Twitter collects too-short updates

Twitter is an ingenious Internet idea looking for an audience. Of course, that could be said for many a startup, whose founders often sense connections the rest of us miss and hope to find a way to make them marketable. But Twitter is unusually controversial because of what it seems to say about us.

Are we at the end of our tethers when it comes to attention span? Are short squibs of information sent in endless streams the way we'll now interact with the world?

Whether or not you like Twitter (www.twitter.com) depends upon your tolerance for text messaging. Most of us have seen this at work (though some, like myself, find it too annoying to use). Cell phone users send abbreviated messages to each other that can sometimes be useful: "Running late. Be there in 10," and that sort of thing. Twitter's insight is to connect the world of text messaging on phones to our other main outlet, the computers we're never far from.

Become a Twitter member (it's free) and any text message you send through the service can be sent out to a group of friends. It will also be posted on your Twitter page for irritating people like me who don't have texting enabled on their phones in the first place.

You're never far from the latest, which is how John Edwards has begun using Twitter, to broadcast his whereabouts on the campaign trail.

If you can't get enough of somebody's life, Twitter is for you.

The key question, of course, is how much of somebody's life do you want to see? Twitter limits messages to 140 characters. Read some of the messages at Twitter.com and you'll find a quick cure for insomnia. "Just had breakfast. Eggs." I mean, who cares?

Can Twitter unearth a business model in all this? The company is all the rage right now, and what happens next depends upon turning what seems to be a limited tool into something companies may want to adopt. The person who figures this out could help Twitter become the next big thing.

Saving just enough from Web

But here's something you won't have any trouble learning how to use. Clipmarks is absolutely indispensable if you do what most of us do every day, which is to collect information on the Internet.

Given the vagaries of Web page design, getting saved text into usable form is a headache. CEO Eric Goldstein got tired of creating huge files of snippets in Microsoft Word and invented this ingenious cut and paste tool that lets you save, share and print Web information easily.

Clipmarks is a free download (www.clipmarks.com), and it works as a browser plug-in for either Internet Explorer or Firefox. When you see something you want to save, you scroll over the text and Clipmarks lets you clip any section of a Web page by re-sizing the selection area as you move your mouse.

When you have what you want, you can clip it into an e-mail, post it into a Web log (Clipmarks works with several major blogging platforms), save it onto the Clipmarks server for later use or print it out.

In other words, no more printing out entire Web pages laden with ads, menus and irrelevant material when what you really want is in the central column of text. Clipmarks will save by the word, sentence or paragraph, but you can also save images and even video.

The social computing aspect of all this is that clips can be made public on the Clipmarks server, where an online community has formed around the idea. But most of us are going to be content with using this absurdly helpful tool simply to organize our information hunting expeditions.

Vista and laptops

I've opined before that upgrading an existing computer to Microsoft's new Vista operating system is a bad idea. Wait until it's time for your next machine. If you're sticking with Microsoft, Vista will come pre-installed on the new computer, leaving you with fewer hassles and, if you can wait six months or a year, a tuned up version of Vista that ought to work better.

And a lot of people do seem to be waiting, as witness industry analyst Gartner's new report that Vista will have no significant impact on PC shipment numbers in 2007.

Gartner sees a gradual adoption of the operating system that takes place over a period of several years, with adoption by larger businesses lagging behind the pace set by consumers. The other interesting question is what kind of computer you'll want to buy when you do upgrade. Another industry research firm, IDC, is saying that notebooks will represent more than half of all end-user PCs sold by 2011. So even assuming a modest uptick in desktop computer sales growing out of Vista adoption, the trend is toward portability.

Sometimes I wonder just how portable some of the feature-laden desktop-replacement laptops I see really are, but there's no denying the benefits of taking your work with you. Expect the notebook trend to settle into default status as we make the transition from location-specific Wi-Fi to ubiquitous broadband wireless.