Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year (particularly if it’s a rock with no internet connection), chances are you’ve heard about the 140-characters-or-less blogging service Twitter.com. Hailed by prominent nerds as the best thing to hit the internet since the dancing baby, Twitter has quickly risen to become the web’s most popular “micro-blogging” site.

That’s all well & good for tech-savvy bloggers who actually know what “micro-blogging” is, but what about you, the average Joe who still uses Netscape to check your Friendster “Testimonials” on a shared computer at the public library? What about people like me, ordinary folks who still fall for the old “My Nigerian Bank Account Is Overflowing With Money And I Need Your Help” routine time and time again? Does Twitter have anything to offer idiots like us? I decided to find out.

According to some article on Time.com (who else would you to turn to for valuable information about tech trends? Cracked.com?!), Twitter is “blogging for regular people.” I don’t know what in the name of God that’s supposed to mean; I thought blogging was ALREADY for regular people. Isn’t that the whole idea? That anyone can write one? Should we really be making it EVEN EASIER to share your thoughts with the entire internet?

In their own words, Twitter is “a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” Here’s the thing: Most of the time, my answer to that question is going to be “working,” “dropping a deuce,” or “getting loaded under a highway overpass.” Considering all the awards and accolades it has received from the tech community, there has to be more to Twitter than the ability to tell your friends when you’re dropping a deuce, right?

Right?!

To answer this question I’ll once again turn to Twitter for an answer. According to the “Why?” page on Twitter.com, “basic updates are meaningful to family members, friends, or colleagues—especially when they’re timely.” Let’s try to wrap our heads around this baffling statement one part at a time, shall we?

Family

I don’t know about you guys, but I spend a good chunk of my time HIDING what I do from my family. Considering that, why would I want to give them a web-based tracking collar that will alert them to my every move? Do I really want them to know how drunk I am (very), what I’m drinking (Evan Williams), and where I’m drinking it (alone under a highway overpass) at any given moment? Besides, attempting to teach my mom how to use Twitter would be like trying to teach a goat how to surf: hilarious, fun to watch, and yet completely pointless and ultimately kind of depressing.

Friends

If we’re friends, chances are you already have a pretty good idea of what I’m doing. My day-to-day life follows a pretty strict routine (go to work, eat dinner, go get drunk under a highway overpass). If you don’t know where to find me at any given point in the day, give me a call and maybe I’ll tell you. If you don’t know me well enough to call me, well, then you probably don’t need to know where I am.

Colleagues

If your colleagues don’t know where you are, why in the name of God would you want to make it easier for them to find you?!

I had some misgivings about this whole Twitter thing, but I decided to give it a shot:

I wasn’t totally sure where to go from there, to be honest. I’d told my Twitter followers all about my driving, twittering, and public urination - what was left? I thought that would cover it, that my Twitter feed would be inundated with thousands of fans, all curious to know more about the fascinating minutiae of my daily life. But after 24 hours of back-breaking twittering, I could still count my readers on one hand.

“Looks like it’s time for the gloves to come off,” I said, mostly because I was in a liquor store buying a bottle of Evan Williams and the gloves were making it hard to take out my wallet. The guy behind the counter just stared at me silently. Maybe he would’ve said something if he’d known how hard the internet can be. You know - like “Why are you wearing gloves in the middle of summer?” or “Get the hell out of my store.”

Ever since our earliest human ancestors crawled over to a computer, loaded up a Usenet client and posted a message for all to read (probably something along the lines of “Did anyone tape Doctor Who last night?”), man has been drawn to online social networking tools for an obvious reason: to convince himself that he is more popular than he actually is in real life. Picture the guy on MySpace with 500,000 “friends,” most of which are inanimate objects and cartoon characters. Picture Tila Tequila. The point of life is to be as popular as humanly possible, and the online world is no exception to this rule.

That being said, I quickly realized that I didn’t want to just USE Twitter: I wanted to WIN at Twitter.

