Michael Stonebraker calls RDBMs “Tired Software”. Stonebraker is a well known guru in the DBMS community. As the architect of Berkeley Ingres, Postgres, Illustra and Streambase, he has been constantly innovating in the database space.

So when he speaks, a lot of us listen. If you are a database developer or designer, this article on the future of databases may be worth a read. A few snippets:

If we examine the nontrivial-sized DBMS markets, it turns out that current relational DBMSs can be beaten by approximately a factor of 50 in most any market I can think of. What follows are a few examples.

• In the data warehouse market, a column store beats a row store by approximately a factor of 50 on typical business intelligence queries. The reason….
• In the online transaction processing (OLTP) market, a lightweight main memory DBMS beats a row store by a factor of 50.
• In the science DBMS market, users have never liked relational DBMSs and want a non-relational model and query facility.
• If you are storing Resource Description Framework (RDF) data, which is popular in the bio community and elsewhere, then “Scalable Semantic Web Data Management Using Vertical Partitioning” points out that column stores are very good at certain RDF workloads
• Text applications have never used relational DBMSs.
• Even in XML specialized engines beat conventional RDBMS

Stonebraker goes on to explain why RDBMs technologies show signs of age and describes several possible alternatives.

Meta:

When we first built a relational engine in mid 80s the only resource we had was C.J.Date’s book. After the first iteration, I managed to get hold of a set of papers on relational database mangement system from Michael Stonebraker. We learned a lot from them. So to me Michael Stonebraker is a bit of a hero. In a conference at Hyatt Rickey’s in Palo Alto, I was lucky to meet all my RDB heros – Codd, Date, Michael, Lawrence Row and many others. After that I bumped into Stonebraker once in Illustra (we build an ODBC driver for them). I lost track of Stonebraker after that. I kept hearing about him a bit when I was doing some consulting work on Streaming Database for an XML acceleration company. So when I found this article, in the Semantic Web group in LinkedIn, I was really happy.

This is an area that bears a bit of investigation. Would love to get back and dabble in RDF stores, one of the most promising technologies on the horizon.

A Broader View from Stephen Hawking:

“I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race,” Hawking said.

In the last ten thousand years the human species has  been in what Hawking calls, “an external transmission phase,” where the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has not changed significantly. “But the external record, in books, and other long lasting forms of storage,” Hawking says, “has grown enormously. Some people would use the term, evolution, only for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally. But I think that is too narrow a view. We are more than just our genes.”

I really like this part. There is, of course, a big IF:

If the human race manages to redesign itself, to reduce or eliminate the risk of self-destruction, we will probably reach out to the stars and colonize other planets.

An exciting future to think about.

Python Alerts from InfoStreams:

• ecspy 0.1 A framework for creating evolutionary computations in Python.
• pyroutes 0.1.5.2 A small WSGI wrapper for creating small python web apps
• zopyx.convert2 2.0.3 A Python interface for the conversion of HTML to PDF, RTF, DOCX, WML and ODT) – belongs to zopyx.smartprintng.core
• pyutil 1.3.34 a collection of mature utilities for Python programmers
• pyprof2html 0.1.3 Python cProfile and hotshot profile’s data to HTML Converter
• datashaping 0.3.1 A pythonic query API for structured data.
• rpy2 2.0.6 Python interface to the R language
• business_tools 0.2.13 A python module for various business transactions.
• markdown2 1.0.1.13 markdown2: A fast and complete Python implementaion of Markdown.

