The unintended consequences

When a technical (or other) advance is made, we often cannot predict how it will affect others. For example, who would have dreamed that Sputnik would have resulted in Tang?

Here's another example, courtesy Dave Winer:

Club 140 has caused at least one person to swear off Twitter forever. Too bad so sad! :-(

Winer then links to a Brian Benz post:

Admittedly, I've been a bit of a Web 2.0 luddite. I'm not on facebook or myspace and I've never signed up for twitter and similar Web 2.0 apps.

I have a name for these - TRAPPS - TRendy APPS that you need to be on to be a cool kid...guess I've never been a cool kid. And yes, they're free, but all of them eventually have some sort of price, financial or otherwise.....

After reading Winer's Club 140 announcement, Benz didn't decide that Club 140 was a WOT. He decided that Twitter itself was a waste of time.

I think I'm going to have to send Nate Ritter (the person who tweeted about the San Diego fires over to IBM.

I'm not completely discounting Benz's thoughts, but it's important to remember that tools are tools, and tools can be used well, and they can be used poorly.

When Twitter was created with its "What are you doing?" question, no one pictured someone capturing instances of posts that exactly meet the maximum length criteria. But then again, no one pictured someone distributing data about a major catastrophic event, either.

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