My 2-year-old daughter surprised me recently with two words: “Daddy’s book.” She was holding my Kindle electronic reader.

Here is a child only beginning to talk, revealing that the seeds of the next generation gap have already been planted. She has identified the Kindle as a substitute for words printed on physical pages. I own the device and am still not completely sold on the idea.

My daughter’s worldview and life will be shaped in very deliberate ways by technologies like the Kindle and the new magical high-tech gadgets coming out this year — Google’s Nexus One phone and Apple’s impending tablet among them. She’ll know nothing other than a world with digital books, Skype video chats with faraway relatives, and toddler-friendly video games on the iPhone. She’ll see the world a lot differently from her parents.

Fascinating article from Brad Stone stating that, quite simply, the unflagging rate of tech advancement is creating mini generation gaps whereby these mini-generations can be identified and grouped by what technology they grow up with during formative years.  Makes perfect sense, because more than once I've observed that young kids today are familiar with an iPhone in a way that kids of eight years ago are not.  My son, now 5, tries to touch, swipe and pinch the screen of every mobile phone he comes across.  Eight years ago, kids would have been introduced to a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile phone or something from Nokia and then introduced to an iPhone.

Another thing I think about: what will tech look like when my son is 16?  How many disruptive technologies will come down and displace the things that, by today's standards, are considered contemporary?

And perhaps the biggest question of all: speaking from psychological, cognitive, sociological and developmental perspectives, what long-term effect will all this technology, replete with its 'information anywhere' capability, have on people?  Today, we see all sorts of psychopharmaceutical drugs aimed at what we now consider mainstream psychological conditions: anxiety, ADHD, depression.  It's interesting -- and not just a little scary -- to consider what we'll be 'treating' 15 years from now as a result of people being overstimulated, forced to multitask beyond what the human mind can reasonably do (some argue we're there already) and rely on technology for everything: information, answers, directions, social consensus, morality.

Even as a tech geek, I reel sometimes.  As a guy who used to read a book a week but now struggles to get through one a month (most of my reading is web reading, which, arguably, is more convenient due to its more fragmented nature), I wonder where this is all going.

I know -- I think I'll check out a Kindle.  If, of course, the Apple tablet disappoints.  Then -- yes, then -- I'll get back to reading at a tyrannosaurid rate.  Right?

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Tim O'Reilly, reporting just after the Nexus One press event:

News from the front: a possible turning point for Android. I've been a huge iPhone fan, but after using the Nexus One for a few weeks, I find so much to like that I'm close to the point where Android might be my first choice. While I may yet go back to my iPhone, I'm conflicted.

As an iPhone user who was impressed with the Motorola Droid but not enough to consider ditching my iPhone for it, the Nexus One already has me thinking that Apple better bring its biggest guns to the 2010 mobile web fight. While Twitter is ablaze about how the Nexus One is the iPhone killer, I think that's premature: anyone who's been doing this a while knows that Apple has had good G2 on this for a while now, and the next version of the iPhone (slated for the now-traditional June/July release) isn't going to concede much to today's Nexus One.

Should be interesting, but all speculation aside, it's time to remember this: when smart companies compete, customers always win. It's a beautiful thing.

(Via @khurtwilliams)

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Robert Scoble:

The writing is on the wall. Small business marketing is moving away from focusing on SEO. Why do I say that? Because, well, Google and Bing are changing the rules so often and are getting so good at figuring out the real businesses that deserve to be on pages. Search Half Moon Bay Sushi and you get real answers from sites that didn’t focus on SEO. Yeah, there are exceptions, but they are increasingly getting rare.

With other searches, like one for Tiger Woods, you’ll get a page filled with stuff that SEO just doesn’t affect much anymore. In the middle of that page is a real time box that brings items from Twitter and Google News. It no longer is good enough to be just an SEO expert to get items onto pages like these. You’ve gotta be great at creating content that gets Google’s algorithms to trust it enough to shove it onto these new hybrid pages.

But there’s something deeper going on. Google has built systems that aren’t Page Rank controlled anymore and are giving far better analytics to small businesses than they did a year ago. They know a LOT more about your behavior now other than you clicked on a link, even to the extent that they know whether you called that business or bought something and THAT is changing the skills SEO/SEM types need to have.

No longer is it about optimizing search engine results and the new breed is going beyond just search engines to provide holistic systems that find and track customers not only on search engines like Google and Bing, but on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

I see the same thing.  I do very little SEO/SEM work on my employer's blog or main website, but our search performance has skyrocketed over the past year.

Why?

