Watch the kiddies

I just got back from Miami where I helped my son pack up his college dorm room and return home for the summer. As comfortable as I felt in a college setting, I knew with one glance in the mirror that I did not belong - but that is another story.

It started in the airport. My son plugged his laptop in to the charging station and his iPhone into his computer to charge it. He told me ATT used to let him run the internet on his computer via his phone but that was cut off. So, he let the phone charge and played a game on the computer.  Not much story there other than the connectivity of devices.

When we got on the plane, he logged into the pay internet service using a credit card (mine, of course) and this is where is started. I call it meta-tasking, a level of multitasking above the capabilities of even a computer fluent guy like me. (meta - "higher, beyond," from Gk. meta  (prep.))

He flipped back and forth among at least four sites I could recognize though my reading glasses - tumblr, liarblog, facebook, the airline's flight tracker and who knows what else. He clicked on videos to allow them to load on the slow ariplane network, flipped to read some funny stuff elswhere, clicked to have conversations with four frinds on facebook at the same time, came back to watch the loaded video, then back to pictures, then funny stuff, then more videos, then the flight status...........




I got dizzy watching him. Windows were flying - front to background, back to foreground, all displayed at the same time (sort of tiled). But I sure ingested a lot of humor and guys doing dumb stuff ending with a crotch landing on a hand rail. 


This kid types faster with one thumb on his iPhone than I type with two hands on my regular keyboard. And if I don't have my glasses, well, you know.


How does this relate to investing? There must be something there to harness all this meta-tasking. I have no idea what but unless you spend time with the kids you will have no clue how they function in the world. Thy may not have jobs just yet but they will  and they will want technology that allows them to do a dozen things at the same time. And they want internet sites that keep up.


I am happy I can write my column with Pandora radio playing on the same computer.

Facebooking instead of blogging

By now, you've noticed the blog has been really sparse in terms of regular updates. I hope you have seen the scrolling window to the right --> with updates fed from my Facebook page. There are always several updates per day there.

My question for all with a focus on people using social media for business is whether you find the same redundancy I now see. I use my Facebook status pretty much like Twitter with quick bits of information, links and charts. Further, it gets sent over to my LinkedIn account for even wider distribution.

I get the feeling this kind of communication is saturating intended targets making it all less valuable. Personally, I do not follow anyone on Twitter. Most of the time they reference links to stories which I do not have time to read. Or, they tweet so much that I have to sit there watching a live data feed to keep up. Nobody with a job has time for that.

Oh, and I am talking about just following one person. What if I follow the hundreds that I see many others follow. Noise, noise, noise.

I like doing the Facebook updates although I am also guilty sometimes of posting links. But I do post charts and I do make quick market comments (such as yesterday's "oil services stocks look sickly.")

Let me know how I can interact with all of you so it is not 1) boring or 2) noise. Keep in mind that I am not going to cannibalize my pay service to do it.