More Web 2.0 fun?

Finished editing really long podcast file, need to take a break. About 17 hours ago.

Drove to band practice, listened to Minutemen CD in the car. "Tour spiel!" About 14 hours ago.

Gotta write my column. But what to write about? Wait, I know! Less than 20 seconds ago.

Well that's enough Twittering for now. Oh, you don't know what Twittering is? It's the latest in utterly self-indulgent Web 2.0 fun.

At Twitter.com, millions of people are constantly answering one question: What are you doing right now? It's sort of like a blog but without all of that, you know, actual content.

As I look at Twitter.com right now, some of the fascinating content includes a person going to get Indian food, someone waiting to get into a breakfast joint and a guy who has just signed up for DirecTV. Wow! What will happen next?

I have to admit that Twitter is one of those things that makes me feel like an old fogy. Even though I'm a cutting-edge, tech kinda guy, the whole constant-connection thing is one that just doesn't connect with me.

But I can definitely understand why this is a hit with the younger crowd. Every sub-25-year-old that I know is constantly on his or her cell phone, and the subject of 99 percent of the calls is similar to Twitter's content: "Hey, whatcha doin?" "Nothing, what are you doing?" "Watching Futurama." "Cool, talk to you later."

Heck, if Twitter cuts down on even half of the calls like that, it's doing society a great service.

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Firefox Gets Social

Recently, I've been playing around with a new extension to Firefox called The Coop. Scratch that. I can't really call it a new extension. I can't even call it beta or alpha. What I have on my Firefox browser is a prototype of Coop that I loaded from the bleeding-edge sandbox area of Mozilla add-ons. Click the thumbnails for full-sized screens What Coop does for Firefox, or at least what it aims to do, is integrate social networking directly into the browser experience. Friends and connections in your social network appear in the Firefox sidebar and users of Coop can easily share Web pages, images and video with their friends. In my tests of the prototype I found Coop to be very easy to use, and for a prototype it has proven to be very stable. Right now the only social network that it integrates with is Facebook. When...

What Are Your Top Web Technology Picks?

Over at eWEEK.com I've listed my choices for the top 30 Web technologies of all time. This list is based on my experiences here at eWEEK testing, evaluating and using these Web-based products and technologies since 1993. But I know I'm not alone in my experiences in the Web. I'm sure there are those of you out there who disagree with my choices or who would have added a few different technologies or products to the list.