Thanks to the wonders of Twitter, and a tweet from @yuccatree, I found this wonderful video clip from 1964. The clip, filmed the year before I was born, shows Arthur C Clarke predicting a future which would have seemed incredible, even preposterous, for most people then. His predictions have, however, come true in many ways - 1:32 into the film and things get spooky.

Watch and enjoy:

Anybody care to predict what the World will be like 50 years from now?

Take 20 minutes (ok, 21 actually) out of your day for this very well-made video. If you're concerned about over-consumption or the future of our environment, this is for you. If not, watch it and tell me you still aren't:

Found via @swissmiss. Thank you

Nice call Twitter! Excellent idea. This'll really further Twitter's growth and popularity!

OK, enough sarcasm. Twitter seemed to have made a monumental decision sometime while I was offline and/or asleep. They have decided to not show public replies sent by friends to people they themselves are not following.

"So what?" I hear you say...

Well, it's a pretty daft decision and reminiscent of the types of quick and dirty decisions that we've witnessed coming from Facebook before.

For most people the very essence of Twitter is that they find interesting information and new ideas from the Tweets they see in their "feed" - a feed of Tweets that comes from people they know, and follow, and those who they don't know but are shown because somebody they already follow is privy to. This very ability to see new information and, as a result, find new people to follow based upon the themes they Tweet about, is one of (if not the main) the features that are behind the phenomenal growth that Twitter has seen over the last months.

Now they've switched it off. Not smart.

Here's what Twitter user Scott Hepburn (@ScottHepburn) had to say about it:

Thank you Scott. Perfectly summed up!

Don't take away the very features that make your platform usable.

It really does seem to me that a lot of tech start-ups in the social space are prone to making hasty decisions without really thinking them through. Users are not very forgiving - the competition is only a click away and people will look for other options.

Has the Twitter train run out of steam?

If the UK government's and security service's plans are anything to go by, we could be faced to redefine the term "privacy". Reading this article today on the BBC website, amongst others, it seems that the current UK economic disaster is of little relevance to decisions to spend huge amounts of money on increasing the amount of internet surveillance.

Under the title "Protecting the Public in a Changing Communications Environment" a new Home Office project would call for communications companies, telecomms operators and probably hosting companies amongst others to store more data regarding contacts made over the internet.

Twitter, Facebook and other social networks will find themselves being asked (or maybe not) to store data about every contact, every transaction, if you like.

The project will, according to the BBC article, cost £2 Billion.

While I can see the need for the security services to be able to intercept and monitor communications by known terrorists, paedophiles, other criminals and potential trouble-makers, the sort of increase in surveillance apparently being proposed is going to produce such a mountain of data that it'll be impossible to actually notice and act upon any real "threat" activity.

Previous discussions about Echelon and other "surveillance databases" have mentioned amounts of data which, even with the computer power available today, are likely to be anything less than transparent to those authorities claiming their usefulness.

Is this the price of "freedom" from terrorism and crime?

Now, I know this video has been posted on many sites and seen by many people. Well, now it's here too:

I think the way that Jonathan Jarvis presents the theme "credit crunch" is basically Oscar-worthy! Take some time out to watch the video and, assuming you're not a finance expert, you'll find yourself nodding your head at the messages it contains.

The credit crisis is, at heart, down to greed. Nothing complicated, just plain old-fashioned greed. Jonathan Jarvis' video illustrates this nicely. Thank you Mr. Jarvis!

Robert