Look back at the state of technology thirty years ago. Now, imagine yourself thirty years in the future.

What kind of untold, amazing sites are in store for us?

Based on what the New York Times envisions for their own web site, not a hell of a lot is going to change. Today, some visitors have been smacked in the face with a full-page popover ad showing an imaginary NYT site from 2040.

Where’s the fantasy? Where’s the awe-inspiring vision? The mockup looks like a fairly run-of-the-mill Wordpress theme. It’s the same three-column layout that we see on most blogs (like this one) right now. I was expecting an Optimus Maximus and I got a plain old black Logitech keyboard.

Maybe the Times crew knows something I don’t, but I sure hope that in thirty years I’ve come up with an experience for this lowly blog that is a little more compelling and a little less cookie-cutter.

At least they had the balls to use a different font in the header. That as to count for something, right?

[via Technologizer]

1. The Link Dumper. I have no problem with you sharing links on Twitter. If I’m following you, there’s a decent chance I will be interested in the same sites you are. However, that doesn’t mean I followed you hoping that you would share every single URL you find the slightest bit share-worthy.

And please – mix it up a little! Constantly dumping links would go like this in real life:

“Dude, you gotta see this web page.” “Dude, you gotta see this web page.” “Dude…” That kind of crap will get a stapler thrown at you at the office.

2. The blip.fm’er. You know what? I’m glad you’re really into your music. You know what else? If I really wanted to know every song you were listening to RIGHT NOW, I’d probably follow you on Last.fm or Blip.fm itself. Say something between tracks at least.

If a friend of mine called me every three minutes to tell me what song he was listening to, I’d block his phone number and replace all his MP3s with “Afternoon Delight.”

3. The self-promoter. What’s that? You write for a big blog? Hey, great! I actually read your posts fairly regularly. Once in a while, however, it would be nice to see that you like to talk about other things you’ve read, not just your own fabulous post – just so I don’t think you’re a completely self-absorbed prick.

4. The caps locker. Whether you know it or not, most of us are smart enough to tell something has you excited by the words you choose and your punctuation. Perhaps you’ve heard of the exclamation point? You haven’t? It’s two rows up on your keyboard from the caps lock key, and you obviously no where that is.

5. The @spammer. It’s common knowledge that @replies are more likely to get a response than DMs. Still, if you want to @spam me, at least wine and dine me a little first. Make me feel like you actually want to converse, don’t just get up in my face with your unsolicited verbal garbage.

Those are mine…What about yours?

Finally, Ev came out and said it this morning (on The View, of all places). Twitter’s not for sale. Really?

No shit.

In case it hadn’t been made abundantly clear before, Twitter wants deals – plural – not a straight up purchase that will put them under someone else’s control.

They want to be “the platform” for microcommunication and profit from things like NowPublic. They want to profit from access to their data and users, not from grabbing a nice, fat, wad of cash from another big IT company (or publisher). It makes sense to me – then again, I’m no social media analyst.

Twitter has become far too important to settle for a simple sell-off.

Now that I’ve really become active, however, I’m starting to see an unexpected benefit. Like so many other limiting factors, Twitter’s challenging 140 character maximum has become an opportunity to improve myself.

How, exactly?

I’m not content to post messages in that abhorrent web 2.0 shorthand. You won’t catch me tweeting things like UR, OMG, or ORLY – I could probably come up with more current examples, but this isn’t a language I care to learn. Kind of like Esperanto.

I hold myself to the same standards I do when I write anything: I follow grammatical and syntactical rules as closely as I can, and make sure my spelling is impeccable. Regardless of what the general perception of a tweet is, it’s still content that appears on a web page with my name on it so quality control is important.

Trying to make those controls work within Twitter’s limited space mean that sometimes I have to re-think an update three or four times before pulling the trigger. I may have to look for synonyms or completely re-structure a sentence.

It’s a bit like playing Tetris with words.

The well is a specific size, and I have words of varying lengths that need to fit in a logical order. Unlike Tetris, I can pause, remove a word, and drop in a new selection that is a better fit. As I continue playing the Twitter game, my brain becomes more nimble and able to fit the pieces into place more easily.

Treating Twitter like any other writing you do is key. If you wouldn’t want to publish a piece in a newspaper that looks like your tweet, rethink and rework it until you’re satisfied.

This post is a riff on a short twitter conversation between me (@leemathews) and @seanharrison.

Send @wefollow a tweet with three tags under which you’d like to be indexed, and you too can be buried beneath page after page of Twitter elite. It’s supposed to make finding users with specific tags easier, but for right now it’s pretty much just a high score list.

For example, Rose himself wins the tech category. Do you follow him? Check out his tweets – they’re not exactly what I’d call #1 Tech Tweeter material. Few links, lots of socializing. Tim O’Reilly at #5? Yeah, that’s a better choice.

I just don’t see much (if any) value in WeFollow right now for the little guy. Add yourself, sure, but know that you’ll be buried beneath a slew of popular users there just as your already are on Twitter.

If the service were put together by anyone but Rose, it’d be glossed over by RSS readers everywhere and filed amongst the dozens of Twitter API also-rans that appear on a weekly basis. Make no mistake, Rose’s status makes WeFollow what it is, not the fact that it’s a breakthrough.

For now, I’ll stick with good old search.twitter.com and twollow.com. They work very nicely, and there’s no pissing match going on.

I’d love to be able to use Twitter as a resource, but right now I can count on one hand the number of truly informative users I’ve found to follow. For my tech blogging, I’m still using Google Reader, Technorati, and Techmeme for the bulk of my tips.

For the most part, recommended industry muckety-mucks on Twitter provide little more than random musings and self-promtional dreck. It makes sense that they do. After all, Twitter is an incredibly good way to create a massive number of trackbacks to your own site.

It’s frustrating, and coupled with the volume of tweets like “finished sharpening pencil #4″ it creates a real problem for people wanting to utilize the site as a tool.

Sure, there are dozens of sites that tap in to Twitter’s API dozens of different ways to provide dozens of different, targeted data feeds, but there’s no “killer app” yet, and Twitter is just begging for one.

Please. Someone. Anyone. Help.