twittering our way to prosperity

Prosper facilitates direct people-to-people lending. Twitter facilitates direct people-to-people social networking and microblogging. Mash them up for direct lender-to-borrower social networking and microblogging. Add Kiva for networking and microblogging between developed-country lenders and developing-country borrowers. So Ms. Lender can see that in the course of taking a yoga class, going to the farmer's market, having lunch with a friend, and picking up the kids from soccer practice, Ms. Borrower has walked to the stream to wash clothes and walked back. Yes, this is crudely stereotypified. And yes, if only Ms. Borrower could twitter in the first place. But it may have something to do with the singularity.

alien diplomacy

Wag the Dog x Children of Men x Aliens = alien diplomacy. Forget about troop surges and never-ending negotiations. Just deploy UFOs and aliens. That’ll stop things at least for long enough to think about more existential matters, like our place in the universe.

social calendaring x RSS

Instead of subscribing to event listings on your own or having to copy & paste events into a social calendar, just have the listings that you and your friends subscribe to automatically feed into one collective calendar. Then you can compare options and smartly mob the best one.

if you're scared that “virtual reality” is replacing “real reality”

...(and you know who you are), don't be. Sure, if you zoom in real close, some of us may go through a virtual dark age for a sec. But if you zoom out again, all this virtual stuff will just make us (re-)enamored with the real thing. Because we could have never made it this good. We'll wander reality as if it were virtuality, and wonder how in the world that designer made the dog bark just as the wind brushed my neck while the light changed and the smell of that woman’s cigarette permeated my olfactory jurisdiction. Experience a busy street intersection. And imagine trying to design it. The question is not whether we'll choose virtuality or reality. But the age-old one of who is the we that gets to choose what.

where does MySpace end and Wikipedia begin?

Wherever we want. You can just as easily post your MySpace page on Wikipedia and voilà: you're in “the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet." (Yes, this happens all the time, but I'm not pointing any hrefs here.) So it would be kinda cute to have a button that automatically booted a Wikipedia page onto MySpace. Kinda cute but kinda dangerous.

can you please spare a cell phone call?

Carrying only plastic is such a comforting excuse for not acquiescing to panhandlers. But with mobile financial services, money can be transferred between cell phones. 'No change to spare? All good, just put your friend on hold for a sec and transfer it directly to my cell.'

a revolution for the revolution

Dance, Dance, Revolution as the interface for telecommuting to the sweatshop.