In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times Pico Iyer wrote about “The Tyranny of the Moment” and in The New York Times Magazine Walter Kirn penned a piece, “A Facebook Christmas Love Story.” Both articles took slightly different views of technology and are well worth reading.

They reminded me of how the Internet has changed the way we live and think. Of course, we are reminded of the Information Age constantly in the media. The print-centric media constantly fingers its collective worry beads about the Internet. Social networking sites like Twitter and the easy access of news is a media obsession–the job of a journalist has been de-valued by society while we applaud the “democratization” of our news. Iyer talks about perusing the Internet and that the result is that he is “wildly stimulated, excitingly up-to-the-moment, alive with ideas — and with no time or space to hear [himself] think.” It is difficult to argue that we are really better informed, which was pointed out by Frank Rich in the Sunday Times. He wrote a wickedly right-on commentary about Tiger Woods and our flawed decade. Despite the adversity the Internet has brought to my profession, I have always had the attitude that the more information the better. But our track record since the birth of the Web points to a society that is easily suckered (Iraq, the housing bubble, Enron, “intelligent design”…and now Tiger Woods) while wallowing in quote-unquote information. We are connected yet untethered when it comes to reality. Just because people can express their opinions does not mean their thoughts have much value, and yet our pride in knowledge equality has taken precedent over everything. It’s not the Internet’s fault, it is the way we obsess over real-time data. It is the misguided way we are using our time. Something is missing.
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I am back from Las Vegas where I was covering the megafight between Manny Pacquiao and Miguel Cotto. (My article here.) When I cover events as a reporter, I am fascinated by the conversations going on underneath the event. For example, a lot of the reporters covering the fight were not only scoring it and taking notes for a story, they were also using Twitter to describe what they were seeing and to throw out bon mots. I was at a medical technology conference a month ago and it was the same thing. I know that many of you have experienced the same phenomenon. And when we don’t attend a conference, we follow it through tweets; there is often more interesting debates happening on Twitter, than at the actual event. Thus, social media is profoundly shaping opinion. This is a relatively new phenomenon and it presents all sorts of interesting issues, including a cottage industry in aggregating opinions and reacting to them. Dan Woods has a good article in Forbes about the aggregation of social media that is worth checking out. Companies, like Radian6, are helping companies monitor this information and essentially get intelligence on what is being said. So, for example, if a politician is talking and getting negative feedback, he can react immediately and change course to better shape his on-and off-line reputation. Is this ability to react in real-time and shape public opinion defeat the purpose of the social media free-for-all?

Windows 7 has launched. It is an important product for the future of technology, and for Microsoft’s place in it. Despite one of the most laughable marketing efforts in recent memory (click here for Microsoft’s unintentionally hilarious Hosting A Windows 7 Party video), it is a worthy competitor to Apple’s newest operating system Snow Leopard, and it will be entertaining to watch the two companies go at it again in a more even fight. Apple has had an easy ride of it for a couple years now. Microsoft’s launch of its Vista operating systems in 2007 was FUBAR. Despite Microsoft’s overall success, a terrible operating system doesn’t bode well for a company that is in the…operating system business. The troubles with Vista helped double Apple’s share of the U.S. computer market to 9.4 percent, and an advertising phenomenon in the clever Mac vs. PC ads. More importantly in the long run, the Vista stumble opened the door to cloud computing–shared computing services accessible over the Internet. Of course an operating system loaded on a computer is not yet an anachronism, but Microsoft’s buggy software has created a cottage industry in the cloud computing concept. Why have a Microsoft operating system, which seems to need a constant, and annoying, stream of security patches, when all of that can be solved at a data center? Google and Amazon, two brands known for reliability, are trying to exploit Microsoft’s vulnerability. The boys and girls in Redmond aren’t taking the threat lightly. “It took us 10 years to establish our enterprise capability and this company, Google, hasn’t really begun to focus,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told the New York Times in March. “We understand what the enterprise needs: security, compliance, archiving.”

Cloud computing is turning into a serious market in the tech sector, according to Gartner, which released a future of information technology spending report on Monday. Because business customers assume less risk in the cloud model, more and more business consumers will want to adopt cloud computing.

