Keeping up

Moore's Law states that technology doubles in performance every two years (actually every 18 months to be exact). This has held true for hardware for the past 30 years and is expected to continue for the next dozen at least. But is it also true for applications? Are they growing exponentially, doubling in performance every two years? This would mean that many of our staple applications today might not have even existed 2 years ago.

For applications like Twitter and Facebook this might seem like it is true, but what about word processors, spreadsheets etc. What is the essential difference between the latest version of Excel and the one we used 10 years ago. Most of us could not tell the difference.

New devices are also making it onto the market, what will the iPhone/iPad look like in 10 years time? Will the Kindle still exist, will we still have laptops?

More importantly, how do I keep up with all this without spending thousands buying the latest to try out for myself and then throwing them away when the merry-go-round of technology turns again? Or do I just get off and wait for time to kill all trends?

Fortunately there is another way, it is now possible to keep up without having to spend hours looking at what's new or thousands trying every gadget out for yourself.

The new web 2.0 social networking tools are designed to keep you informed by bringing a steady stream of information to you. Of course this stream can be just junk as any Facebook or Twitter user can confirm, it is not really earth shattering to find out what someone had for lunch and you really must question why someone would need to post that on their accounts. However this noise can be quickly filtered and ignored, and maybe is the price you need to pay to look into the stream of information. Not everything will be interesting but there will be gems there.

So what are the tools that I use to keep up. Firstly there are the sites which use RSS (such as this blog [that's the little square symbol in the address bar that looks like this]). By using this I can keep up without ever visiting the site again, the information just comes to me. Secondly I go to a Mashup site on a regular basis. The one I use is Digg. Here stories from around the world are posted by Digg users which might be of interest to other Digg users. Lastly I use Google regularly to check on anything I don't understand or want to find out more about.

Using these methods I have a steady stream of information coming to me and somewhere there I find out what is happening. I then get to choose when or if I will take part in any of the new developments.