• 800 TFLOPS chip for ray tracing 800 TFLOPS chip for ray tracing Courtesy of Multicoreinfo.com, Tops Systems Corp of Japan, a venture involved in multicore technology, together with Toyota Motor Corp and Nihon Unisys Ltd, both of Japan, is developing a dedicated integrated circuit (IC) for ray tracing*, an image rendering method used in 3D computer …
• The Bulk Multicore Architecture The Bulk Multicore Architecture The Bulk Multicore Architecture for Improved Programmability, by Josep Torrellas, Luis Ceze, James Tuck, Calin Cascaval, et al., describes a novel, general-purpose multicore architecture called the Bulk Multicore that is designed to enable a highly programmable environment. In the Bulk Multicore, the programmer and run time …
• CAPS announces new version parallel programming workbench CAPS announces new version parallel programming workbench This over the email transom last week. CAPS Entreprise has announced a new version of its HMPP (Hybrid Multicore Parallel Programming) workbench Based on C and FORTRAN directives, HMPP Workbench provides developers with powerful data-parallel code generators that efficiently leverage the computing power …
• NetLogic-RMI to intensify multicore battle NetLogic-RMI to intensify multicore battle NetLogic Microsystems Inc.’s recent move to acquire RMI Corp. will help the multicore processor specialist to devise new products more rapidly, according to executives. The move will also intensify the battle in the emerging embedded multicore sector. During a press event here on July 1, …
• Report: UPCRC Summer School on Multicore Programming Report: UPCRC Summer School on Multicore Programming Program featured both and hands-on projects Sponsored Topics: Multicore cable – Programming – Education – Parallel computing – UPCRC Summer School
• ARM licenses graphics processor to MediaTek ARM licenses graphics processor to MediaTek by Richard Wilson ARM has announced that MediaTek has licensed the Mali-400 MP multicore graphics processing unit (GPU) for integration in its system-on-chip (SoC) technology. Increasingly, ARM is seeing its Mali graphics processor IP as a differentiator for adoption of its IP in consumer …

I post some of these links as Tweets. However, a blog gives you a bit more space to explain why these posts/articles are worth a read.

The first is an article from Harvard Business Review about innovations at Microsoft Research India.

Technology for Emerging Markets seeks to address the socio-economic needs and aspirations of people in emerging-market countries like India, where the majority of the population still lacks affordable access to computing technologies. TEM’s work is closely aligned with Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group, which I have written about in the past.

The second article comes from one of my favorite sources – Stanford Social Innovation Review. I am not sure why it appeared in my inbox today.

In developing this policy environment, the federal government needs to play a defined and limited role, without creating a new bureaucracy that runs counter to the culture of social innovation and entrepreneurship. It should remain flexible in its approach, using both policy tools that can adapt to changing circumstances and new evidence about what works.

Some good reasons for doing basic research even in hard economic times from Micorosft Research:

Many people across industry, and even some in academia, misunderstand the reasons for investing in long-term basic research.  Too often people equate basic research with its outcomes, especially the new technologies and products it creates.  They then try to manage basic research like they would product development or a business, often with disastrous consequences.

Government has a key role to play in advancing the boundaries of science and technology.  If you look back to the writings of American scientist Vannevar Bush, as he described what would eventually become the National Science Foundation and the U.S. federal research infrastructure, Bush said, “You invest in basic research and long-term research precisely because you don’t know what the future will hold. You don’t know whether there will be a war, a disease outbreak, a famine, a new competitor, or an economic dislocation of some kind.”

1. How SonicWall Scaled Multicore Barriers How SonicWall Scaled Multicore Barriers How multicore processors can provide a big win
2. Parallel Processing and Computer-Aided Manufacturing Parallel Processing and Computer-Aided Manufacturing Software that helps engineers in the manufacturing or prototyping of product components
3. OpenMP Workshop Presentations Online OpenMP Workshop Presentations Online 5th International Workshop on OpenMP, IWOMP 2009, took place in Dresden (Germany) – a dynamic city with lovely surroundings – from 3rd June until 5th June 2009. The IWOMP 2009 is an annual series of international workshops dedicated to the promotion and advancement of all aspects …
4. ARM to help make televisions smarter ARM to help make televisions smarter ARM has announced a new processor licensing deal with television manufacturer LG, which will see the company’s sets deliver a range of internet services. LG will use the British chip designer’s ARM11 MPCore multicore processor and Mali GPU family in its next-generation sets. ARM …
5. PGI 9.0 Compilers Simplify x64+GPU ProgrammingPGI 9.0 Compilers Simplify x64+GPU Programming The Portland Group today announced the general availability of the PGI Release 9.0 line of high-performance parallelizing compilers and development tools for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
6. Sun Announces Major Update to Sun Studio Compilers and Tools Software Sun Announces Major Update to Sun Studio Compilers and Tools Software Sun Microsystemshas announced that Sun(TM) Studio 12 Update 1, a major upgrade to its software compiler and tools technology, is freely available for download at http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio. Sun Studio software provides an advanced suite of tools for the Solaris(TM) 10 …

