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Just discovered an article at The Independent via dmhprior on twitter;

The Future Of Computing?

There's a revolution in the air. Literally. As we upload our lives into cyberspace, we're finally unleashing the true power of the internet. It's the sort of thing science fiction has been grappling with for decades and now it's coming true.

There's a scene some way into The Matrix in which Keanu Reeves wakes to find himself soaking in a bath of pink, primeval ooze, a USB jack plugged into the back of his head. He soon learns from Laurence Fishburne that the life he believes he's been living was a computer-generated mirage; that his memories, his friends, his office, were nothing but digital constructs.

The excerpt above is from an article in The Independent written by Tim Walker. The article reports on how the future of the computer and perhaps even the future of mankind lies in the realms of works of fiction such as the Matrix and numerous other films and books written over the last hundred or so years. The premise being that as mankind indulges more and more in Social Media such as Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, FriendFinder, MySpace, Blogs, and 12Seconds, we are uploading not only data and personal details but little bits of ourselves.

But with each tweet do we really plant a little bit of ourselves to run free on the web. Or are we just placing a bit of potentially useless data onto a hard drive that will one day be wiped clean. Its not like our tweets eventually get bored of sitting on the page and decide to pop off to Greggs for a pasty, and then gain some satisfaction from eating before subsequently feeling a little foolish at the sense of having greasy pastry lining its gut!

But i can see what the article is getting at, besides its not all that deep and futuristic. The main purpose of the article is actually to highlight the fact that Microsoft are developing the idea of using the Internet as a Huge Drive for storing data that can then be retreived wherever you are in the world. Thing is.... Some years ago we were all talking about the Gmail Drive Hack which allows you to use your Gmail account as a mass storage device.

That is all good as long as your web connection isnt down!

Facebook just added another extremely useful feature for users, and in doing so took out a slew of applications that do that same thing. You can now get a weekly email telling you, simply, which friends have birthdays coming up.

That’s good news for all of us who want more birthday information. It’s bad news for Birthday Alert and its clones that already do that on Facebook. Birthday Alert has 180,820 active monthly users.

Lest you think this is just some random feature: Birthdays are big business. Bebo founders Michael and Xochi Birch started their social network Bebo with a simple birthday reminder service. That service had 100 million users at one point and still brings in $4 million per year in revenue from ecards and gift purchases. Bebo was funded in the early days from birthday reminder revenue.

The title of this post is meant to be a joke, but it definitely sucks to be one of the very many birthday reminder Facebook apps today. Such is life. With a flick of the keyboard Facebook can make your app redundant and pointless. Meanwhile, I happily turned on the new feature, and I can’t wait to be prompted to send people virtual birthday gifts for a small fee.

Source: TechCrunch