Those who eat cold cereal often have a favorite. For many years, mine was regular Cheerios. After college, my tastes changed to favor Back to Nature Flax and Fiber Crunch.
Despite the unappealing name, the product is quite good. My preferred grocery store, Super Target, sold the 14 oz. boxes for $2.29, so all was well in the world. Unfortunately, my peaceful bliss was shattered this week by the disappearance of the familiar boxes from the shelves.
Where there had once been 14 oz. boxes, there were now 10 oz. bags. That wouldn’t have been too bad, except they seized the opportunity to boost the price to $2.99. That represents an increase of 82%, from 16.4 cents per ounce to 29.9 cents per ounce. Oh, the injustice! That’s on par with the recent run-up in orange juice prices, but it might be nothing compared to the fallout from the honey bee population collapse.
Regardless, I’m left with a quandry: I can pay the newly exhorbitant price at Target, or I can find a new supplier. Amazon looks promising, but I would need purchase a three-month supply to make it worthwhile. I suppose that I could simply find a new breakfast cereal, but I would rather avoid that hassle. The good news is that it will be a few weeks before my stash runs out, so I have time to find a solution.
In other words, I’ll forget about the problem until I have no more cereal, then I’ll buy whatever’s on sale.
The blogosphere is abuzz with talk about Twitter. I admit that I was initially skeptical. Are there really that many narcissists out there who think their lives are interesting enough to warrant real-time updates? On the other side of the equation, are there really that many voyeurs interested in such mundane drivel? What a stupid idea. Or so I thought.
I couldn’t believe that people would post with enough frequency to keep the system interesting. Neither could I believe that people would follow each update with rapt attention. Then it hit me: people already do these things.
With AIM, people will often be “away” just for the sake of posting a comment on their present condition. Completing the system, people will check other people’s away messages just to find out what they’re up to at the moment. Twitter provides the same basic functionality except with a much-improved interface. Since similar systems have been around for many years, it is reasonable to assume that Twitter will also survive.
The question becomes: what’s next? The first entrant to a category isn’t necessarily the one that will prevail in the long term. I would like to see an expansion that gives comments spatial tags in addition to temporal ones. I would like to see the comments become enabled with multimedia.
Imagine that it is Saturday night. You’re in a big city trying to find a club for you and your friends to party. You pull out your cell phone and check the latest twitters from locations less than four blocks from your own. One catches your eye; it has an associated video. The video, shot with a camera phone moments earlier, shows a hot party, packed with people. As you and your friends arrive at the club, you post your own twitter about that night’s ‘it’ spot. Others notice the large number of twitters from the location and also join the fun.
It’s been done, but the existing solutions leave something to be desired.
While effecting nowhere near as drastic a change as the one shown in this video, Photoshop certainly helped my most recent “passport-style” photo. Of course, even the unretouched photo is considerably better than the photo that ended up on my passport in 2003. Yikes!
I wonder how many people are going to be in Rev. Williams Park in Boston, in the middle of the afternoon on September 23rd, all because of this comic.
(note to self: don’t comment on something if it’s out of focus)
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