As the velocity of communication approaches realtime, language compresses.

Think about it. When people originally started talking about Twitter, the first thing they’d always mention was the 140-character limit that the service imposes on tweets.

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What goes around comes around, if always a little faster.

Remember when we first started using email, back in the foggy depths of the twentieth century? The great thing about email, everyone said and everyone believed, was that it was an asynchronous communications medium.

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The release next month of The Beatles™: Rock Band™ is shaping up to be the cultural event of the year, if not the millennium to date.

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Forget altruism. Misanthropy and egotism are the fuel of online social production. That’s the conclusion suggested by a new study of the character traits of the contributors to Wikipedia.

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It’s amazing that, before Google (GOOG) came along, any of us was able to survive beyond childhood. At the company’s Zeitgeist conference in London yesterday, cofounder Larry Page warned that privacy-protecting restrictions on Google’s ability to store personal data were hindering the company from tracking the spread of diseases and hence increasing the risk of mankind’s extinction.

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Twitterification continues. Not only are other social networking sites, such as Facebook, scrambling to pour their members’ energy into the realtime stream, but more traditional publishers are also adopting the Twitter model to firehose their content. Build your arks, my friends: The stream is going mainstream.

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Three truths:

1. Google is a middleman made of software. It’s a very, very large middleman made of software. Think of what Goliath or the Cyclops or Godzilla would look like if they were made of software. That’s Google (GOOG).

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“Controlling the stream” is not just one of the major life-challenges facing elderly gentlemen; it is the center of industrial competition on the realtime social network that we once termed “Web 2.0.” Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, gave a speech yesterday before a group of advertising executives in New York in which she argued, as the Wall Street Journal reported, that “banner and text ads are old news.”

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One of the goals of the software coder is parsimoniousness. Because every line, even every character, of code places a demand on the computer processor, the pruning of instructions to their essence makes for faster, more efficient programs and an optimized system. The art of the coder, like that of the aphorist, is one of compression.

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Here’s an incredible, and telling, data point. In a talk yesterday, reports the Financial Times Richard Waters, the head of Microsoft Research, Rick Rashid, said that about 20 percent of all the server computers being sold in the world “are now being bought by a small handful of internet companies,” including Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Amazon (AMZN).

Recently, total world-wide server sales have been running at around eight million units a year. That means that the cloud giants are gobbling up more than a million and a half servers annually. (What’s not clear is how Google fits into these numbers, since last I heard it was assembling its own servers rather than buying finished units.)

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The Singularity–the prophesied moment when artificial intelligence leaps ahead of human intelligence, rendering man both obsolete and immortal–has been jokingly called “the rapture of the geeks.” But to Ray Kurzweil, the most famous of the Singularitarians, it’s no joke. In a profile in the current issue of Rolling Stone (not available online), Kurzweil describes how, in the wake of the Singularity, it will become possible not only to preserve living people for eternity (by uploading their minds into computers) but to resurrect the dead.

Kurzweil looks forward in particular to his reunion with his beloved father, Fredric, who died in 1970. “Kurzweil’s most ambitious plan for after the Singularity,” writes Rolling Stone’s David Kushner, “is also his most personal”…

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In response to the flood of prescription brain stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall on college campuses, a group of academics from Stanford, Harvard, Cambridge, Penn, and other schools say the time has come to allow such drugs to be prescribed to healthy people for “cognitive enhancement.” In a commentary published yesterday in Nature, they argue that such drugs, as well as future therapies like brain chips, should be viewed no differently than communications technologies or good sleep habits.

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Microsoft is about to take trailer park computing, or, as The Register has dubbed it, white trash computing, to its logical and necessary conclusion. The company’s next generation of utility data centers will take the form of–you guessed it–trailer parks: sprawling, roofless parking lots in which all the components–server clusters, power units, security systems–will be prefabricated off-site, packed into containers or other types of “modules,” trucked in, and plopped down on the ground as needed. All employees at the new centers will be required to wear wifebeaters and carry around 30-packs of Busch Light.

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There’s something about the crisp autumn air that brings out the philosopher in Mark Zuckerberg. At this week’s Web 2.0 Summit, the Facebook founder mused, according to Saul Hansell of the New York Times, “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and [the] next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.”

Hansell dubs this Zuckerberg’s Law. But I believe it’s actually Zuckerberg’s Second Law. Zuckerberg’s First Law, enunciated on another fall day almost precisely one year ago, took this elemental form: “Once every hundred years media changes.”

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Are we missing the point about cloud computing? That question has been rattling around in my mind for the last few days, as the chatter about the role of the cloud in business IT has intensified. The discussion to date has largely had a retrospective cast, focusing on the costs and benefits of shifting existing IT functions and operations from in-house data centers into the cloud. How can the cloud absorb what we’re already doing? is the question that’s being asked, and answering it means grappling with such fraught issues as security, reliability, interoperability, and so forth. To be sure, this is an important discussion, but I fear it obscures a bigger and ultimately more interesting question: What does the cloud allow us to do that we couldn’t do before?

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