Micro Persuasion

Rolfe Schewe sent me a heads-up on Twitter tonight that Google Profiles now has added photo streaming. All you need to do is point Google toward Picasa, Flickr or any other photo sharing service that supports feeds and it will pull in your public photos. Here's my profile. (Also, if you haven't verified your Google Profile as I have below you might want to follow these instructions.)

Google keeps adding features to these profiles. Recently, they made them searchable. This is clearly a not-so-stealth social networking site being built right before our eyes. But I am wondering if they will turn this into a lifestreaming site that competes with Friendfeed. Keep an eye on this space.

I want to make a bet with you today. By January 2014 I will wager that in the US almost all forms of tangible media will either be in sharp decline or completely extinct. I am not just talking about print, but all tangible forms of media - newspapers, magazines, books, DVDs, boxed software and video games.

Don't believe me? Consider the following news items, all of which broke in the last month ...

Finally, if you need further proof, when was the last time you bought a CD? Exactly. For me it was back in 2003. I haven't purchased a newspaper in at least two years and the number of people who I see toting them on my morning train have declined too. I canceled my last print subscription this month and I am now living 100% "media green." Also I recently signed up for Safari Books Online and I am liking it a lot, though it's pricey and their iPhone client needs a lot of work.

We're moving fast toward becoming a society that consumes media entirely in digital format. Part of it is environmental, but a lot of it is because of broadband and connected devices. Now of course it will take a long long time for this to become a global phenomenon. But in the US at least, the pace has picked up a lot just in the last few months. Further, with the very green-aware millennials set to become the dominant demographic in the US by 2010 I would expect you will see even more of this.

So what do you think? Participate in the poll below. (Feed readers will need to click through)

I actually found this one through an Adwords link in my Gmail and it's a gem.

Tabbloid is a "hatchling" project from Hewlett-Packard that turns your favorite feeds into a personal magazine (HP's personal systems group is an Edelman client). All you need to do is point it at one or more feeds and set up a delivery time and you will get a nicely formatted PDF by email. You can also generate a PDF on the fly from one or more feeds.

Below is what a sample magazine issue looks like. I simply pointed Tabbloid at my favorite feeds from Google Reader and generated this PDF.

I am a big believer in cloud computing. It's the wave of the future. Work is transitioning from the desktop to web applications, albeit slowly and not without challenges. But make no mistake, it's coming. The success of the netbook market is a great sign of things to come. However, I believe smartphones will give this category a run for their money.

Earlier this week Alex Wolfe at InformationWeek published an interview with me about how I use my iPhone as the fulcrum of my productivity system. I want to share with you one part of the interview here since it summarizes my thoughts on how cloud computing and smartphones are going to change the game...

While others like my friend James Kendrick disagree, the future is coming a lot quicker than I imagined. In fact, it sort of arrived today. This morning a brand new iPhone app from Quickoffice called MobileFiles hit the App Store. You can get it on iTunes here and it's free. I downloaded it and boy it is sweet.