Back before graphical user interfaces on PCs and the rise of Web 2.0 and the Rich Internet Application you could tell a power user by their mastery of the command line.

It may have been typing ls in a Unix shell or dir at a DOS prompt but these guys knew how to get things done in the leanest, most efficient way. No redundant mouse clicks, no waiting for the translucency animation to rotate your menu options into view. Bang! and move on to the next thing.

Part of the beauty of Twitter is that it goes back to those days of terse interaction and great power.

When it started it was just a simple way to display your status and post messages to your friends (publicly with @ and privately with "d {username}") but it's started to become a lot more.

My first discovery was that I could pipe things to twitter - so I didn't have to do anything to publicize a new blog post but automatically pull from the sites RSS feed to twitter. I use twitterfeed for that.

Then I discovered there were other robots out there that I could send messages to and have things happen. Sandy (sadly now closed down) was an ever helpful personal assistant, gtFtr tracks my exercise stats, Kvetch lets me vent and my most recent discovery is TrackThis which lets me get updates on any FedEx, UPS, USPS or DHL package I have in transit just by sending them a message with the tracking number.

Twitter is also reducing the amount of time I spend in email, IMing and blogging. Rather than clutter up my inbox with one line emails I can use Twitter. I can use Twitter when I don't want to be distracted by the constant ping of Messenger. Rather than try and turn a 2 line blog post into something interesting I can tweet it. if I can't express myself in 140 characters then maybe I need to think more about the post.

In the same way that the command prompt made you more productive if you were willing to learn a few tricks (such as idiosyncratic syntax) Twitter is filling that space in the interconnected internet world... and it's allowing me to do it from everywhere - at my desk, on any web enabled PC or via my phone - it's bringing consistency of experience and incremental benefit to learning those tricks.

So how do you use Twitter as the command prompt for Web 2.0?

If you use a Blackberry Smartphone and wish you could be like the cool Windows Mobile folks who have access to Live services well… there’s some good news for you - Microsoft and RIM announced Windows Live Services for Blackberry.

This brings both Instant Messenger capabilities as well as access to Hotmail via Blackerry’s familiar push technology to keep you in touch with personal as well as business contacts on the go.

This adds to the existing Live Search capabilities already available for Blackberry.

Just because you use a Blackberry doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of Live services

Thanks to a tweet from FrankArr I’ve been playing with Digsby, a fairly new combined IM, Email and Social Networking client.

So what does that all mean?

Essentially it provides a replacement to the Windows Live Messenger and GTalk clients I usually have running on my dekstop. In that role it’s much like Pidgin or AdiumX for Mac users and does the job at least as well as they do. It still needs a bit more polish to get it on par with more developed clients for things like smileys but it does what it says on the tin (and I get tabbed chat which I love!)

The it adds on a notified for Social Networking tools like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook to let you see messages, alerts, status changes and what have you. It saves me many a wasted moment in the browser checking these things. You can even respond to some things directly, or get taken straight to the relevant item to manipulate it however you want.

Finally it acts as a mail poller for Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, POP3 and IMAP accounts – letting you read, manage and reply to email.

If it continue to evolve and deliver a stable, reliable, light footprint (resources and screen real estate) client I think it’s going to be a keeper.

It’s not going to replace Outlook (or Communicator for Exchange based IM and phone control) any time soon, and it doesn’t support Skype or MagicJack to manage all my communications … but who knows what the next build will bring :)

I first heard about XIOS (aka iCloud) about a year ago and I've been keen to have a play every since to see if finally someone would get it right.

I've wanted a portable "play and play" OS for a long time. Things like U3 and MojoPac looked like lightweight solutions but had their flaws (MojoPac still doesn't work with Vista) and going for a full VM solution like Moka5 didn't help (Internet Cafes where you can't install a USB device or incompatible host operating systems and problems getting network access from the guest OS)

Internet OSes seemed like a great idea but I've yet to find one that works well enough to deserve a return visit once I've set them up.

Well iCloud (or XIOS - I can't seem to work out what they want to call it) is the first that does a good enough job that I've been playing for a few days as I bounce around machines. In fact, I'm posting this with iCloud running and even using their Music Player to listen to BBC1xtra from the UK and test an IE app.

