Ah, Christmas. A time to compile lists of desired items in the hopes that someone will get them for you as a gift. I amused myself by thinking up this list of things that made perfect sense to ask for at the time… but today, just seem hopelessly outdated.

I like to think of this stuff as "incidental technology."

VHS Tape Rewinder

Because you don’t want to wear out your VCR by rewinding the tapes in it. Or at least, that was what I always heard—hence, the dedicated tape rewinder. Don’t forget the ones that look like sports cars!

Floppy disk hole punch

Because it really sucks to have single sided floppy disks—5¼" disks, of course. Now you can make those into double sided disks by making a custom notch on the other side! It certainly beats using a regular hole punch and hoping you don’t nick the magnetic part of the disk inside.

8-Track cassette adapter

You have all these cassette tapes but all you have to play music is an 8-track player. Out of luck? Not anymore! With this adapter you can play your cassettes in your 8-track player, saving you the money you would otherwise have to spend on a tape player—or even a stereo!

Tabletop arcade games

The ironic thing is, I remember seeing these in the Sears toy catalogs and thought they would be awesome to have: Coleco’s tabletop arcade games were sold in the early ’80s and came in the flavors of Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Frogger, and Galaxian. You can read up about the Pac-Man game (with links to the others) here; check out the hot fixed-digital graphic action!

Maybe it’s just me, but this story on Slashdot about Google developing quantum computing is making me nervous. Why? One word: Skynet.

I have an idea that the first real quantum computer will go "runaway" and develop into a true strong AI—the first sentient computer. It’s a science fictional notion, sure, but when they’ve essentially shown that a quantum computer can run without even being turned on—well, what’s science fiction these days?

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about Twitter‘s new "Retweet" functionality. Okay, first of all, there is a scary number of hits when you search "retweet": 9.8 million from Google. That just seems wrong somehow, considering "retweet" is a made up word that’s only been in the lexicon for what, a couple of years at most?

Anyway. In short, a "retweet" is when someone copies and re-tweets your Twitter message, usually by putting "RT @username" in front of it. It’s a way of sharing something you like with your own Twitter followers and it has become very common practice in the Twitter world.

So common and popular, in fact, that Twitter itself has created a "Retweet" button that they’re experimenting with. It’s a handy piece of functionality: it copies the Twitter message you like to your timeline so your followers can read it, but instead of looking like it came from you with "RT @username" prepended, it shows the original tweet with a notation that you are the (re)tweet source.

(Obviously I have this Retweet function attached to my Twitter accounts, so I’ve been playing with it.)

What I like about it is the one-click functionality they’ve built into it: you don’t have to copy a message, scroll back to the top of the screen, type "RT @whatever" and paste the message in—shortening it in case your addition breaks the 140-character limit—and then scroll back to where you were in reviewing your timeline.

However, there’s two things this functionality breaks: the ability to modify the original tweet to add your own comment (if there’s room), and the "branding" of the retweet.

What do I mean about the branding? Well, consider this: every time I manually retweet a message, it’s immediately clear to my followers that the retweet came from me: my image and username are right there, and this is especially handy for people that might be quickly scanning their timelines looking for certain images (people they want to read). With Twitter’s built in Retweet function, this is broken; users now see a tweet from a user they may not follow, so they may not immediately assume it’s something you recommended.

I’m thinking of this in terms of my Hack Bend Twitter account. In that case @hackbend is definitely a brand I’m pushing, in that I want to build awareness of Hack Bend and ultimately build credibility and drive more traffic back to that blog. When I do a manual retweet, followers can quickly and easily see that @hackbend has posted, and recommends something. With the new Retweet function, they don’t immediately see @hackbend, and—if they’re looking for Hack Bend-related tweets—they potentially miss it.

So I’m a little on the fence. I think for my @hackbend account, where branding is definitely an issue, I will continue to do the manual "RT @username" retweeting (unless I just get lazy). Otherwise, on my @chuggnutt account, I’ll keep playing with the auto-Retweet feature. But I’m curious as to what other people are thinking.

An interesting experiment might be to track which style of retweeting generates more traffic; do a Twitter post in one account, linking to a site (tracking hits from Twitter, of course), and then retweet it in the two different ways in another account. There should probably be various controls, but I’d be curious to see which works better.