From Cognitive Edge:

I need to thank Bill Daul for bringing this story to our attention. It is about an amazing “visual meditation” about Iran Election. This beautiful article interleaves the science of social networks and the power of visualization with a very human story.

At this very moment, millions are uniting with their brothers and sisters in the streets of Iran. From thousands of miles away, the Internet brings information immediately between continents and countries as if from the same local community, unencumbered by spatial constraints and political borders.

Taking us on a gripping journey Bonnie DeVarco explores the evolution of  “Small World Network” and “Six Degrees of Connective Intelligence”

1. Human stories become real time conversations documented on the social web
2. that link humans into complex conversational and activist networks
3. that leave information trails and data tracks we can turn into maps, artworks and visualizations
4. that we can draw from to synthesize new information
5. to tell ourselves richer, more comprehensive narratives and stories
6. to gain and share a higher level of collective wisdom

Trying to keep up with #iranelection on Twitter, is like trying to drink from a firehose. Twitter,  Facebook, twitpics, flickr and youtube have become the new citizen media to get information from a region that is not easily accessible to the main stream media.

Notice  the way Twitter is used to share knowledge on  how to handle various situations. Here are just a few sample snippets.

• … show a newspaper from today in films & pictures to verify the date VERY IMPORTANT FOR CNN etc.
• Break all the Security cameras in streets as police are using those to monitor movements
• Those who know how to survive without electricity, food, meds, etc.. Pls. Tweet anything you know with #Survival
• Remove house numbers and street signs so Basij cant find people they’re looking for. Worked in Czech
  run wire across streets to knock basij off motorcycles

Each one of these tell you lot more than what the basic message itself conveys. One of the most re-tweeted entries was the invitation to take the wounded to European embassies for treatment.

Twitter is a simple tool. The true genius of Twitter is the way people figure out how to use it.

People in Iran are not only turning a new page in their nations chapter, but also inventing new applications of one of the most fascinating internet technologies.

About 3 or 4 years ago, I cam across an Intel presentation on the web,  which predicted the spread of internet of things. Today,  I came across a fascinating  document that describes an European Initiative for Internet of Things.

One major next step in this development is to progressively evolve from a network of interconnected computers to a network of interconnected objects, from books to cars, from electrical appliances to food, and thus create an ‘Internet of things’ (IoT). These objects will sometimes have their own Internet Protocol addresses, be embedded in complex systems and use sensors to obtain information from their environment (e.g. food products that record the temperature along the supply chain) and/or use actuators to interact with it (e.g. air conditioning valves that react to the presence of people).

The scope of IoT applications is expected to greatly contribute to addressing today’s societal challenges: health monitoring systems will help meet the challenges of an ageing society connected trees will help fight deforestation; connected cars will help reduce traffic congestion and improve their recyclability, thus reducing their carbon footprint. This interconnection of physical objects is expected to amplify the profound effects that large-scale networked communications are having on our society, gradually resulting in a genuine paradigm shift.

Nice to see technology evolving to meet societal challenges. This is an exciting time to be in technology.

I have been watching Bing, Wolfram Alpha and Google’s Snippets. All of these (and some others) advance search and provide lots of cool features. Their job is challenging since they are trying to guess what I want when I just type one keyword or phrase or a search expression.

