Laptops | Tom Raftery's Social Media

I have been very quiet on this blog for the last few weeks - apologies for that but I can’t promise on the pace returning to the two or three posts a day I was averaging at times last year.

Why? I have been spending a lot of time on the micro-blogging site, Twitter.

Twitter is a site where you have a maximum of 140 characters per post but instead of a traditional blog site, these posts are typically conversational. Because of the immediacy of writing 140 characters, reading and responding to ‘Tweets’ is relatively trivial and so conversations are born.

Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a great article last year explaining how Twitter is now paying his rent.

And because of the still early nature of the application, it is possible to very quickly build up a powerful network of highly influential users who are only too happy to converse with you. I have met several people recently who, up until now I only knew through Twitter.

Another way I use Twitter is I often pose questions to Twitter and get great replies back from highly qualified people in minutes.

Twitter has an open API so it is possible to use third party applications to post to and read from Twitter. Currently I am using twhirl on my laptops (twhirl is a cross-platform desktop client for twitter, based on Adobe AIR) and twibble on my phone. Snitter is another cross-platform Twitter desktop client which gets a lot of good reviews.

Dave Weinberger called it “continuous partial friendship” but I think it goes beyond that. The term Ambient Intimacy has been coined to cover one of the aspects of Twitter - it brings you a lot closer to people you might ordinarily never get to know (if you decide you don’t want to know them, you simply stop following them!).

Whatever it is, it is growing in popularity steadily and it was how I and many others chose to remain connected over the holiday period.

If you want to follow me, here is my Twitter profile.

I read an interesting article the other day about a new type of laptop battery which should be able to go 30 years between re-charges!

The batteries

are constructed from semiconductors and use radioisotopes as the energy source. As the radioactive material decays it emits beta particles that transform into electric power capable of fueling an electrical device like a laptop for years.

Of course, the useful lifetime of a laptop is only 3 years or so before it becomes obsolete so if these batteries do come to market, you would need to be able to remove them and add them to your newest laptop.

The batteries

can be quite small and thin, a porous silicon material is used to collect the hydrogen isotope tritium which is generated in the process. The reaction is non-thermal which means laptops and other small devices like mobile phones will run much cooler than with traditional lithium-ion power batteries.

Fantastic, no more laptop burn then!

And

The best part about these cells are when they eventually run out of power they are totally inert and non-toxic

According to the article, the batteries are dur to be delivered to shops in the next 2-3 years. There is no mention of a price point though - never a good sign!

UPDATE - post edited to add title (d’oh!) - Thanks Simon