Twitter as we all know is a fantastic messaging platform, so much so that nearly a billion people are registered with the site. But I don’t want to talk about that, rather I’d like to discuss how it has gotten so ubiquitous and depended upon it’s indispensable.

And that’s a problem.

Twitter is now more than just a service, it’s a messaging platform as useful as IM, SMS, email and the telephone. It’s indispensable during emergencies, political elections, social movements. Sure it’s more broadcast than engagement but it’s useful to the nth degree.

The problem I have with Twitter, as it nears a billion users, is that it doesn’t talk to other platforms. At all. It doesn’t work with Facebook or Google+, its hashtags and @ddresses don’t talk to any other network.

But it should.

Twitter is a behemoth but it’s not invincible, Twitter has issues with bandwidth, outages and intentional...

“So I got this idea, basically it’s Uber for dog walkers. Here’s how it works…” is the mating call of the non-developer technorati set, trying to mate with the socially inept developer fauna, with the hopes of kicking out an Uber for X and changing the world.

I did a quick search for “Uber for *” and found a veritable shit ton of Uber wannabes. From Quora -

• Sprig, Munchery, SpoonRocket, Push for Pizza: Uber for food.
• Foxtrot, Minibar: Uber for alcohol.
• Hotel Tonight: Uber for last minute hotels.
• YPlan: Uber for last minute events.
• Nimbl: Uber for cash delivery.
• Homejoy, Handybook, Exec (acquired by Handybook): Uber for home cleaning.
• Vatler, ZIRX: Uber for valet-ing your car Plowz and Mowz: Uber for lawn mowing.
• Lyft: Uber with fist bumps and pink mustaches.
• Postmates: Uber for courier services.
• BloomThat, Proflowers, Floristnow: Uber for flowers.
• SixDoors: Uber for flowers and...

I just read this post on Wired, Could Hospitals Be an Engine of Economic Development?, and my first thought was why don’t hospitals have tech labs? Not an IT team but an experimental lab filled with developers that work to create apps, software, websites and connected systems that make it simpler for doctors, nurses and clinicians as well as patients and visitors to do what they need to do?

What type of Lab exactly? I envision something like what the Sunlight Foundation does. They cultivate a set of APIs that are used both internally and externally for the development of apps and services around government transparency. The same can be done, with privacy ensured of course, within hospitals, allowing for the creative development of apps and software that benefit the hospital and the surrounding community.

The drawbacks are bureaucratic red tape, HIPAA and cost (developers are...

The first time I ate at a Slow Food restaurant it was quite………….the…………..experience. Everything from drink orders to appetizers to the main entrée took an inordinate amount of time, but that was the point. We sat and ate and talked and enjoyed the time we spent in each other’s company.

Slow Food is just one element of the Slow Movement, which advocates slowing down of one’s life from a cultural perspective. Slow Art, Slow Money, Slow Travel and many other iterations of Slow exist within a movement founded in 1986 by Carlo Petrini, who became famous for protesting the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome.

In the Slow Content space (or Slow Media according to Wikipedia) there have been a couple of interesting developments meant to get consumers to slow down at the end of the work day and actually read long form journalism. Instead of reading all your emails, checking your news feeds...

If you haven’t heard of IFTTT by this point, you’re sitting in the dark somewhere. IFTTT is the hugely popular platform that makes it dead simple to connect one web service to another.

Like what?

Connecting one service to another creates a recipe, here’s an example of a few recipes.

Say you’re following the Twitter hashtag savethewhales and need to document all tweets related to that campaign. IFTTT can connect Twitter to Evernote so that every time the hashtag is used you can document the tweet on the note taking service.

You can set your Phillips Hue bulb to change colors if you get a new message on Facebook or you’re @mentioned on Twitter.

One that I use is SMS based, with a recipe that sends me a message to wear a coat if the temperature dips below 60 degrees or bring an umbrella if it’s raining.

At present IFTTT has 145 channels, connecting just about everything to...

Facebook’s billion+ user base is seen by many as fantastic advertising vehicle on many fronts, there are arguments for and against that of course, but you can’t argue with the fact that Facebook has the incredible power to influence large numbers of people.

Whether they know it or not.

In June of this year Facebook admitted to tweaking its news feed as part of a psychological study to see if they can manipulate users’ emotions. From the New York Times -

Facebook routinely adjusts its users’ news feeds — testing out the number of ads they see or the size of photos that appear — often without their knowledge. It is all for the purpose, the company says, of creating a more alluring and useful product.

But last week, Facebook revealed that it had manipulated the news feeds of over half a million randomly selected users to change the number of positive and negative posts they saw. It...

While I’m not the biggest fan of the design of the Apple Watch I think there’s plenty of potential in the technology itself. With Apple’s push into wearables, like its push into tablets, we’ll see the jumpstart of a nascent tech field that’s ready for innovation.

Wearables in general are going to do a lot of good and provide services we’ve yet to fathom. Tracking steps in a day, taking photos and playing music are a great start but there’s plenty of room for growth.

Like what?

Wearables will facilitate bank transactions, open secured doors, personalize the lighting, heating and your home entertainment system, exchange personal information with trusted parties, monitor the air quality in your home or workspace…you get the idea. Your Apple Watch will be able to talk to any other form of electronics or sensors in your environment.

Currently this isn’t the situation but I can see...

When Jeff Bezos’ purchased the Washington Post, many were left scratching their heads. The first thought was that he was going to include a digital subscription to the Post with every Kindle or Amazon Prime membership. He certainly could still do this, in fact he probably will.

Many were hoping Bezos would bring the Post into the 21st century, make it Kindle friendly and revitalize an industry hemorrhaging ad revenue and readers year after year. I would love to see that to tell you the truth but I’m not about to put all my eggs in one basket.

Where the value lies for Bezos and Amazon is integrating your Post reading behavior into their predictive algorithm. Amazon doesn’t have access to your interest graph like Facebook and Google do so your reading history will give them a sense of what news is important to you, what movies you want to see, what books you’re interested in and where...

Wut.

Parking spaces. And parking garages for that matter. They’re everywhere. Above ground, below ground, there’s even a requirement here in Washington, DC that each house/apartment/condo has X number of parking spaces in correlation to the number of people living in the building.

If you think about it, it’s already sort of mindless, with all the transportation options in the city that don’t require car ownership, but soon it’s going to be just plain stupid.

Let me get back to parking spaces in a second so I can talk about self-driving cars.

Yeah yeah, Google Cars are the future…what I find interesting isn’t the technology but what’s going to happen because of the technology. How will our cities respond to cars that drive themselves, like a symbiotic relationship, what’s the benefit and what’s the tradeoff?

I answered a question on Quora about how self-driving cars can change our...

Television and print as we know them aren’t quite dead yet but they’re on their way out so aside from these two mediums, how do you consume the news? Are you a single-sourcer, do you read a number of sites or are you into aggregators?

You can probably figure out consumption by demographic break down, for example my step-dad reads a handful of sites, my mom the same, if that many. A number of my friends only have time for a single aggregated source, so it ends up being something like Twitter or Facebook. My nerd friends make their source reddit or Slashdot.

This is the breakdown of how I consume the news and in the order that I do it -

Digg Reader - First I was a loyal Google Reader user until that service was axed which I then transitioned over to The Old Reader. The Old Reader features were pleasantly reminiscent of the Google Reader from days past but the site was slow and buggy...