But nice as it is, it's still very early days. There are typos galore but on the whole it's pretty polished. And there are some pretty cool apps - Dayplan, Money Manager, Notepad and (rather bizarrely) a Balanced Scorecard app complement a collection of widgets, a desktop messenger and an internal browser instance (tabbed, supports Silverlight, Flash and anything else the host browser supports).

But there's a way to go which the development language (for you to write your own apps as a collection of XML files) doesn't quite compensate for.

No email client, the IM client won't talk to my Messenger buddies and there's no Word or Powerpoint app or a database (although these are all promised "real soon")

The other limiting factor for many is that it relies on IE. Now 90% of my time I have that available, but I also have a Mac Mini at home at the moment and would love to be able to move from one to the other seamlessly.

That leads me on to desktop sync.

In the ideal world I'd have a portable desktop I can take anywhere I happen to be working, and have the latest documents to my fingers or up to date email. In a secure, reliable manner (to allow me to work in a connected or disconnected manner) that doesn't impose limits based on if I'm on a PC or a Mac, at home in the office or at an Internet Cafe. Sadly there's no sync yet so I have to carry files on a USB key still!

Nice as it is... iCloud isn't quite my digital dream yet... it's the closest I've seen so I'll keep hoping (and Windows and OSX don't have to worry just yet!)

Mike Butcher thinks that Twitter is moving away from a status update tool and becoming more of a conversation starter.

I think I agree with him at the moment, but I'm not sure how I'm going to end up using Twitter longer term.

When I first started with it I did use it as a status update thing (once I got over the "why bother" hump). I tweeted when I was waiting for a bus or cleaning my teeth. I used it in the same way I treat the status box in Windows Live Messenger - to share some information about what I'm doing now (usually what song I'm listening to) with my contacts.

Then I started to discover the value as a conversational tool - less immediate (but often more pervasive) than IM but at the same time more robust, especially when you didn't need the relative overkill of email for a one-liner.

I've also noticed that the one line venting has reduced the number of blog posts I have written - there's something about the 140 character vent that often takes away the need for a full blown post.

Tweets are not like ephemeral IMs or status updates in WLM - they have a timeline and permanence which changes the nature somewhat.

I don't think Twitter is 100% there yet though. For my needs Direct Messages are not handled elegantly enough - I'd like a "Whisper" mode where I can send a private tweet to one (or more) people that appears in their timeline if they're viewing it (authenticated) but not in public view (perhaps ~offbeatmammal to whisper, like we have @offbeatmammal for a public reply or # for hashtags to collate tweets on a subject).

I think Twitter has changed the way a lot of people communicate - mostly for the better. There are some who are a lot of noise to signal but you get that in any communications channel. Some I like having the conversation with (and watching their conversations unfold), others I value the status updates.

I wonder what's next for communications...

The folks at Messenger Café have just got their direct line to Santa up and running and now if you add northpole@live.com to your contacts in Windows Live Messenger you can tell Santa if you've been naughty or nice, and argue why you really should get that shiny red bike for Christmas this year....

If you don't have Windows Live Messenger go get it here.

Windows Live Messenger is all about improving communications, but the folks at Microsoft Research don't think it has to be serious all the time.

The folks from the Visual Computing team have just released a demonstration of their Digital Video Effects for MSN Messenger project which showcases ideas based on several core technologies developed in the past few years by the team: face detection, face alignment, face segmentation, and 3D face pose tracking.

This release includes some fun features:

• Background Blur: blurs the background to protect the privacy of the user.
• Magic Lens: morphing of facial features, such as enlarging the nose (I'm sure folks with find uses for that feature!).
• Flying Text: let text flying out of the user’s mouth as the user types any text in the edit control.
• 3D face mask: attach 3D virtual objects or masks on user’s face. It's almost Halloween!

Of course this is very much an alpha so it may have unexpected results. If you have problems it's a simple uninstall from Add/Remove Programs (WinXP) or Programs and Features (Vista).

I'm off to plug my video camera back in....

It's been an interesting day on the interwebs for ways to experience computing in an every day setting.

First Microsoft officially announced Surface Computing (which I can see being the beginning of something amazing), then Palm announced the Foleo which while it's an interesting idea inspired Wired to detail some very good alternatives that don't cost much more and put a heck of a lot more computing power in your hand.

In the last few days we've also seen a lot of talk about flexible displays and dynamic keyboards.

