The Nxt Twitter

What will be the next Twitter?

Not the next brief message of 140 characters or less to flash across the screen of your cell phone or monitor, but the next innovative step in the evolution of communication.

Each innovation seems driven by the compulsion to communicate faster, with less and to a larger audience. Snail mail, to email, to text messages and now Twitter. How fast is fast enough? How brief is brief enough? Or, for that matter, what is too fast? Too brief?

We are rapidly approaching the limit of communication. Any faster, we'd be sending our messages back in time. If our messages become any briefer, we begin to lose information and they look more like an unrecognizable code.

The question is, what could be next? A cryptic code may not be too much of a stretch, so long as one understands the code. Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphics are merely symbols packed with a lot of info. That is what communication is all about: Information and its transfer. But even symbols that say a lot may quickly become too limited and burdensome. It's quite possible that the next innovation in communication technology will be about pure data presented in audio and visual packets.

Television's Biggest Loser showcased 24 Hour Fitness' Bodybugg device that is essentially a fancy calorie counter, monitoring the energy output of your every move. The humble clip-on pedometer has given away to the runner's GPS tracking device coupled with a heart rate monitor (which doubles as an iPod). Nursing homes are looking into the possibility of analyzing the stool and urine sample of their residents by having the flush of every toilette run past high-tech monitors which would catch health problems long before they became problematic. Likewise, analytical companies are on the verge of creating the "Lab on a Chip"; a device where one only need place a drop of liquid sample on a piece of silicon with nano-sized detectors that analyze the sample as it passes through a miniature maze. Remember the movie Aliens where the Colonial Marines had their vital signs wired to a central command center for viewing? The US military is looking into making that a reality. Just like the movie, tomorrow's soldiers will be wired for video. Why wait for an embedded journalist's account of events when you can go on line and see them for yourself? Well, a time-delayed censored version in any case.

What does this all mean for tomorrow's Tweeter? An instantaneous kaleidoscope of information shot-gun blasted at viewers with no input effort on the part of the sender. Senders will wear their information recording devices which broadcasts to viewers who will watch on their mobile devices. Viewers will see a YouTube-esque first person gamer's view of somebody's activities, complete with vital stats. Giggling groups will gather around an LCD screen to note that What's-His-Face's heart rate and hormone levels are spiking through the roof while talking to What's-Her-Face...all set to an iTunes soundtrack in the background...and being recorded to Facebook for posterity. Across town, parents will be relieved to know that the elevated heart rate alarm beeping on their child monitor is due to simple adolescence and not a car accident.

Tomorrow's Twitter will not be some clunky keyboard dependent tool. Whatever it turns out to be, it will only require the user to breath to inform his or her fans of whazzup. Well, that is until they invent the mind reading device...that sends messages back in time.