After many weeks of anticipation I was finally able to obtain a Nokia N900, the new Maemo Linux-powered tablet computer. This is the device I wanted fifteen years ago, when the web was just taking off. While it resembles the smart phones that currently dominate the mobile marketplace, the N900 is more like a mobile computer because it runs on an open source operating system that potentially enables it to evolve faster than others.

When buying any new technology an important evaluation metric to is the health of the supporting community, including user groups, developers and the companies around it. This logic is even more important when it comes to open source projects, as community health and dynamics are explicitly tied to their usability and the direction of future development.

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.

The past two weeks have seen a number of announcements by Microsoft, Google, and Facebook that have set the stage for an incredible clash of the titans when it comes to the future of the Internet.

On one side, reigning champion Microsoft, monopolist of the personal computer era, backing young upstart Facebook, the early leader in the emerging social computing era.

On the other side, reigning search engine and online advertising king Google, and instead of backing a single emerging player, they've taken the longer tail and have embraced the concept of Open, which while including open source, also includes a broader philosophical approach to open internet development and initiatives.

I've recently taken up quite an interest in the online environment second life, and the potential it holds as an emerging virtual reality.

It was with considerable pleasure that I heard the news that Linden Labs the owner of Second Life had open sourced their client software. This was quite a bold move, as it lays out their strategy as an environment, rather than as just software. It also allows for considerable possibilities when it comes to user-directed design and development.