What do I want from a search? It varies. Some times I want to find a website. Some times I want to find an address or document. There are times I want a person or discussion or a “how to”.

I am wondering why search engines don’t ask you what you want to find and make their job simpler?  Instead of assuming what you want, why not take that additional input from the user?

To be fair, they all do it to an extent. Google has keywords like filetype to specify the type of document you are trying to retrieve. Bing lists some of the categories as a set of options in the search result. Wolfram Alpha amazes me some times but I am never sure what I am going to get back.

Here is my suggestion. Why not let the user specify a keyword/value pair as part of search? For example

cisco type:address

will give me address of Cisco the company. Type can be abbreviated to # (since hashtags are becoming popular) if needed.

cisco #adress (could have synonyms like location etc.)

Or even extend this to retrieving multiple properties

cisco #address #stockinfo

The default will be #all

cisco

which defaults to the current mode of dumping all the stuff at you.

A feature like this would reduce the clutter (too many results), increase relevancy. There will be many challenges like coming up with a finite set of hashtags or hashtag synonyms.  If the search engine does not recognize a hashtag, let it default to #all and do what it is doing now. The search engine can learn from such input  about what people want.

I am little tired of getting lots of useless information from the search engine and wading through it all to find the one little nugget of information I really need. I don’t need a million results or decision engine or computational knowledge engine.  So, Might Search Engines, please let me tell you what I want. I may be stupid and this feature may already exist. In that case, you reader can educate me a bit. I know there are a few of others like me.

When I attend a conference, I look forward to three things:

1. To learn from peers and experts
2. To network with people who share similar interests
3. To meet new people, hear about new products and have some pleasant surprises

I just came back from SLA2009 in Washinton DC and here are some pleasant surprises:

1. The keynote. I have heard a lot of great key notes. When I heard Colin Powell was delivering the keynote, I was not sure what to expect. This one was such a fantastic experience and I cover it a bit here.
2. The amazingly interactive breakfast session on the future of KM. People discussed what worked, what did not, challenges in bringing KM into an enterprise.
3. Conversations in the exhibit hall are some of the most informal learning experiences in any conference. I met some really cool and helpful people and had some great conversations.
4. One of the biggest surprises was a little unnoticed unconference track running in parallel. I really enjoyed participating and interacting with a small group of very open minded forward thinkers.
5. Lunch time conversations were another big bonus. I was lucky to bump into a software developer from New York Times at my lunch table. NYT does some cool work on data visualization. So we both spent some time talking tech.

Even though I attended only a part of the conference, it exceeded my expectations. I was glad to be part of this historical event (Centennial celebration of SLA).

In our first unconference session at  SLA2009, we talked about a lot of things. But most of the discussion centered around conferences vs unconferences. Meg Smith did a wonderful job of moderating it. She took lots of notes and promised to put them up on the SLA Wiki.

So what is an unconference?  The Wikipedia Unconference page describes it in detail.  Here is another link – OpenSpace and TLTF.

For me, an unconference is simply a very interactive gathering with a larger theme but no detailed agenda. The agenda is collaboratively assembled in a wiki or made up during the conference. It is a collaborative process and blurs the lines between the speakers and audience.

While there may be a few presenters to bootstrap the event, any one can present. You can simply announce your topic, give a one minute pitch and get audience to your little gathering. The first one I did was on “Improving Search” and to my surprise there were three people from Google there.

Unconferences are dynamic, interactive, engaging and fun. There are three reasons I normally go to a conference. To learn, to interact with my peers and network. You can get all these in an unconference.

I see an increasing trend towards incorporating unconferences as part of regular conferences. Here are some options:

1. Have a parallel unconference track along with the main conference. The advantage of this method is that people who are bored with their sessions or curious about unconferences will walk in. If they find these sessions useful, they will come back and also spread the word.
2. Devote a whole session (all tracks)  for unconference. This will increae awareness and if people like it, this can be made a regular feature.
3. Run the whole conference in an unconference style. This is what is done with mashupcamp, several foocamps, barcamps and devcamps. It is so prevalent, pbwiki even has a community for organizing such an event.

