I happened to read a RWW article on Tweeting in Color today.  I can’t say I was thrilled at the entire concept of Twitter Style Sheets (TSS), the Twitter version of CSS for HTML.  The entire concept of having people able to colorize and change the font characteristics of their tweets is a bit disturbing to me.  To quote the last section of the article:

For now, come check out our demo (if you have a preview access account), or at least read the code (at http://xent.com/tss.js ) and stay tuned for what comes next. Though, like @ev himself, we’re not quite sure about the Promethean curse of giving users Tweets in any color they’d like – we’re afraid it’s only a matter of time before we see animated, blinking Tweets in 3-D!

I can’t say I’m hopeful at the ability of at least some of Twitter user base to restrain from posting loud and obnoxious tweets, or louder and more obnoxious, anyway.  What I do like about that post is the mention of annotations and that people are thinking about how to link between tweet subjects and other social network accounts using the annotation functions.  It is indeed difficult to reference a Facebook user in a Tweet in a useful manner while keeping the message under 140 chars.

What interested me more about the article was the thoughts that it prompted about the usefulness of the Internet.  The concepts of “Content is King” and “keeping presentation out of the way of your message” seem to come to mind when being reminded of the old “blink” HTML tag and it’s possible use (or abuse) in the future of Twitter.  It is a very good reminder that new functionality can be misused just as easily as it can be used to improve experience.  That’s something every UI designer and software engineer needs to be reminded of on a regular basis.

Given that I had the opportunity to travel this Thanksgiving week to my friend’s place in Los Angeles, I had a lot of time to think (and a lot of time to regret the decision to drive with my 3 little boys on a holiday weekend, but that’s another post in another blog ).  Anyway, as a result I have the following short list of things I am thankful for in things tech related.

• Engineering geniuses that understand that they don’t know everything and can find bits of truth anywhere
• Engineering humility that allows cooperation with designer genius
• Palm, for leading the way in smart phones with their PDA series so long ago
• Apple’s iPhone, for forcing the mobile phone industry to go ’sexy’
• the Internet and it’s creators, for enabling world-wide connection, information sharing and collaboration
• Google, for enabling the search of and usage so much useful and relevant information
• Google watchdogs for reminding us that so much power can also be easily abused
• Facebook, for allowing me to connect with so many of my old friends
• Twitter, for introducing microblogging and the “Continuous Partial Attention” concept
• Microsoft marketing, for making computers look easy to end users and their developer tools group for enabling such sophisticated development
• Many other companies for creating technology that actually makes computing easy

In all seriousness, there are plenty of other things I am thankful for related to tech.  I am more thankful to my family and friends for putting up with my incessant use of “Greek” language that tends to put them to sleep