All in all it adds up to lots of gadgets, lots of creativity and hopefully a bright new computing future.

But it got me thinking... what would my ideal mobile computing solution be, and what's my next laptop going to look like.

The next laptop is probably easier to answer given it's not going to involve any paradigm shifting technology to deliver.

Currently I'm using a Sony Vaio SZ390P. It's the latest in a long line of laptops* that I've lugged around with me. It's not terrible but between Sonys inability to care and Vistas hardware related tantrums it's also far from perfect. Over the years though there have been some neat features that I wish could be combined into one unit that I could be happy with

• Good size/weight ratio. I think 15" is about right. 17" get's to be unusable on a plane, but 12" makes you squint.
• Performance. I don't want to care who makes the chip, or how it's rated, or how many gigabytes of RAM it has. I just want it to work so the operating system and apps are as near to invisible in my perception as possible.
• Battery life. It's a laptop. I should be able to use it on the go, all day (real all day) without having to stop services, shut things down and panic because I didn't bring a whole life support systems of cables and chargers.
• Storage. Give me a big enough hard drive. Doesn't need to be terrabytes (ideally by the time I get this someone will have worked out a decent sync/replication solution so I can use the network at work and home and in the cloud as a virtual hard drive)
• Removable Media. Support lots of them. 95% of the time I don't need to carry around the DVD player but make sure I can boot from flash drives or attach to a DVD drive on the network to install software. I don't know if my next camera will use SD, xD, miniSD, microSD, MemoryStick, MemoryStickDuo, CF (type I or II), something magic using an ExpressCard slot or whatever. Ideally the camera (and every other peripheral) will connect (and recharge) using a standard USB 2.0 mini cable so I won't care... but just in case make sure I can attach a reliable, quick memory reader (though if it's built in and I don't have to carry it around just in case I'll be happier)
• Decent keyboard. Real keys that move properly, and enough of them. Don't make me use obscure arcane Fn/Alt/Shift combos to do something obvious like Delete (Apple BootCamp - I'm looking at you now) and coupled with that a decent tracking device that's not too sensitive that the mouse jumps around all the time but that is responsible enough that when I want to move the mouse or click somewhere it works. If it can avoid giving me carpel tunnel syndrome at the same time (so I don't have to lug around a separate keyboard and mouse) that would be great. Ambient condition aware illumination for the keys would also be very welcome - makes it so much easier to use in a darkened room. A combination of the Apple solution with timeout and the Microsoft proximity sensor would be great.
  
• Media Keys. Play|Pause, Fwd/Rwd, Stop, Vol+/-, Mute, properly mapped so I can use them in Windows Media Player, iTunes, Songbird, Pandora or whatever I want. Reliably. Especially the volume ones. If I can use it as a Zune without having to power the whole machine up that's a real bonus. I really like the idea of the MacbookPro remote control but make sure I can slot it into the case and use it there (while it charges) and use it from across the room.
• Webcam with decent resolution, a driver that can cope with backlight and general poor ambient condition and for video calls ideally some face tracking software to at least try to keep me in frame so I don't have to bolt myself to my chair.
• Secure fingerprint reader and/or other biometrics (face recognition?) - something that IT will be happy to have used, not worried that someone with a jelly bean will be able to break.
• Plugs and connections. I'm usually WiFi connected so make sure it's reliable and works with the full alphabet soup of ABG and N, and Bluetooth 2.0. Of course, every now and then I'll need to connect to a wired ethernet so make sure I don't need a multitool to get the cover off (or back on). I also want decent outputs. VGA (d-sub), DVI, HDMI, S-Video/RCA. It might be mobile but that means I might want to watch a movie from my laptop on a hotel TV rather than squinting at the 15" screen... (referring back to media keys from above... in this scenario hopefully Joost or whatever media app I'm using will support the remote keypress because they're standard and published right...)
• Touchscreen. It's a personal thing but I like being able to reach out and touch some things. Going from my K-Jam to the PC seems retrograde because I can't push on-screen buttons! The problem with most TabletPCs now-a-days is that they're underpowered and overpriced compared to their clamshell cousins (and only the Origami class UMPC machines get to run the Origami experience which IMO is a real shame)
• An Operating System and driver stack that works. 100% reliably. No Blue Screen of Death because of a USB device being plugged in. No problems sleeping, suspending or hibernating - it should be instant and invisible to the user. Vista is really good (ironically the best sleep performance I've seen is on a MacbookPro) and almost at the OSX level of never having to care (and Vista does give me a bit more control). Docking and undocking (I like docking stations. not having to plug/unplug a dozen cables every time I sit down is great) should be totally seamless so I can shut the lid and undock as safely as pressing the undock button, waiting while it does some magic then selecting sleep from a menu. Require no more thought than my phone.
• Indestructible. It doesn't need to survive an explosion but the day to day knocks and drops and spills that a laptop living with someone who's in and out of TSA queues at airports, works in cafes, has a dog and daughter running around at home...
• No flashing lights. When I'm not using the machine I want all the lights to go out. Keyboard, Mouse, Power, whatever. If I'm in a hotel room and can't sleep because the thing keeps winking at me and lighting up the room I'm going to take a roll of duct tape to it. If you're going to have a glowing logo (Apple) or internal lighting (Dell XPS) let me change the color and brightness (including an off option) through a simple software app. The former stops me annoying people, the latter to save some battery ergs.
  

