Based on a truthy story

Since the first time Steven Colbert said the word, I've been obsessed with truthiness. That 3 minutes of satire - hell, those 3 syllables - has set the entire tone for the Colbert Report and also spoke a lot of truth about the United States in 2005, in the deepest depths of the Bush administration.

I'm going to skip the entire chapter about how sides selecting their own facts has come to dominate American culture, election cycle, blah blah blah.

While it's easy to say all the blah blah blah of truthiness is deplorable in the public square, it is totally awesome in my private life.

In fact, the fellow pictured in this post is actor Jeff Daniels. In a different context, however, the man in the picture is Will McAvoy, the character Daniels plays on The Newsroom, drawing from someone not unlike Keith Olbermann: equal parts TV blowhard and Edward R. Murrow. 

Daniels is truth; McAvoy is fiction.

He has a Twitter account. To clarify: McAvoy has a Twitter account. @WillMcAvoyACN speaks with his own voice and interacts with real people on Twitter. 

There are a few other "people" like him on Twitter: @JoshuaLyman, @Toby_Ziegler, @Bartlet and @sam_seaborn, to name a few.

Indeed, there are entire casts of Aaron Sorkin TV shows on Twitter. 

On Twitter, this is nothing new. Inspired by Fake Steve Jobs, CEOs and celebrities have had shadow Twitter accounts that exist entirely for parody. Hence the Verified Accounts feature letting you know when a Twitter handle really belongs to the famous person in question.

But whereas the parody accounts are simply parodies, these Sorkin characters break the fourth wall in an incredible way. They're convincing. The characters behave on Twitter exactly the way you'd expect them to, based on the shows. @sam_seaborn speaks in short, pithy sentences. @JoshuaLyman yells at Donna across Twitter (OK, that one's a little cheesy). @Bartlet speaks with the authority and poise of a former president (which he would be today), with subtle biblical references sprinkled in. They humorously needle each other and they respond to real-life current events like the 2012 election debates.

None of them are Verified Twitter accounts. But you wouldn't want them to be, because it would break the illusion. Under the way Twitter runs that feature, a Verified mark would give away that the account is purposely manned by HBO or NBC. And if it's manned by a Hollywood studio, it's for promotional purposes. And if it's for promotional purposes, it's cheesy and lame because it's being written by an intern who got stuck on the social media desk because they're the youngest person there.

Yes, if you pull away the smoke and mirrors, it's almost certainly a Sorkin fan writing tweets to entertain fellow fans. But the same applies to any entertainment: The West Wing was just Martin Sheen walking around and saying things in an authoritative voice. The smoke and mirrors can always be pulled away, but sometimes we willingly go along with it.

We allow suspension of disbelief to enjoy the great stuff Sorkin writes. And now there's a compelling case to allow it in our very real Twitter feeds every day. This is big.

Jeff Daniels is truth; Will McAvoy is truthiness.

Fruit Theory

Dudes pursuing girls have a number of theories that purport to explain all the mysteries of women and give men the upper hand in the chase.

My personal favorite is Ladder Theory, which greatly (and effectively!) simplifies the differences between the ways each sex perceives the other. In this context, you might also consider the whole pickup artist thing as another theory.

Today I offer the world a new way to look at things: Fruit Theory.

Fruit Theory proposes that the availability of women in a certain area will match the availability of produce - fruits and veggies - in the same area. 

To kick things off, I propose three areas where I've lived recently that conform to the theory very well:

California: Abundant and awesome in every shape, size and color
Texas: All about outer appearance, no taste
Tokyo: Shaped differently, high-quality, but very expensive

Gentlemen of the world, how does your city stack up? Please let me know - this theory needs to be tested.

Tablet Friendly

The iPad chipped away at me and now I want one. That's how I've felt about it since it was introduced. The value prop just got gradually better, little by little, and I would necessarily go past some tipping point. Here we are thanks to the new hardware and software.

I think the initial proposal was that Apple would sell you everything you wanted: books, magazines, newspapers, TV shows, and maybe the occasional Angry Bird. But it looks like what emerged instead is a fractured ecosystem in which content makers privatized and decentralized whatever it is they offer. The downside is that I have to have separate apps to read, watch, or otherwise consume the stuff I want to. The New York Times and The Economist, two of my regulars, live in separate apps. But on the plus side, apps for Netflix and Hulu hold a lot of video. I can get live Japanese TV from NHK World. And with a web browser and an RSS reader I can follow all my usual websites. And once I can get a decent TV, for $100 I can start beaming all my stuff everywhere thanks to AirPlay. And best of all, I can do all of those things all over the world. 

What's more, iPhoto for iPad is a big deal. It's a fully-featured desktop app with a wholly replaced interface. It's the Minority Report interface we've dreamed about. We're now really getting stuff done with gestures and touch. It's Direct Manipulation taken to its logical extreme. I think it's a sign of very good things to come. 

One thing I love is the Photo Journals feature, where your photos fill up the page along with contextual maps, calendars, and blocks of text:

Why am I not publishing a website that looks more like that? Why aren't there images strewn about in every which direction? Why aren't there big quote boxes setting off my best lines? Some high-readership websites are beginning to take their cues from print magazine layouts, but why isn't that in my blog software? I think Apple has quietly pushed the envelope here for web design. 