As near as I can tell, consistent content creation.  As a company that believes in engaging its community and customers, we try to post something to that blog every weekday, and we’ve done a pretty good job of it all year.  No author of that blog writes for keyword karma: we simply post content that we think will be useful or interesting to our customers, prospects and industry colleagues.  The rest just happens, and I attribute that to consistency.

Of course, our company has aircover from its Twitter and Facebook activity too, and as the new real-time web emerges, new content developed through these channels will factor into search performance.  Early this year, I was telling people how consistent, quality tweeting was important to draw new followers through Twitter’s official search engine.  Now, as 2010 approaches and social content is being integrated into Google and Bing search results, the importance simply cannot be overstated.

The ground is shifting away from static SEO keyword saturation and more towards behavior-driven merit systems.  Google and Bing are getting smarter at weeding out SEO farming sites (save a few examples, like appliance searches), and during 2010 I think we’ll see the semantic web in the sense that search engines will understand intent much better than they do now.  That’s not to say the system won’t be gamed anymore, but increasingly new content, interaction and effort will be rewarded rather than metadata and keyword concentrations on business websites.

So.  All that said, what’s the real value of intelligent, consistent social media activity for business?  If it wasn’t massive before, it is now.

(crosspost)

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The new Motorola Droid, probably the most anticipated Android handset to hit the broader market, has a 512 MB ROM embedded onto its motherboard.  Of that, only 256 MB is available for application storage. From AndroidandMe's Taylor Wimberly:

The Motorola Droid will be the most powerful Android phone to date when it launches on November 6, 2009. However, the device still features the same shortcomings of all other Android phones. The Droid ships with a 512 MB ROM which contains only 256 MB available for app storage.

Google does not support installing apps to the SD card (and likely never will), so developers are limited in what they can create.

This makes no sense to me, and frankly, I'm surprised this handset came to market with this limitation.  No doubt it's a measure to prevent app piracy -- a problem installing apps onto an SD card would surely create -- but this decsion shows a distinct misunderstanding about how an application-rich smartphone could be used.  My old BlackBerry had the same thing, and the onboard memory to run apps got crowded -- fast.

On my iPhone 3GS, I have just over a gig used for 57 apps.  I have a few games that weigh in at over 50 MB each, with one approaching 100 MB.  For a single game.  In light of this, 256 MB for app storage on the Droid seems ludicrous.  Did anyone look at iPhone user/app stats before making a decision not to include more onboard memory, even if it meant the demise of SD support?

The confusing thing is that Motorola gave the Droid a PowerVR SGX 530 GPU -- a strong piece of kit capable of cranking out some impressive graphics.  Did they expect users to have one or two games, and that's it?  Because any graphics-rich game that takes advantage of that chipset is going to weigh in at a fairly hefty size.

The solution is a tough one.  Either allow SD card support for app storage and runtime, or rev the hardware to include more onboard storage.  The former is unlikely to happen because it's a policy-side Pandora's box, and the latter because it's otherworldly expensive.

The more I learn about the Droid, the more I see a rev A effort that shows a ton of promise, but has a long way to go before it can match the iPhone's user experience and platform polish.  Give the iPhone a real network (say, Verizon, sometime, oh, around 3Q next year), and it will own the smartphone market the way Windows owns the desktop.

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Lots of hay being made about the native Exchange functionality in Verizon's upcoming Motorola Droid, but John Gruber points out the not-so-tidy underbellly: it will cost users an extra $15/month to enable this feature.  As Gruber says, so starts the Verizon nickel-and-diming.

It's nuances like this, little business plan caveats, I'm convinced were the roadblocks to the iPhone debuting on Verizon instead of AT&T.  Verizon isn't a carrier who is willing to let a device vendor call the shots of the larger revenue model.  Apple, naturally, isn't even remotely willing to let a wireless carrier dictate its market vision, either.  So Apple took its ball to AT&T, and we know how important the iPhone has become to AT&T as a service provider.

Verizon may be getting religion about the revenue power of a cutting-edge handset on its network (with handset being increasingly defined as "portable computer"), but as any Verizon user knows, the death-by-a-thousand cuts fee structure really muddies the entire experience.  And that's what Apple is all about: experience.

I think the Droid looks very promising, but it's the steampunk, uber-nerd version of the iPhone.  Very powerful, some nice technical juju under the covers, but overall an open platform waiting for user customization to make the phone what it really can be.  The iPhone, for better or worse, is the exact opposite: polished to the nines right from the factory, but comparatively closed and controlled from an ecosystem perspective.  But the user experience?  Unsurpassed.

Finally, with respect to the growing din that the Droid is an iPhone killer, I say two things:

1. We've all heard about the iPhone killers that are now being offered for free after rebates, and
2. The company that's trying to really unseat the iPhone 3GS from the alpha seat is this little company called Apple.  Have you heard of them?
   

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