It's a fairly long list but pretty much all these things exist today. It's just getting the combination right that seems to be the challenge. My T27GP had great media keys, the Macs have perfect power management, the Thinkpads were robust. Mac and Asus (and others) have media remotes, there are plenty of docking station solutions... I just want someone to line the pieces up and then work on making sure all their Vista drivers are rock solid.

Then I've just got to work on finding the seamless LAN/Cloud storage solution that's smart enough to make sure I've got what I want where I want when I need it.

Oh, and my perfect mobile solution... pretty much as above but ideally in a smaller form factor for managing email and reading on the bus, but unfolds/unfurls to do real work in a cafe and docks at home/office to a smart base station that gives me all the computing power and screen real-estate I can ask for. Ideally paired with a minimalist clamshell phone handset (and an elegant SPOT watch) working in perfect harmony to give me simple voice calling and messaging everywhere I go.

Vaio SZ390P, 15" and 17" MacBookPros (sadly loaners, gone back to their owner), Vaio T27GP (Still using), 12" RevA Powerbook (on my daughters desk), Vaio C1MT (PictureBook, still using), Compaq E500, Compaq Presario, IBM ThinkPad (about 3 of those), IBM P75 and P70, Toshiba T6400

One thing that's bugged me about Messenger is that I couldn't dock it without resorting to third-party add-ons which (while cool are not always up with the latest bleeding edge betas).

So I was really happy today to discover a Vista Sidebar gadget that actually works how I want and does what it says on the tin.

MessengerGadget displays a customizable, usable list of contacts docked in your sidebar (or floating on the desktop if that's your preference - though I'm not sure how that's better than the usual interface) - you can quickly check peoples status and double-click to chat.

I'd love to see an option to hide the windows client (one less thing taking up desktop real estate) and run messenger totally from the sidebar but this is certainly good enough for now.

All I want now is for Messenger to get tabbed chat and a spell-check!

So, for the first time in over a decade I'm wearing a digital watch today. It feels a little strange not having the hands and needing to work out the time... and that extra thrill of knowing that this watch is accurate and the day is right!

This is no ordinary watch that just tells the time, oh no... that would never be enough to get me to put my real watch on the shelf even for a day!

This is an MSNDirect powered watch feeding news, weather and traffic reports to my wrist (as well as syncing to my calendar and letting people send me alerts from Windows Live Messenger).

Now this watch isn't exactly cutting edge but it got some nice reviews when it was new - there are some much nicer models available now.

It's fairly comfortable (though my wrist is probably as thin as you'd want to use this with) and it's fun having the data on your wrist. Downside is that it's got a fairly unusual charger connection so it's one more hunk of junk to lug around when traveling (apparently there is a USB charger but I can't find anything about it)

I'm not totally convinced of the value of a one-way device... you'd end up needing to carry a PDA or smartphone to push information back (new appointments etc) and it would be nice to be able to sync contact info to the device as well (though I guess there's a limit to the internal memory!)

I'm going to have a hunt around and see what third party apps exist beyond the MSNDirect services (PopLogix have a couple, I wonder if there are more). SpotStop looks like a good place to hang out for some info.