I never miss a chance to participate in an unconference in my area of interest. I encourage you to try it out.

Thanks to Meg and Kendra for taking the initiative and starting a few sessions during SLA2009. I hope they will spread. In the one I attended yesterday there were several great ideas, questions and discussions. Looking forward to seeing them on the wiki.

If you are conference organizer of any sort, please make an attempt to experiment with an unconference style event.  You will be amazed at the results.

Here are some links to the various unconference events I blogged about.

It was one of the best speeches I heard in a while. He had a great sense of humor, connected well with the InfoPro crowd, was charming and had great insights. I hope they put up the video of the keynote. I would like to watch it again and show it to my family and friends.

A few snippets from the notes I was taking furiously (while they may not truly convey the spirit of his talk, I hope to capture a bit of the wide ranging topics he talked about). He is a natural speaker. I need to dig up videos of all his past speeches and watch.

About the challenges in  bringing in new technology in to the state department:

“Bought over 440,000 new computers and completely wired them together. I could change the hardware and software but changing the brainware was a challenge.”

“We are in a transactional world not a lunar world where information updates are done weekly, monthly.  Periodic updates of information on the web sites (govt) is not enough. Information needs to be current with every new event (transaction).”

“We are in a new world of constant information explosion. Requires a different mindset to cope.”

About being pulled into new technologies by his 14 year old grandson.

“I am an analog. My 14 year old grandson is hardwired digital.”

“My grandchildren do not answer emails. If you want to talk to them you should be in IM or Twitter.”

“I am pedaling as fast as  I can, just to keep up with my grand children.”

Special Collections

Special collections are  essential for any modern organization (he introduced his team of librarians who managed special collections for him). Generic browsing and searching is not enough to keep up with the rapidly changing information.

Challenges to America now

“We are competing for everything in the world, including education business.”

He was talking about the decrease in the flow of foreign students. Mentioned that there are many options for education in the world like UK and Australia and US is no longer the preferred destination. He pointed out that how this will affect US in the long term.

About Leadership

“I had the privilege of commanding organizations from 40 people to 3 million”.

“As leader you have to give people a sense of purpose. You have to be passionate and it has to be infectious.”

He talked a lot about leadership qualities.

Infostreams Alerts titled: Semantic Stuff

1. Pellet 2.0 RC7: The SemTech 2009 Release

   Pellet 2.0 RC7: The SemTech 2009 Release In anticipation of our Pellet tutorial at the Semantic Technology Conference next week, we 19ve made a new release candidate for Pellet 2.0 available for download. Pellet 2.0 RC7 improves on previous releases by resolving several exception-causing bugs reported by users, improving the lint …

2. New Common Tag Format

   New Common Tag Format Today we are announcing our support of Common Tag, a new semantic tagging format for Web pages. Developed jointly by a group of Web companies including Zemanta, Metaweb, and Yahoo!, the Common Tag format adds semantic meaning to tags, making Web content more discoverable and enabling …

3. The BBC, the Graph, and Linked Data Stores

   The BBC, the Graph, and Linked Data Stores Over the past few weeks, Talis has been working with the BBC to crawl their programmes and music sites and pull in a bunch of usable data into a Platform store. This store now contains information on over 360,000 programmes and more …

4. Semantic Wikis in the Enterprise – Sanjiva Nath

   Semantic Wikis in the Enterprise – Sanjiva Nath I consider myself firstly a fan and evangelist of semantic wikis and secondly a provider of technologies and solutions that offer those capabilities to enterprises. After spending several years following technologies related to this particular feature, on the eve of the Semantic …

