Alex Iskold at ReadWriteWeb is all wet today.

The gist of his article is that business applications need to be efficient, almost Germanic in their precision, while software we use for personal entertainment can be more casual.

Software is increasingly polarized into utilities and entertainment. Utilities help us work and are becoming more rigorous. We're looking for helpful software that understands our context and guides us through the process, whether it is search or a complex business task. Entertainment software is at the opposite spectrum, being casual, brief and random. We're unwilling to spend hours browsing, but instead seek quick and satisfactory entertainment.

This couldn't be further from the truth.

What's really happening is that people want to be entertained while they work, and not thanks to a pair of earplugs and their iPods. They want their work appliances to be fun to use.

This is why Twitter is gaining in popularity: it allows people to flit in and out of work and play modes--all within the 140-character limit. After all, where else can you learn that the Google calendar will be available off-line and also hear about someone's pining for a long-lost high school sweetheart? (Just kidding, Meg.)

[Just noticed that the Tweet about Google is now down--I guess Google got mad at the leak. Thems the breaks.]

By the way, RWW's Sarah Perez has a piece about a mash-up of Twitter and a project management application that sounds pretty interesting.

Likewise, many enterprises are using Facebook for business purposes, although it's common knowledge that people gravitate to Facebook because of the hook-up possibilities it offers.

Let's face it--we all work impossible hours, and working from home has gone from being a perk to being a prerequisite for keeping our jobs. Well, the blurring of work and personal lives goes both ways, and we now expect our employers to allow us to shop online from the office, and listen to music from places like Pandora.

Quick now--the iTunes app store: business or pleasure? I don't blame you if you can't answer; now, you can get Bloomberg news on your 3G iPhone via the iTunes app store. I'm sure there's a better example of the blurring of work and entertainment, but I can't think of one.

The other argument I have with Alex is the idea that we want entertainment options to present themselves quickly.

The new entertainment is based on a couple of patterns. First is brevity. With increasing (and nowadays unbearable) amount of information and choice, modern entertainment software knows it has your eyes for only a limited time.

Again, that's 180-degrees wrong. We want business applications to help us move through our work more quickly, but we're far more willing to dawdle through a Netflix queue, moving movie picks up and down as we browse through the infinite inventory of options.

Remember when technology was going to create all this extra leisure time for everyone? Well, call us naive, but I think we're still hoping that this blend of business and social software will squirt us into a parallel universe of more enjoyable work and more leisurely leisure.

What do you think?