Meanwhile, Google and its brethren have developed brand loyalty based on its enterprise capability and reliability. Vista has put Microsoft in a defensive position. Can Windows 7 earn back customers trust and as a result make Microsoft the de facto leader in cloud computing? Or will it open the door to Google, Amazon, Apple, and others? The success (or failure) of Windows 7 will help determine the next winner in the personal computing business.

Since 1995 the Information Age has become exponentially faster and more important. We have more access to data, it is easier to get information immediately, and we have the ability to tailor information based on our own needs. For all its messy greatness, there is a lot of white noise, however. Can the information flow get any faster? And will the white noise become clearer?

I think it will. In just thirteen years, we have changed how we process information and there seems to be a growing need for better filters, thus sites like Bing. There is also a frustration level: there are mechanisms to get certain information but institutional lethargy in providing it. The next movement in the Information Age will be the drive toward better filters and commercial real-time systems. There will be more flow and more transparency. For example, someday in the near future, voters could have the ability to see a Senator’s expense account on-line and know who he is having dinner with leading up to a big vote. And with more networked medical technology, physicians won’t simply have a patient sit in a room and recount their ailments, people will wear health monitoring devices and swallow digestible pills with microscopic monitoring chips that will tell the narrative of their health. (Transparency Alert: my wife runs an annual conference, called the Body Computing Conference, on networked medical technology, which will be held tomorrow at the University of Southern California, and it delves into the merging of the Information Age with medicine.)

The movement toward real-time has already happened with Twitter, but I believe “tweeting” is a rough approximation of what lies ahead. A new consulting company, The Realtime Project, based in London, is advising companies about real time strategy. Steve Overman, one of the firm’s founders, worked at Wired in its early days, and believes there is a shift in social values and a need for authenticity, a shift he compares to the early days of the Web. He points to President Obama’s presidential campaign as an example of using the Internet to react quickly and talk directly to people. But real time is more than email blasts and tweeting. For example, with the collapse of media platforms, industries are being forced to create their own media platforms that talk with their customers. As companies create their own real time systems, whether it is in marketing or in the guts of an operation, expect to see an even faster world that is (seemingly) more transparent.

Facebook just crossed the 300-million user mark, and they are cash flow positive. Is it now time to worry?

Business lifespans seem to be getting shorter and shorter. When I first started covering technology almost two decades ago, the major players were old-line technology companies, like IBM, that had made smart transitions into the modern computer age. There were upstart hardware companies—Apple was still considered one—and a slew of software makers who did not have the heavy manufacturing costs and were able to bring out products in relatively fast cycles. There was perceived chaos as technology went through upheaval in the hardware business (AT&T taking over NCR, for example) and more and more manufacturing jobs moved overseas. But troubles used to bring a slowish spiral in the hardware and software businesses. When a company struggled there was a mourning period because people had a sense of brand loyalty. I don’t think brand loyalty exists very much anymore and that goes across industries, but technology companies have tended to seek marketshare more than money (Twitter is a good example) and so our expectations have changed. Brand loyalty has diminished and companies tend to go bust much more quickly.

During the Internet Boom, I watched companies with no real value become overvalued. I remember going to a launch party for a company that had enormous buzz. I asked the CEO about his company’s strategy and he said he hadn’t figured it out yet. Of course, many of these Web businesses were over-hyped and they went bust. Technology, including the non-Apple hardware business, lost its perceived value over this time period and the bit hardware companies have fallen away. I think the nature of today’s tech companies and our very culture has made most companies expendable in our minds. Just ask the folks at MySpace.

Facebook is doing well, and yet I wonder if Facebook will even be around in five years. I remember when AOL was all the rage. (After many tough years, AOL has finally been able to re-invent itself.) And I can list many dot-com busts (boo.com, for example) that generated excitement for a limited time. The tech children of the so-called “New Economy” are typically faddish outfits with short business lives. The real value in many of these Web-based tech companies come from users. That should worry companies like Facebook. A decade ago people were passionate about chatting on AOL because it was seen as cool, but then they moved to another party. I remember in years past having loyalty to a brand whether it is a car, a computer, or even a cell phone. I like Facebook. I like Twitter. But do I have loyalty to them? No, I have loyalty to the user-generated content, and that is not something they control. And that would make me very nervous.