Infostreams Alert titled: multicore

1. Yahoo Releases Hadoop Source CodeYahoo Releases Hadoop Source Code An open source parallel programming framework
2. Free SDK for High Performance ComputingFree SDK for High Performance Computing Targeted at parallel programming of FPGAs
3. Snow Leopard taps into the Mac’s multicore powerSnow Leopard taps into the Mac’s multicore power Laptops and desktops could see software performance gains with parallel programming tools built into Apple’s new operating system, Mac OS X 10.6, which was introduced by the company on Monday. (Agam Shah)
4. Multicore Courses through MIT’s Professional Education programMulticore Courses through MIT’s Professional Education program We just wrapped up our 2-day course (6 lectures and 4 hands-on labs) at MIT.Here are the lectures from this week’s 2-day course:Welcome slides1 – The Multicore Software Challenge 2 – Parallelism and Performance3 – Analysis of Multithreaded AlgorithmsWelcome Back slides4 – Issues in …
5. Research SponsorshipsResearch Sponsorships Research Sponsorships The Intel University Research Grant program – Research is the key to developing next-generation technologies. Intel is working with universities worldwide to enable the advancement of technology through a variety of programs including regional academic forums, university research grants and the funding of open and collaborative …
6. SMPs. Clusters. Accelerators. Next? Personal supers.SMPs. Clusters. Accelerators. Next? Personal supers. Joe Landman has a thoughtful post at his blog on the Next Big Thing in HPC that riffs off a post by Doug Eadline at Linux Mag. Doug talks a little bit about the history of HPC, and then asks this question Given that …

This is one of those blogs, where I have very little to add. I think it is a brilliant idea and would like to see how it develops. From the Open Government site:

Some questions to consider in formulating ideas include:

• How might the operations of government be made more transparent and accountable?
• How might federal advisory committees, rulemaking or electronic rulemaking be better used to drive greater expertise into decisionmaking?
• What alternative models exist to improve the quality of decisionmaking and increase opportunities for citizen participation?
• What strategies might be employed to adopt greater use of Web 2.0 in agencies?
• What policy impediments to innovation in government currently exist?
• What is the best way to change the culture of government to embrace collaboration?
• What changes in training or hiring of personnel would enhance innovation?
• What performance measures are necessary to determine the effectiveness of open government policies?

A few comments:

1. Many open questions

2. A mention of Open Linked Data in addition to Web 2.0 would have been better

3. Combined with other intersting initiatives like Apps for America, this is one of the cool ways of harvesting the collective intelligence of the people.

I have been interested (but have not really done anything useful yet) in large scale data analysis. Here are some personal interests:

1. Analyze the InfoStreams I track from Twitter, Blogs and our own Customized feeds on programming, multi-core and semantic web topics
2. Explore Open Linked Data, visualization, connections and analysis
3. Applying machine intelligence to understand raw data and notifications of change as well as tracking velocity of change.

This leads to dabbling in the semantic encoding of data (RDF/OWL), visualization techniques (processing), data analysis (R Language) and large scale streaming data (map/reduce, hadoop).

So when I stumbled across  Ben Lorica’s Big Data: SSD’s, R and Linked Data Streams I could not resist reading it, following a few comments and some links.

This is how I landed in this strangely named platform called Pig, a sub-project of Apache’s Hadoop. From the wiki:

Pig is a platform for analyzing large data sets that consists of a high-level language for expressing data analysis programs, coupled with infrastructure for evaluating these programs. The salient property of Pig programs is that their structure is amenable to substantial parallelization, which in turns enables them to handle very large data sets.

At the present time, Pig’s infrastructure layer consists of a compiler that produces sequences of Map-Reduce programs, for which large-scale parallel implementations already exist (e.g., the Hadoop subproject). Pig’s language layer currently consists of a textual language called Pig Latin, which has the following key properties:

• Ease of programming. It is trivial to achieve parallel execution of simple, “embarrassingly parallel” data analysis tasks. Complex tasks comprised of multiple interrelated data transformations are explicitly encoded as data flow sequences, making them easy to write, understand, and maintain.
• Optimization opportunities. The way in which tasks are encoded permits the system to optimize their execution automatically, allowing the user to focus on semantics rather than efficiency.
• Extensibility. Users can create their own functions to do special-purpose processing.