So who’s currently winning at Twitter? According to the good folks over at Twitterholic.com, the top 5 users are:

KevinRose (Creator of Digg.com)

BarackObama (American politician and Democratic presidential nominee)

LeoLaporte (Some tech nerd I’ve never heard of)

AlexAlbrecht (Some tech nerd I’ve never heard of)

JasonCalacanis (Some tech nerd I’ve never heard of)

Stiff competition, to be sure, but what do these guy have that I don’t (other than fame, fortune, and the respect of their peers)? What makes them so interesting that thousands of people want to know when they go to the bathroom? The question had me stumped, so I grabbed a bottle of Evan Williams and headed down to my favorite highway overpass to do some thinking. A few hours later it hit me:

They are all nerds.

Admittedly, Barack Obama doesn’t quite fit the equation, but if you look at the Top 100 Twitter users there is an unmistakable pattern: they are mostly tech-oriented blogger types. I had figured out the target demographic - now all I had to do was use it to my advantage.

I reclined lazily on the couch and hit refresh a few times, eagerly anticipating the praise and affections of the tech community that I so obviously deserved. Yet somehow even now, almost a whole day later, I’m STILL not a Top 100 Twitter User. Which all leads me to an unfortunate but seemingly unavoidable conclusion:

Twitter is fucking bullshit. Case closed.

Every day, frustrated people around the globe wonder via sarcastic t-shirt whatever happened to the future we were promised as children. A future in which everyone flies their hovercar to a four-hour workday at the cybermines, breaking off only to pop a protein pill and hop a transport tube to the exercise pods.

After all, the iPhone is kind of like a Star Trek communicator (especially this iPhone) and some of those giant glass underwater hotels they’re building in Dubai rival Heinlein on a good day. But what about the rest? Our jetpacks, robots and laser guns? Were they just sweet fiction, the hollow promises of a society longing for the comfort and freedom of a spandex unitard?

Sadly, no. The disappointing truth is that the futuristic devices we’ve demanded for so long are already here. Just different … and kind of shitty. It’s like when you order something at Denny’s based on the picture on the menu, but when the food comes out it looks like a pile of phlegm smothered in gravy. Behold: the future (in phlegm and gravy form)!

What We Were Promised: Forget gun control, bullets will be obsolete once we get our hands on an ion-spitting, atomic-powered, soul-searing plasma cannon. From Han Solo’s handy blaster to Kirk’s minimalist phaser (complete with multiple firing modes), the laser gun has become so intrinsic to our vision of the future that we created laser tag just so our children could train in their usage, in preparation for the inevitable laser wars of 2013. The ray gun is proof positive that while mankind may have enough collective imagination to envision a futuristic multi-verse where vast empires slug it out on the galactic scale, we aren’t quite up to imagining doing so with anything other than a good old-fashioned, pleasantly phallic six-gun in our hands.

As Seen In: Star Wars, Barbarella, Alien, Farscape, Dune, Doctor Who, anywhere lightsabers are unavailable.

The Pale Imitation: Scientists have actually made a pass at the ray gun. Only problem is it’s the kind of pass you used to make on essays about how you spent your summer vacation. Instead of a hand-sized blaster spitting ionized crimson death, the military has proudly unveiled an invisible sound wave that kind of burns and is the size of a truck. Here’s a video of a middle-aged “60 Minutes” reporter easily foiling it with a mattress.

Well, even if we can’t look forward to Star Wars-style laser battles, at least we can rest assured that our enemies, provided they don’t have any mattresses handy, will have to step literally several feet to the left in deference to our mighty future arsenal.

What We Were Promised: There’s nothing more passé than eating food. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years now, and it’s time to move on. Soon enough, the only people shoveling food into their mouths will be out-of-touch Neanderthals watching tumbleweeds roll by at the abandoned food court. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be popping protein pills by the handful, saving us enough time to read books describing how stuff used to taste back in the primitive days.

