ghosts of holidays past. Western Oregon in November.

I felt poetic that day.

Conclusion: a quote from an NBC web story about twitter:

The nicest thing about Twitter might be that it’s a grassroots medium nobody has quite figured out a way to make money off of yet. Not even the guys who created it.

Consider these predictions. They’re all based on identifiable trends. Ask yourself how this affects you, your business, and your business future:

• In 10 years, the number one English-speaking country in the world will be China.
• By 2011, 90% of all the engineers in the world will live in Asia.
• In 20 years, two thirds of the world’s middle class will live in India and China. That will be 1.15 billion people, an increase from 430 million in 2000.
• The Chinese instant messenger system QQ has more than 342 million users.

This five-minute video puts a quiet, almost peaceful, musical background behind a series of startling Futures Group predictions of drastic change coming soon to a world near you.

If for any reason you can’t see the video here on the blog, just click here for the source video on YouTube.

My thanks to Kare Anderson of MovingFromMetoWe.com for posting to this. The title, The Rise of the Rest comes from the title of a recent book by Fareed Zakaria (Newsweek International Editor).

We used to talk a lot about the "killer app" back in the early days of personal computing, late 1970s and early 1980s, when a killer application was something that would create a new market, or bring a technology into the mainstream. VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, was a killer app. So was PageMaker, which, combined with the early Apple LaserWriter, started desktop publishing. Aldus Persuasion, precursor to PowerPoint and Keynote, was a killer app.

Yesterday Amazon.com and iTunes announced the killer app for ebooks. The combination of Kindle and iPhone is going to finally create the market that ebooks have deserved for years. It's an unbeatable offering. 

I've read good things about the Sony eBook reader, and, at least until now, the Kindle was not quite good enough and about two times too expensive to create a real power market. But with the iPhone app, in combination, I predict it's going to.

I've been a happy Kindle owner since I got one, just a few weeks after it started shipping. I've said so in posts on this blog here, and then again here. Then yesterday Amazon announced the Kindle for iPhone, which is exactly what I'd been hoping for. 

The experience was absolutely seamless. I went to the iTunes application store and downloaded the Kindle for iPhone application, then plugged in my iPhone and synchronized. Then I picked up the iPhone, started the application, typed in the obvious email address and password of my Kindle account, and within literally less than a minute I had 21 books available for downloading — the same 21 books that are waiting for me on my Kindle.

I downloaded five of those books. None of them took more than a few seconds. And they were all already mine, purchased earlier for my Kindle, waiting to be read. Some of them are partially read.  I switch moods, go from something on business to a novel, sometimes short stories; I rarely get so involved in a book that I read it straight from cover to cover. That's more of a vacation behavior, and generally with fiction. 

My Kindle (first generation, by the way … I've seen the version 2, and it looks nicer than mine, but not worth getting a new one when the one I have works fine) is great for vacations, reading at night, and traveling, in airports, airplanes, and hotels. But the iPhone is always with me, there for company if I get caught waiting for something. I really hate waiting. And it's also nice at night, and it's going to be nice in dark planes, because it has it's own light. The Kindle doesn't. The Kindle needs a bed light or one of those tiny book lights.

And what's best about the Kindle — the great access to a library, electronically, without having to break out time for buying or shipping, such as while you're at the airport — is also there for the iPhone application.

And, perhaps the best of all, I'm not fussing with two libraries, buying one book for the iPhone and another for the Kindle. Now I can buy everything for the Kindle, and have it in both places.

The synchronization looks just fine to me. I haven't had time to test this one, but they say that it will keep track of the last page read on either device, synchronizing between them.

How cool is that?

As I think of the good reasons to go to a store to buy something, instead of over the Web, some of those reasons may go away in the future. There may be a new Web version of retail brewing.

This has been on my mind since I posted on my other blog about the Trunk Club offering men a way to get the personal-service advantage of help and recommendations and opinions that they'd get from a good salesperson, without having to actually go to the store. It comes via Web video chat from a Trunk Club style expert. Founder Joanna Van Vleck pointed out that this may be the future of retail.

It takes dividing the benefits of buying retail into their components. Some can be replaced by the Web, some can't.

The world has already seen how effectively a Web offering can replace the kind of browsing we do in a bookstore. As long as we're able to wait a few days to get what we choose to buy. And more so with computer software. We choose and download. We don't even have to wait.

One component a Web alternative will never replace is immediacy for things that can't be delivered digitally. If you want some physical product right now today, then you go to the store. You go to a restaurant to sit and be served, and to the hair place to get your hair done, and that's not going to happen via live video chat.

Another component is the actual visual and tactile comparison. Look at the various offerings on the shelf. Pick them up, read the package, make a choice.

The component of the retail transaction that a Web alternative might replace, for some businesses, is the interaction with the expert. Many hardware and home maintenance and home remodeling businesses advertise person-to-person expertise as a reason to visit the store. Could that become a live Web chat followed by an order, shipping, and then maybe more Web chat? What about the specialty vitamin shop, or the health foods store? The hobby shop? And maybe the office supplies and office technology business, offering a video chat with an expert leading to an order for a printer, or scanner, or new computer?

