I've been meaning to write another post sharing and reflecting on how I use Twitter, yet this keeps changing, as the service itself evolves at an incredible pace. Certainly Twitter is experiencing exponential growth as the users of the service expand beyond the usual early adopter crowd to a larger and more diverse general population.

However the other influence on this ever changing ecosystem are the emergence of all sorts of applications and services that allow for much greater optimization and customization. It is now way easier to tune into various customized signals amidst the noise.

For a while I was describing Twitter to people as "cloud chat" in that it was similar to a chat room, but without the walls, so potentially anyone could see what you were saying. A colleague of mine Jason Dojc in a recent tweet used a similar description: "Twitter let's you instant message the public."

Yet this only speaks to one side of both the appeal and power derived from this emerging platform. Marshall McLuhan often mocked people by saying the medium is the message, but really what he meant was to pay attention to the form rather than content.

So when the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, referred to Twitter as a poor man's email system, really he was fooled by the content of Twitter rather than the medium. As a medium, Twitter is more a search engine than a chat room, and it's not the incessant tweeting that people should be focusing on, but rather the constellation of applications that are giving shape to this growing cloud.

I use a lot of Google's services, in part cause they tend to work really well, but also to try them out and share my thoughts with friends and colleagues. About a month ago Google announced their Chrome browser, which nicely coincided with my purchase of a new windoze desktop computer. So instead of installing any additional software on it, I just started using Chrome.

A month later I'm still using Chrome, but it is far from perfect. YouTube doesn't always work with it, and Google Docs is kind of buggy. The irony of course is that these are both Google owned applications, so they're supposed to work seamlessly with Chrome, and yet they don't. With that said, Gmail is super fast, and I tend to browse the web with dozens of open tabs at a time. In this regard Chrome is great.

However I have had to install Firefox to load certain pages and do certain things on the web due to Chrome's overall flakiness. I'm going to continue using Chrome, and hopefully it will evolve and improve like all Google products.

I do of course have to mention the whole controversy with Google's user agreement, although it too seems to be evolving, yet personally I'm a little acclimatized to less personal privacy and tend to engage the surveillance society in strategic and chosen situations.

Recently Privacy International came out accusing Google of being the greatest threat to privacy due to the fact that their massive Google machine is constantly absorbing and cataloging information. I had a chat with Nancy Wilson about this on CBC News Today:

As many of you know I've been a Google Watcher for some time now. My main attraction to Google is that they are actualizing many of the theories I've developed over the past decade and a half. Similarly they are bringing the model of network-centric computing to the average consumer, which I feel can be quite empowering. Personally I've been using Google's Calendar for quite a while, and am now starting to use their Spreadsheet program. For professional reasons I've also learned quite a bit about their advertising programs, which are their core sources of revenue.

Just as Sept 11 is regarded as the political/military start of the 21st century, so too will the Google IPO in time be regarded as the start of the economic/technologic side of this century.

Google represents a business model based on AI. Further, they've been the most successful at making AI a relevant and ubiquitous part of mass society, certainly at the individual consumer level.