Power of Twitter and Douglas Engelbart
Twitter is becoming ubiquitous and if you haven’t checked it out, here’s your official excuse to do so: www.twitter.com. It is an astoundingly powerful communication tool, research resource, people’s media outlet, and a bunch of other uses we’re all familiar with through social media sites like MySpace and Facebook. Some folks are calling it the most important invention since the telephone.
Yes, we’ve become a little addicted and obsessed with tweets and just the idea of Twitter in the past month, but we’re not alone, as 5 million users will tell you. (Twitter recently rejected a $500 million buyout offer from Facebook, to give you an idea of the arc this is on.) As Twitter rises, it’s a good time to look back at what WIRED calls the Mother of all Demos that Douglas Engelbart made 40 years ago today to show the computer technology he’d developed for everyday office and personal use at a time when computers were only for high-level physicists.
