There's a few things that i've been thinking about lately that have both very little and quite a lot to do with each other.
The first is Wolfram Alpha, the latest internet Jesus that's disappointing dozens because it's not causing Google to shut down next Tuesday. Never mind that they're two different tools that do two very different things. Google is about providing indexes for recently generated information, and it's very good at that. i'm not as impressed with it's ability to dive deep onto sites and find older, less indexed, historical data, but then that's what Yahoo! is better at. Much the same way that it's possible to use a flat head screwdriver to tighten a phillips head screw, it's often better to use the right tool for the job.
Wolfram Alpha, is about math. It's about showing relationships and quantification of items, and it's very, very good at it. It's not about vanity searches, eggplant parmesan, or ubuntu drivers for a PNY 9800GT graphics card. Unless you're trying to figure out how much parmesan you need to grate with a PNY 9800GT graphics card in order to cover 27 eggplants, then it does a lovely job.
So how does that relate to my second point? (Second point? Oh yeah, i've got one of those.) The other thing i've been thinking about is the current infatuation media folks are having with Streams. Truth be told, i can understand that. There are times when there's a lot of interesting discussion that happens on them. Then again, those times aren't every single second, and much like your favorite 24 hour news channel, there's an awful lot of dead air to fill between those illicit arrests, bombings, earthquakes, and alien invasions.
Plus, meta streams like reddit, digg, and others don't simply exist for their own benefit, even though the same articles can appear multiple times and echo back and forth between them. They have to draw from somewhere. As an added bonus, search engines have a REALLY hard time with things like streams so at best, they might be able to record one or two events. What happens in Twitter, stays in Twitter, unless someone not on Twitter talks about it.
"Lifestream" services are the latest headline news. Much like the rest of the planet, the reason that everyone is currently focused on them is because everyone else is currently focused on them. Kind of like how people love crowds. Honestly, i wouldn't dig all that deep into their motivations for offering it unless you really like disappointment.
i guess it all kinda gets back to the point about how the Internet, life and a great many things can have no clear winner. There can be, amazingly, more than one of something serving the needs of the billions of people online. Not everything has to kill everything else.
Kinda makes me wonder if the folks that keep talking about how "X will kill Y" grew up alone or were put in cage matches with their younger siblings.
C'mon Billy! Take your pacifier out of your mouth and throttle your older brother! Aw, for a 8 month old, you hit like a baby.