As Seen In: The Jetsons, Soylent Green, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

The Pale Imitation: Tiny cans of ass-flavored soda, nutrition bars that virtually demand to be eaten four at a sitting, and the addition of the word “energy” to the front of nearly every food product imaginable. And while the food is getting smaller, it’s a long way from pill size. In the meantime, instead of focusing on cramming all that goodness into a single dot, food companies have taken to making shitty-tasting versions of all their regular foods.

Energy cereal? Really? This distraction could prove fatal to the future of food pill technology. If we’re not careful, the trend towards down-sizing food could become totally derailed and end up with shelves full of energy-boosting hot dogs, memory-aiding muffins, and chicken breast that inoculates you against polio.

What We Were Promised: As early as 1900, man was envisioning a future in which all major cities were connected and traversed with smooth-moving, safe, and speedy robotic sidewalks or, failing that, at the very least some kind of city-wide vacuum tube that whipped civilians through the air to their destinations at staggering velocities (and yet, against all logic, never resulted in the splattering of the tube’s interior with the remains of a commuter who leaned a little too far to the left).

As Seen In: Metropolis, Caves of Steel, Minority Report, Futurama

The Pale Imitation: The Segway. It moves you around at about walking speed, and instead of costing the government billions of dollars to install moving sidewalk technology all across the country, it costs rich douchebags a few thousand dollars to graphically point out that they are, in fact, rich douchebags (who shop at The Sharper Image no less). And in case you can’t afford a Segway, or don’t want to be seen riding one, you can get a taste of the future at nearly any major airport. That 100-yard segment of moving sidewalk is just long enough to let you slip into a daydream about shuttling effortlessly from place to place, but not long enough to let you actually enjoy it.

(more…)

Ever since I saw the flickering blue form of Princess Leia plea for help from an aging and wizened Jedi hermit, I’ve wanted two things above all else: hologram technology, and to bang Princess Leia. And thanks to exciting technological breakthroughs from our friends over in India, I could accomplish at least one of those goals as early as 2010.

And as for my less savory ambition, who knows? I mean, Carrie Fischer’s career isn’t going so well, I’ve got this whole blogger thing, and by 2010 she could well be in the throes of early onset dementia.

As you may have deduced, I’m talking about holograms. Not mirrors, not 3-D goggles, not that old Sega arcade game that looked kind of 3-D, cost a whole freaking dollar, and took up the space of three Killer Instinct 2 consoles. Actual holograms.

According to the article (which is conspicuously absent of any images, videos, or science fiction references), the 3-D imaging handsets will be able to project free standing holographic environments and photos that you’ll be able to rotate, move through, and dissect. The pornographic possibilities alone are life-changing.

But I’m trying not to get too excited. Frankly, I’m used to the thought of holograms being made of blue-tinted scan lines, and “revolutionary technological breakthroughs” ending up being gay scooters.

But there are reasons to be hopeful. The company behind the project, Infosys, is a huge technology conglomerate in India known as “the Taj Mahal of training engineers,” which is kind of creepy considering the Taj Mahal is a building for storing dead people.

Plus, their headquarters looks like this:

If sci-fi-caliber holographic technology is going to enter our world, I’m fairly certain it will be via a glass pyramid made of diamonds fronting two triangular pools being constantly raked by indentured servants.

The Infosys people promise that the images will be high quality, without loss, and that the handsets will be able to capture 3-D images as well.

Imagine it: every time one of your friends snaps a shitty picture of you on their cell phone, it will be instantly transformed into a perfect, rotatable hologram. Yes.

The article also mentions applications such as analyzing crash sites, helping medical students practice surgery, blah blah blah, and GAMING.

I’m sure at first it’ll just be flash games, like moving one 3-D block back and forth across a gray field. But by the time we get to the HoloSet 8, I’m hoping for full mindlink and the ability to psi-blast minions on no less than four dimensional axes.

So I put it to you, Cracked Blog readers. What’s the first thing you’ll do after unwrapping your very own holographic handset?

And don’t say videos of Carrie Fischer; I don’t want a bunch of copycats slowing up my downloads.

---

When not blogging for Cracked, Michael is relocating his life, home, and Those Aren’t Muskets!