Just Another Blog…Or Is It?

Shout out to Josh for sharing this with me….

So my friend Josh found an article about how science is connecting brain activity to Twitter. Essentially, they hook up a device to measure your brain waves and when you focus on a particular letter on the computer screen, the computer will figure out what letter you are focusing on based on your brain activity when the computer blinks certain rows of letters. The article explains it,

“The interface consists, essentially, of a keyboard displayed on a computer screen. “The way this works is that all the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually,” says Williams. “And what your brain does is, if you’re looking at the ‘R’ on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the ‘R’ flashes, your brain says, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Something’s different about what I was just paying attention to.’ And you see a momentary change in brain activity.”

You can tweet this message and people with locked-in syndrome, in which they can’t communicate, but their brain is working completely are able to communicate with the rest of the world. I found this so interesting because on my favorite TV show House, one the patients had locked-in syndrome or something similar to it, and was hooked up to a computer and a cursor to where up was yes and down was no. However he couldn’t communicate anything past this. With this new brain-twitter interface, these people are able to communicate normally.

After Blair Garrou’s talk to our class, I started noticing that ShareThis is everywhere! The icon looked familiar when he brought it up in class, but I wasn’t sure. Then later that day, I was researching something for another class and found that the article had a ShareThis link. It was so subtle that I barely noticed it, and realized that I had never bothered to use it before (mainly because of a lack of recognition). In fact, I would say that the ShareThis looks like just text from the parent website and not another company’s icon. However, I found that the ShareThis feature was super cool and easy to use, as I simply shared my article with my Twitter page. All I had to do was enter my name and password, and it appeared on my Twitter account without my having to go the Twitter page. ShareThis had so many options of where to push your shared information that it made me think that you don’t really need a Facebook or Digg button anymore. I like the idea, especially if they can unobtrusively help advertisers choose what I would be interested in, just by my sharing behavior and the behavior of my friends.

As a thought for the venture capital side of things, I also found it interesting that Blair didn’t care about monetizing Twitter or any of the other “web 2.0″ websites. I find this to be very true among venture capitalists nowadays because I’ve been researching Twitter for class and some of the possibilities to monetize their service and while many experts and bloggers have their ideas, the venture capitalists supporting Twitter are perfectly fine that there is no money coming in the door. The question for me and the rest of our class today was why. Shouldn’t they trying to find a business model and make money? I feel like the value of a large network of users and their information is being bidded on my venture capitalists more than the actual returns they could make in the next year or two. As Kevin said in class, they are hoping to make it big. In a sense, venture capitalists are accustomed to taking more risk, and the cloudy companies with huge network potential are where the money might come from. Overall, I feel like the talk was very enlightening and made me think much more about the VC market and how companies are getting started (and exiting) now.