Are fewer young people using social networks such as Twitter? How we all use the internet | News | guardian.co.uk

Are fewer young people using social networks such as Twitter? How we all use the internet | News | guardian.co.uk:

"Apparently, it is SO over: the kids don't like social networking anymore. Even more gallingly, it appears part of the reason is that older users do."

Figures show a drop in use of social networks by users between the ages of 25 to 54. So, what do they mean by older?

Serendipity

Ping - The Digital Age Is Stamping Out Serendipity - NYTimes.com:
Is it possible to build in some randomness or chaos into an information system?

Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder, wrote to the Twitterati, 'Repositioning the product to focus more on discovery is an important first step in presenting Twitter to a wider audience of folks around the world who are eager to start engaging with new people, ideas, opinions, events and sources of information.'

Interesting observation that the digital world hides so many things that were formerly visible, a person's music collection, choices of movies, even now, I suppose, books. Now, we reveal things about ourselves on our Facebook pages, or through the random pictures of us others might post.
But note, randomness has to be anarchic and disorderly. Serendipity, is really the wrong word. The word was coined by Horace Walpole (in 1754) according to the Wikipedia. Walpole gives an example definition:

One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for, comes under this description) was of my Lord Shaftsbury, who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon's, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs. Hyde, by the respect with which her mother treated her at table.

"Accidental sagacity" is not how we would define the term today. Walpole's example shows what we would more likely call deduction, putting together clues to find out something that one would otherwise not have known. It shows simply a discovery, suddenly understanding something, but it is not necessarily a fortunate or happy discovery, the most important element of our current definition.
The idea of the accidental encounter contains the possibility of the happy chance discovery, but also of the unhappy or unpleasant discovery. And, in any system to do what Biz Stone wants to do, viz. engaging with new people, ideas, opinions, &c, the happy is only just a part of it.

The prospects of Microsoft Word in the wiki-based world - Ars Technica

The prospects of Microsoft Word in the wiki-based world - Ars Technica:

"One day you wake up and everything is on a wiki somewhere. How did that happen? It happens in much the same way as typewriters suddenly disappeared—because a better alternative arrived. Word—and I know I'll be attacked for saying this—is the new typewriter."

Well maybe not on a wiki somewhere but somewhere in the cloud. And doubtless it will happen. From the point of view of people like this writer who are concerned with finding the real document / the most recent / the final version of a document. For many others the reality is still the printout.

What everyone had lost track of in the heat of battle was why we were still using Word (or OpenOffice Writer, which is—let's face it—just a clone of Word) to create documents that were likely never going to be printed.

Yes, maybe this is true, but a document is in many people's minds something that could be printed out--even if in reality it will never be. It is only when the document on the screen becomes the real document--in people's minds--and the printout is seen as only a copy, an instance of that reality that the shift will have been made.
I think that the regularity and rules of design that have accreted around the 8 1/2 x 11 page have given it the authority of some consistency (a replacement of the typewriter created page). And a new design standard of an electronic document will have to replace this, and perhaps the author is correct in finding this (at least for himself) in the wiki page

Wikipedia's CSS files automatically make everything look pretty, and more importantly, consistently pretty.