ReadWriteWeb

After watching Microsoft lurch toward completion of Windows 8 and trying out a few of its early versions, I am struck by a tremendous sense of déjà vu. It took me some time to figure out why I was feeling this way, and then it hit me: Win 8 is on track to become the OS/2 of today, and suffer a similar and ignominious fate.

Don't get me wrong: I was a big OS/2 fanboy. I even wrote a book about OS/2 in the enterprise, which was never published. But I think it is useful to recall the mistakes of computing yesteryear and see if we can try to avoid them in the present.

All throughout human history technical breakthroughs have altered the topography of human thought. Or, rather, human thought has had a freer expression when it creates a more efficient vehicle for its own transmission. The 18th century, more than many, may remind us of our own time. That period was the culmination of what had become known as the "Republic of Letters," a shared domain of imagination that lasted from 1500 to 1800.

As Open Culture points out, by the late 18th century, new technology had culminated in national postal services and mass printing. This mechanically-based read/write web allowed for the proliferation of ideas across international borders in record time and subsequently led to revolutions, not unlike the Arab Spring and #occupy movements of today. (Though with more guns.) Stanford University has been conducting a project to map the data from the Republic and its efforts have led to some interesting discoveries.

Microsoft's gesture interface Kinect turns one year old this weekend; it was the 4th of November 2010 when it was first publicly available. The device has taken the world by storm, from casual gamers to device hackers around the globe and it's breathed new hope into a lagging tech giant. Perhaps most importantly, it's helped create an entire new category of human-computer interface. After the Command Line came the Graphic User Interface - and after that has come the Natural User Interface (NUI): the human-computer interface that is transparent or invisible.

Along with the iPad, which itself is just over 18 months old after launching in the Spring of 2010, the Kinect has helped turn ideas that were once science fiction into developments that seem imminent. See, for example, the video below made by Microsoft to celebrate the innovation occurring on the Kinect platform.

In a sign that healthcare is moving to the mobile, a company called HealthTap is launching an app that offers a Quora-like experience from the cloud.

HealthTap Express allows the 89% of patients who turn to search engines instead of their local doctors for health information to do so in an objective and relatively "clinical" environment on mobile devices.

Later this week, the Jewish High Holidays begin with Rosh Hashanah, which marks the beginning of the new year. It seems like good timing for Google's announcement that the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls project is up and running.

Created by The Israel Museum in conjunction with Google, the project, first announced last year, offers the public the opportunity to read five of the scrolls in super high-definition.

One of the wonderful results of networked intelligence is the revelation of the already-there. Geoglyphs. Could there be anything more there than a work of art built out of or incised into the earth itself? But the earth, she is big, and you can't get your mind around the whole of it and apprehend its multitudinous parts, or even the small patterns they form. Well, you couldn't, but now you can.

Thousands of geoglyph "wheels," almost completely unknown to the public, are now part of public knowledge thanks to advances in technology, both photographic and social. These wheels are scattered across the deserts of Jordan and adjacent countries.

Twitter, then known as twttr, was born just over 5 years ago - but in Twitter-time that's ancient history. What did it look like when it launched? I'd never seen a screenshot of the original Twttr home page until old school megablogger Jason Kottke posted one tonight, along with links to a few other oldies.

As you can see below, Twitter didn't have a hard time explaining itself at first. "If you have a cell and you can txt," the home page said, "you'll never be bored again...E V E R!" I guess when you've raised mountain upon mountain of venture capital and changed the world in multiple major ways, you've got to take yourself more seriously than that. (?) None the less, I like this old version of Twitter!

As the 10 year anniversary of the terrorist attack that brought down New York's World Trade Center approaches, there are many opportunities to comb through the wreckage of national consciousness, courtesy of both news and social media. Among the most complete is Understanding 9/11, an Internet Archive project to collect all broadcast coverage of the event.

Whether you were all the way across the country as I was or in the neighborhood, you have, no doubt, very strong feelings about the event and may want to memorialize it somehow. But reabsorbing the terrible images seems almost unwholesome to me, personally. Do it if you want, if you think it will benefit you, but watch out. An alternative might be Broadcastr's September 11 Memorial. Here you can bear witness, in person or via telephone and your testimony will become part of the historical record.

Steven Wolfram and team have gathered together a big timeline of key events in the history of systematic data and computable knowledge. The team has created a beautiful infographic and a five foot long poster available for mail order (I just bought one, $15 with shipping) in anticipation of the Wolfram Data Summit in DC early next month. We're really at the dawn of a whole new age of data creation, so this timeline will likely look like pre-history relatively soon, but it's fascinating and important none the less.

"[When] I first looked at the completed timeline," Wolfram writes, "the first thing that struck me was how much two entities stood out in their contributions: ancient Babylon, and the United States government... [It] is sobering to see how long the road to where we are today has been. But it is exciting to see how much further modern technology has already made it possible for us to go."

MySpace's fall from glory is now complete; Kara Swisher reports that it has been sold off to an advertising network for $35 million, an incredible decline in value from the $580 million that Newscorp paid for the social network in 2005.

Why did MySpace fail? Why have Facebook and Twitter stolen its thunder? That will be a question for the ages, but one contributing factor may be the incredible hostility that MySpace had for outside application developers. MySpace thought, and said publicly, that all the rest of Web 2.0 was a leach, a monkey on MySpace's back. Below, an excerpt from a TechCrunch post I wrote about this five years ago. It looks pretty amazing now in retrospect and is a good reminder that today's leading companies should remember their humility.