I'm so swept up in the mood that I've changed this blog's design yet again, this time to something a little better suited to tablet reading. Images will be prominent, when they're there, and text columns are much wider for much less wasted space. Colors are very e-reader-ish, too. 

I think everyone will eventually hit the tablet tipping point, if they haven't already. This is just the time where I'm convinced I need one. 

Language and the Internet

This Wired column by Clive Anderson is fascinating. What if Google's improved translation features (try them out in Chrome if you're doubtful) unifies the users of the Internet, and everyone can post in their own mother tongue simultaneously, letting automated translation sort it all out?

Certainly, any activity requiring serious precision — legal proceedings, business discussions, diplomatic negotiations — will still need expert human translators. And in the short run, English will probably dominate those fields. But most people don’t need that level of quality to chat with foreign friends or surf the international Web.

At once, I'm thrilled and mildly concerned about the prospect. I think the 10-year-old in me that first got on the Internet would feel the same. When I was that little, the first website I was visited was nintendo.com (I was a big, big fanboy). The second was nintendo.co.jp. I have no doubt that being able to see a little sliver of the Japanese world back then was a big inspiration to go on to learn Japanese later in life. What if I had Google Chrome 15 years ago? Would I have been too lazy to bother wanting to learn Japanese?

Every so often, I start to miss Japanese life and language and need to reconnect with it. I'll crack open a beer and log in to my iTunes Japan account. Last night, I spent an hour checking out what was popular lately, but also just listening to random podcasts about the Japanese music scene. As I put it to Suihan: 

i'm at once very happy that i can understand what's being said (thanks to having studied) and relieved that the 'net has developed to the point where i can just jump into the japanese world on demand. they go hand-in-hand

I guess the real question is, will the Internet make future generations more internationalized, what with all this translated communication, or will it make them more insular and dependent on their own language and Google translation?

I, for one, welcome our 2010 overlords.

Holy crap, it's 2010. Twenty-ten. We can finally stop saying "two-thousand and ____." 

Update: wow, it took me a long time to correct that line from "tho-thousand." I'm losing my edge.

Back to story: I, for one, am relieved.

It's been pretty popular to make lists of the best (or worst, or whatever) of the decade we just completed, but I thought I'd try to do you guys a service and lay out a few ground rules for the decade to come.

1. Piracy will become uncool.
Trendsetters in the gaming world have already moved in this direction, and the freeloading style of downloading music and movies will no longer be edgy and cool. It's a thing of the Naughty Oughties, people. A lot of this will come thanks to affordable, usable digital content. Netflix and iTunes are leading the way, and marketplace competition from big sellers like Amazon (or legit free rides like Spotify) should make things a lot more interesting. $8 for an album ain't bad. I'd rather pay $5-7, but we're getting there.

I'm not suggesting that piracy will disappear. But it will be one of the lamer corners of the Internet, like 4chan.

2. You will be nickeled and dimed to death.
Small fees for things will go completely out of control. Have you seen those commercials for Ally Bank, the bank that doesn't deal in small print? Yeah, they deal in small print. Maybe, just maybe, we'll move toward a haggling culture in response. We've already moved this way with cable and Internet providers, for example.

3. You will carry a networked device everywhere.
iPhone users, even 3GS owners who reluctantly got one with a Christmas 2009 gift card, are early adopters in terms of buying come sort of persistently handy, persistently connected device. If I had to guess, cell phones will be our social devices and tablets will be productivity machines. As a result, asking IT to troubleshoot your iPhone 4G will be considered rude, but you'll be having lots and lots of problems with your wonderful, foldable, handwriting-recognizing tablet machine of awesomeness.

4. "Baby mama" and "baby daddy" will become commonplace social entities and will no longer be considered damaged goods.
Thanks, divorce. Easily offended groups of unmarried people with babies will come up with a politically correct term for baby mama/daddy, and it will be such a stupid term that it's beyond my creative capacity to name it now.

5. Rich Americans will finally work out and eat healthily and do these correctly.
Health gurus will go upmarket, resulting in Dr. Oz-branded foods at Whole Foods. What's more, the Ugly American will now rear his head in strange new places, like Southeast Asia, when such a tourist asks if the snake he's eating was killed humanely.

6. The price of oil will rise steadily.
You'll start paying attention to those "10 things you can do to lower your energy bill" articles, and you'll end up a miserly user of energy. You may also buy a car that looks cool and goes slow, like the Ford Fiesta or whatever becomes of the Toyota FT-86.

7. Airline crashes will increase dramatically.
Fly on big planes between big cities, amigos. Regional jets will continue to be flown by exhausted, underpaid, illegally under-rested young pilots. These guys already sit on the poverty line, and they'll continue to take the brunt of cost reductions so you can still have your $99 ticket to New York. The solution is obvious, but for deregulated airline management, easier said than done.

8. Sorry about that last one. You'll have more fun this decade.
Time management and getting things done (GTD) will be a big fad in the mainstream. You'll get more chores done in your off time, leaving you more time to chill with amigos.

I'm ringing in 2010 by being exhausted. Finishing this post now, while it still gets posted as being on January 1st. Happy new year!