Memory Leak

I live about 42 miles from the Mercury Interactive software campus and it will get further when we move to the HP offices in Cupertino in June. It takes me about 45 minutes to get to the office in the morning and about 1 hour and 15 minutes to get home in the evening. For most folks, this commute would be suicide but its not so bad for me. I grew up in Connecticut and an 1.5 hour commute into New York City was common. It leaves me time to catch up on audio books, podcasts and the news. Most importantly, I use to the time plan my day in the morning and unwind my brain in the evening. I have come up with my best ideas during this time.

One of the bad habits that I’ve picked up on this commute is trying to type out mental action items on my Blackberry. Yes, I know, this is stupid and I could get into an accident. Well, Jott.com to the rescue! Jott.com allows users to call a number and record the thought. The message will be transcribed and it can be sent to yourself or to any contact you have uploaded to their system. I love the idea because its ultra simple, easy to use and actually useful! It goes to show you that the most simple problems can turn into valuable business ideas.

However, as i write this, my message is stuck “Waiting for transcription”. Oh well, I guess even good ideas get stuck with poor execution.

“Dude, check my twitter out. I’ve just updated it and it says that I’m telling you about Twitter. Now, I just updated it again that I’m done.”

Twitter is the latest buzzword around this “Web 2.0″ stuff and I don’t understand it. It allows users to “Micro-Blog”. A “Micro-blog” is a message less than 140 characters that gets posted to Twitter for all to see. Some examples of messages I’m seeing right now include,

• “Reviewing kids’ report cards and ITBS test results.”
• “Ready to call it a day”
• “Watching Rocky IV. Man, this was a cheeseball movie.”

Other interesting features include, email notification of messages, twitting from an instant messaging client and twitting from a mobile phone. Either I must be getting old or I have enough other “Web 2.0″ products to waste me free time. Or, the likely reason is that I’m not the target demographic. I can see pockets of friends or early teenagers getting into this. It will be interesting to see if Twitter can continue through the hype or if we look back on “Web 2.0″ and laugh that folks invested in this.