People are talking a lot these days about "the cloud" and what does that term mean. Software as a Service (virtual applications), Hardware as a Service (buying/renting compute time on machines you don't have to administer), both of which are being done by Amazon, are typically what gave birth to the term "cloud computing," but really Twitter embodies a whole separate meaning here.

Twitter is the Cloud realized for the masses. In a sense, I get my news from Twitter -- since it has my eyeballs, and folks I follow post links to news stories, I tend to read a lot of current events posted there. So what is the effect of this? Events of similarly-minded people tend to bubble through to me, and the Cloud acts as a kind of pre-made filter for what I'm interested in. And I did not have to configure it, unlike RSS. It is auto-configured by the simple nature of whom I choose to follow.

It goes both further and closer than that.

Further: I follow Shaq. Yes, that's right, Shaquille O'Neal, the Big Aristotle, is tweeting. (and the legitimacy has already been proven, in case you're skeptical) He's hiLARious, and even though I don't know him, it is interesting to see what he's up to (did you know he gave millions of pounds of peanut butter to hungry folks in Africa?).

Closer: Today I was sitting in a meeting being broadcast worldwide to my company's IT org. About a dozen of us were using twitter to talk about what our CIO was saying -- it was great fun and some good ideas came out of it.

Further: Election coverage. Twitter and current.com. 'nuff said.

You get the idea.

Twitter changes everything.

not particularly, no, but I wasn't paying that much attention to headcount numbers -- I was mainly interested in the scuba diving ;) (and I was also pretty much at the bottom of the food chain, working for a very mousy, keep-your-head-down individual)

Love Apple -- and Miso! Hmmm....there's either a new product or a new food combination in there somewhere. (or an iPhone/iPod app/skin for TechMiso -- have you seen MobilePress? (http://mobilepress.co.za/))