Hope to give it a spin and try to see whether I can manage a drink from my InfoStreams firehose.

Have you ever stood gazing at an open sky on a dark night?. First you see a faint glimmer of a few tiny points of light. As you keep gazing, you will observe more and more stars. Occasionally, you may find a few shooting stars. Keep gazing and you will see lots of beautiful patterns, some familiar some entirely new.  Some of us go back and not think about this much. Some of are transfixed by the beauty and keep coming back. Some of us even go and buy a telescope and fall in love with the heavens. This is exactly the experience I am having with Twitter.

When I first started on Twitter it was merely out of the curiosity. The name probably had some thing to do with it. I tried a few tweets, read a bunch and then walked away. To me it seemed trivial, people posting that they had lunch or waiting in an airport or trying to sell you something.

The event that changed my view was the terrorist attacks on Bombay. I was in Chicago at that time. Having lived in Bombay for over 6 years, I have a deep affection for both the city and the amazing energy of the people who live there. I was devastated to hear the news and sat glued to the TV and internet during those few days. I searched and surfed and flipped channels. The information was utterly inadequate and kept repeating. Even the most popular Indian news feeds had very little. I was among the many anxious millions all over the world really hungry for information. Suddenly I thought of Twitter. So I went back and found some items of news. One of them had a hashtag that pointed to the news stream. I found an endless bits of little items, some times comments, some times conjectures. Following the Tweet Stream was like trying to drink out of a fire hose.

It was not just a news stream. You could hear different tones in those tiny messages. There were discussions, dialogs, anger, wonder, sorrow and every emotion you can think of. To me, this a small sample of humanity in its true form. Engaged and engaging. Faced with a common tragedy, it was humanity at its best – sharing, discussing, dissecting. es. In all my years working with the web, I have never seen such energy and other strong emotions. There was some beauty in the brevity of the messages.

This incident changed my view of Twitter completely. It  is now my new source of instant information, news, opinions and thoughts. It is by people like me not people necessarily paid to bring me news. There is no editors here filtering stuff, figuring out which goes on to the front page. I structure my sources of information and when I find a new and exciting one, add it to my growing repository of personal news reporters.  Some times it is endless trivia, but some times it is pure bliss. Even the self-descriptions are amazing – “a mom with lots of  kids” (makes me think of mine), “happily unemployed”, “a reluctant exerciser”. You relate to these people. They are you. And you are them.  Where else can you find in 15 minutes a theory on how Yoga is good for your sex life, about a hot oil chilly fish dish, a profound discussion on Open Linked Data, emerging trends in learning and the best way to market your small business? If an occassional post evokes your curiosity, there are links to find out more.

Facebook allowed me to rediscover my old friends and stay in touch. Peek a little into their life and have them peek into yours.  But Twitter is bringing me new friends and acquaintances, that one day may become friends. I am richer by the experience.

Twitter is a place to have conversations. You can say something without really saying anything by simply retweeting. When you retweet, you do more than merely pass on the message to others. You are thanking the bearer of this little nugget of information by recognizing them, you are telling your friends to take a look and you are starting a conversation. When you post something  on Twitter and see it propagating through the Twittersphere, you know you contributed something useful to the conversation.

Tweets are triggers. They trigger business ideas, product ideas and ideas for blog posts but mostly, they evoke curiosity to know more, to learn more. Twitter can be an observation post. Some times I fell as if I am sitting in a mall or a town square watching people. It is a great place to observe people, interesting patterns of behavior and odd quirks and fascinating reactions. Twitter is a information exchange, a knowledge sharing network. You gain knowledge not only from the tiny bits of information streams but also from the reactions, behaviors and obsessions of the crowd. I am glad it is there and growing.