BEST OF THE WEB: Finding value in the Twitter stream

Every time a significant event occurs in the public eye, Twitter usually releases a statistic on what this means and how it compared with previous events, usually using the metric of “tweets per second” to denote importance.

It’s a fun gimmick, but this piece on the Wall Street Journal looks at a group of scientists who are using Twitter data to actually make sense of all the information that is being thrown through the system by its users when these events occur.

“As Twitter’s message traffic has grown explosively, so has the scientific appetite for the insights the data can yield,” it says, noting that dozens of new studies from computer analysts have studied the types of data being sent through Twitter’s servers.

“This research has harnessed the service to monitor political activity and employee morale, track outbreaks of flu and food poisoning, map fluctuations in moods around the world, predict box office receipts for new movies, and get a jump on changes in the stock market.”

While Twitter isn’t making much revenue now, there is potential here for this data to become valuable in the marketplace – a trend the piece picks up on, noting that companies are already paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to look at this data.

While Twitter may be having some teething problems, this piece suggests that as long as the company stays relevant, mining this data can lead to some lucrative – and fascinating – opportunities.

The perils of cloud computing

Cloud computing is all the rage, but there’s plenty of discussion about what happens when it goes wrong. This new piece on The Atlantic by James Fallows takes an unusually personal look at what happens when hackers can infiltrate private details.

“On April 13 of this year, a Wednesday, my wife got up later than usual and didn’t check her email until around 8:30am. The previous night, she had put her computer to “sleep,” rather than shutting it down.”

“When she opened it that morning to the Gmail account that had been her main communications centre for more than six years, it seemed to be responding very slowly and jerkily. She hadn’t fully restarted the computer in several days, and thought that was the problem.”

“When she came back to her desk, half an hour later, she couldn’t log into Gmail at all.”

She had been hacked, spreading spam to everyone in her contact list. The piece reveals an aspect of hacking that is often left unnoticed – the fear of having all your financial details stolen in the blink of an eye.

“The greatest practical fear for my wife and me was that, even if she eventually managed to retrieve her records, so much of our personal and financial data would be in someone else’s presumably hostile hands that we would spend our remaining years looking over our shoulders, wondering how and when something would be put to damaging use.”

For anyone dabbling with cloud computing, even Gmail, this is a must-read.

The man who inspired Steve Jobs

There’s been a lot of talk this week about how Apple co-founder Steve Jobs inspired millions of people, but there’s not a lot of talk about who inspired Jobs himself. This piece on the New York Times takes a look at the inventor of instant photography – Edwin Land – and how the man inspired the creator of the Macintosh.

The piece describes how both took similar approaches to their work, using patents to protect their inventions, and also describes how the two used a dramatic method to showcase their new products in board meetings and presentations.

“The two men met at least twice. John Sculley, the Apple CEO who eventually clashed with Jobs, was there for one meeting, when Jobs made a pilgrimage to Land’s labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and wrote in his autobiography that both men described a singular experience: ‘Dr. Land was saying: ‘I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me, before I had ever built one’.”

“And Steve said: ‘Yeah, that’s exactly the way I saw the Macintosh.’ He said, ‘If I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like, they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it, so I had to go and create it and then show it to people and say, ‘Now what do you think?’”

The two creators were eerily similar, with Jobs taking plenty of guidance from Land, who, like Jobs, was even all but forced out of his company in the 1950s.

“After their founders departed, both Polaroid and Apple slowly began to lose their edge, their innovation machines gradually cooling down and falling behind other technology companies.”

This is a fascinating look at where Jobs took plenty of his inspiration for not only Apple itself, but the dramatic and theatrical nature of his work.

Forget the cloud – the hard drive isn’t dead

It figures that the head of a company that makes hard drives would go out and say there’s nothing wrong with them and that everything’s fine. But Seagate senior manager in product marketing Mark Wojtasiak actually has a point in this All Things Digital piece.

Wojtasiak points out that even with the growing demand for tablets and cloud products, demand for hard drives is growing at the same time, in order to service the demand for services in the cloud itself.

He points to figures that show in 2005, the world generated 150 exabytes of data, and that this year, it’s predicted we’ll see storage of 1,200 exabytes.

“Consumers didn’t discard their PCs for smartphones, and they aren’t going to chuck their PCs for tablets – the devices just aren’t that interchangeable. People are using their tablets for content consumption: to watch movies, browse the internet, check email, play games, etc.”

Whether or not Wojtasiak is actually correct in that PCs won’t die – some figures suggest users are indeed discarding PCs for tablets – it’s true that the growth of cloud computing will mean a boom for creators of hard drives and data storage companies.

“Content will continue its growth and storage will always be needed,” he says – it’s definitely something to think about.