Better still, I have an expert I know and trust, with whom I have worked again and again over time, who I can meet with, by appointment on the Web cam.

The secret is the use of the interactive Web video — over Skype, for example, or equivalent Yahoo! or Google video chat facilities — to do what that trusted salesperson in the favorite store might do.

So it makes me start to think. Sure, with this model I have to wait to actually get the goods; but I don't have to go to the store, wait in traffic, park the car, find the salesperson, and so on. It's a very intriguing alternative.

Could you list the top 30 high-tech innovations of the last 30 years? Number one on this list is Internet broadband. Followed closely by personal computers, mobile phones, and email.

I got a press release in email; NPR releases its list tonight, February 16, on the Nightly Business Report. Set your DVR. Check your listing.

The list was compiled from readers' suggestions and reviewed by the faculty at the Wharton Business School, based on seven criteria:

1.  Did it have a direct and/or material effect on quality of life?

2.  Did it address a compelling need?  Did it solve a compelling problem?

3.  Was it a fresh, new breakthrough?   Was there a "WOW" factor?

4.  Did it change the way business is conducted?

5.  Did it increase the efficiency of how resources are used?

6.  Did it spark an ongoing stream of new innovations on top of the original innovation?

7.  Did it lead to the creation of a vast, new industry?

For more on the Web, click here for the NPR page on it. And the press release shares the actual list, in reverse order, from number 30 to number one:

30. Anti retroviral treatment for AIDS

29. SRAM flash memory

28. Stents

27. ATMs

26. Barcodes and scanners 

25. Biofuels

24. Genetically modified plants

23. Radio frequency identification (RFID) and applications (e.g. EZpass)

22. Digital photography/videography

21. Graphic user interface (GUI)

20. Social networking via Internet

19. Large scale wind turbines

18. Photovoltaic solar energy

17. Microfinance

16. Media file compression (e.g., jpeg, mpeg, mp3)

15. Online shopping/ecommerce/auctions (e.g., eBay)

14. GPS systems

13. Liquid crystal displays

12. Light emitting diodes (first real devices in 1960s; in products in mid-70s)

11. Open source software and services (e.g., Linux, Wikipedia)

10. Non-invasive laser/robotic surgery (laparoscopy)

9.  Office software (Spreadsheets, word processors)  

8.  Fiber optics  

7.  Microprocessors  

6.  Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)

5.  DNA testing and sequencing/Human genome mapping

4.  E-mail

3.  Mobile phones

2.  PC/laptop computers

1.  Internet/broadband/WWW (browser and HTML)

I just read Netflix demolishes own business model on John Caddell's blog and I think it's very much worth passing on. John is posting about Netflix now working with various (he just installed a Roku digital video player at his house) on-demand options that potentially cannibalize it's main business of DVDs by mail.

It's got to be a tough world in video media these days. Things change fast. That gap we used to fill by renting videotapes turned to DVDs and then DVR and now at our house we've also got video on demand from iTunes and Amazon Unbox and Comcast, as well as Netflix instant.

For a while there, Netflix was the only really competitive game in town. As far as I'm concerned, they blew Blockbuster out of the water. But then the whole world of DVD rental starts to go away, and what do you do?

John says:

What’s so impressive to me about this is that Netflix is investing in technology and partnerships expressly designed to make their old business model obsolete. When I think about how much they have spent, in dollars and time and thought, on the sending-videos-through the mail model, I wonder how they were able to make the leap to say, “We have this process optimized, but it’s not the future. Time to build a new model”–meaning internet streaming.

Netflix founder Reed Hastings recently said "We named the company Netflix, not DVDs by Mail, because we knew that eventually we would deliver movies directly over the Internet." That's in a post listing his 4 secrets of success: Target a niche, stay flexible, never underestimate the competition, and take no shortcuts. It speaks to flexibility, of course.

John has a more troublesome word for it: "cannibalization."

One of the most repugnant terms in the English language – referring to one of the greatest human taboos – is used when a company’s new products take sales away from its older products.

So I propose the revisionist phrase "eating your own tail." Because you're eating yourself, in a way. But isn't that also the best way to go in a fast-changing market? John concludes:

The problem is, the marketplace is a bit like the jungle. If you don’t eat your own, someone will eat them for you. And this has happened again and again. One example: GM’s abandonment of the EV1 electric car just a few years before Toyota introduced the Prius. To survive, companies will have to get rid of that taboo against cannibalization and act more like Netflix.

I have a suggestion for marketers. If you want to get approval to introduce a better product, instead of referring to “cannibalization,” call it “upselling.”

And I have a conclusion too. I'm in awe. Can you imagine what it takes to not spend all their time defending DVDs by mail? Can you imagine how hard it was, there in the Netflix headquarters, to really move into video on demand?

That's so hard to do. There's a lesson there for every business.