Pew Internet & American Life Project reported on Internet status update trending (see results here). They have shown a significant increase in Internet users updating status on some social networking site. In April of this year it was at 11%. Five months later results showed 19% of Inernet users updating status on a social networking site. That’s nearly 1/5 of the Internet population updating their status somewhere.

“Three groups of internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of this activity: social network website users, those who connect to the internet via mobile devices, and younger internet users”

In this study, 54% of Internet users have some type of wireless access to the Internet (via cell phone, wifi, etc.). Of those, 25% use Twitter or some other service up from 14% in December of 2008.

“Owning and using a wireless Internet device make an Internet user significantly more likely to tweet.”

When asking wireless Internet users why they value their mobile connections, 50% say to stay in touch with other people. (I read this as status updates.) 

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In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 Congress directed the FCC to come up with a plan and metrics for measuring this plan to get broadband accessible to all Americans. As a result, the FCC has published a request for comments here.

Excerpt: Driven by technology and market forces, this evolution of communications services to broadband creates many opportunities for our country, but it also has a significant impact on the circuit switched Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), a system that has provided, and continues to provide essential services to the country.

What does this mean for the end user? Hopefully this will open the doors to a whole slew of new application opportunities for developers. Take Google for example; the chromium OS that they are touting is 100% a browser. There is nothing else to it from an end user perspective. Why? I think the idea is to increase mobility and give you access to your data no matter where you are. All you need is connectivity. I read an paper a long time ago entitled "Rise of the Stupid Network" written by David Isenberg. It described a dumb pipe. Google is trying to reverse this by making dumb computers with a smart network. What better way to make use of blanket broadband for the population than to make the services live in the cloud?

One project that jumps to mind is Bespin found on mozilla labs. Its a great project that puts a developement environment in the cloud and lets multiple developers collaborate on code, no matter where they are. Its all about mobility. I love having access to my email from anywhere, any device. Using apps like Bespin let me and my colleagues have access to my coding environment from anywhere. Its no longer tied to my laptop. I see a bright future ahead for all end user as these technologies slowly roll out to the world.

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There are a ton of different cell phones out there. The problem that you run in to as a developer is deciding on which phone to develop an application for. Depending on your choice you end up deciding what language the application is written in, and in many cases what your limitations are going to be as a result of this decision. Java: When writing apps for phones in java you gain portability. The problem here is that you can also gain a myriad of issues with particular phones, and partic... [More]