The immediacy of Twitter is exciting, but the usefulness of it takes a little while to become apparent. Following celebrity lives is one predictable function, but more serious business uses can be found:

• tweet news of your latest products/services to your clients (assuming they ‘follow’ you — something that you can encourage)
• tweet interesting links/information in your business field (don’t just promote yourself relentlessly)
• encourage informal feedback from your customer base, or from potential customers
• listen to leading thinkers/businesses in your field, follow up on some of the suggested links/hints.
• Programs like TweetDeck can help you keep track of everyone you find interesting in the world of Twitter.

Twitter’s truncated, telegraphic form cuts a lot of the clutter found in the rest of the web. It also presents very low entry barriers, and if you only send a couple of tweets a day and read a few more, represents less of a time commitment than a blog. The web is a very important business frontier, and tweeters are often right out on the bleeding edge.

LiveBrush is one of the more fully featured programs available in the Adobe AIR format (see earlier post). While nowhere near as precise and powerful as programs such as Illustrator or CorelDRAW, it does have a few interesting aspects and the virtue of being free. Users select a brush from a fairly extensive list, and apply to a new page. The brush stroke is governed by the velocity and direction of the mouse, and the result is often very smooth, spontaneous and gestural — far from the quavery line many of us manage when drawing freehand. The brushstroke has a mind of its own — only notionally following the path you lay out for it. Each succeeding stroke has its own layer, and the artwork can be saved and exported at any time. Despite the many customisation options, Livebrush feels more like an interesting feature of a larger program than a standalone entity.  It’s most obvious use is as a means of producing some loose, interesting brushwork and importing same into a drawing or layout package.

Massive, extremely cheap online storage capacity and increased bandwidth are currently enabling a whole slew of new Internet businesses to carve out fresh niches. It’s like the Cambrian evolutionary ‘explosion’, this time with silicon-germanium rather than carbon. On the subject of carbon, Carbonite is one of those interesting new cloud-based businesses. Users install a small program, indicate which folders they want backed up and then sit back while their data wafts into the ether, settling in the (apparently) secure servers of said company. The program only runs while your machine is idle and only updates changed files. If something at your end eventually goes wrong, the data retrieval process is very simple.

Possible worries include the security of private data, and the rights of those from non-US jurisdictions if something did go awry. Users might also want to limit the amount they back up if their up/down data limits are fairly small. A graphic designer, for example, might balk at tagging folders with multi-hundred megabyte image files.

Assuming Carbonite is stable and here for the long term, approximately AUD$65 per year for unlimited backup seems very reasonable.

Here’s another neat little service on the cloud — optical character recognition (OCR) for free. If you couldn’t be bothered re-typing a two page printout with no electronic original, just scan the accursed thing and upload the file to OCR Terminal. The result can then be saved back to your PC in a number of formats. Their free basic account allows you up to 20 pages of OCR a month, which might be more than adequate for the occasional emergency.  Additional pages are charged on a per page basis, with the amount per page dropping with increased volume. After a certain point, however, one is entitled to wonder if a standalone OCR program would be cheaper. For any machine, anywhere convenience, however, this is a site worth bookmarking.

In the realm of layout and design, Adobe products tend to loom very large. Most designers submit to their gravitational pull and use at least one and usually all of the big three: Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. However, there are plenty of people whose design needs are not extensive enough to justify the purchase of these quite expensive products. They recognise the diabolical shortcomings of Microsoft’s drawing and layout programs, and hence strike out for an alternative. Scribus and Inkscape may appeal to those with a DIY frame of mind. Both are free, and both were developed by a fairly egalitarian community of developers.

Scribus is a page layout program. Its capabilities largely mirror those of InDesign and QuarkXpress, but it cannot open files created with those programs (for practical and legal reasons). Those familiar with commercial layout packages will find the Scribus interface very familiar. Additional and improved features are added on a rolling basis, and new builds can be downloaded from their website.

Inkscape is an Illustrator/CorelDRAW analogue. The drawing tools are adequate for all but the most demanding users, and files can be output into industry standard formats such as EPS and PDF. As per Scribus, the developer community surrounding the program is open and cooperative, and the program continues to evolve.

One of the interesting aspects of cloud computing are programs that run over the web rather than residing on your PC. Examples include Google Documents, Google Calendar, online accounting solutions and online databases. Other programs install on your computer, but run on a constant stream of data from the web, such as Google Earth, or are strongly integrated with the web, such as Picasa. Google Docs and Calendar have fairly limited capabilities compared to programs that reside on a single PC, mostly due to limitations of bandwidth.

In the graphics field, the tentative beginnings of a revolution may be underway. A company named Aviary is offering a suite of programs available online, no installation required. The programs include both an image editor and a vector drawing editor. The drawing tools are frankly primitive compared to those available in Illustrator or CorelDRAW. The fundamental interface is very similar, and it could prove a useful introduction to people learning to use vector packages. As a pointer to the future, however, it is very interesting indeed. If a user could access a professional standard drawing package online, would it make sense any more to install it on your machine  (assuming reliable internet service provision)? Updates and improvements would be instantly available to the user, projects could be stored and distributed online, and collaboration and file sharing would be much easier. The same reasoning would apply to photo editing packages and even page layout programs.

The financial model would be subscription or membership based, with some offerings perhaps free in return for advertising placement. Bandwidth would have to improve dramatically for this to become a reality. Barriers to entry for new software providers would be much lower. Personal computers would become windows to a much larger realm rather than kingdoms in their own right. Perhaps the only role for the home computer would be to mirror the data generated online in as a form of insurance. Perhaps each of the programs to which the user subscribes could have an offline version for moments where the web is unavailable, resynchronising when the connection is restored.

For years, PC users used Microsoft Office programs as a default option, and helped make Bill Gates very rich. Many PCs came with Office pre-installed,making it the path of least resistance. Despite their flaws, programs such as MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint went on to dominate the PC world.

In recent years a real option has taken shape, and it is free. Funded by Sun Microsystems, the Open Office suite includes the following elements (with the Microsoft equivalent after the colon).

• Writer: Word
• Calc: Excel
• Impress: Powerpoint
• Base: Access
• Draw: Visio
• Math: Equation Editor

For the vast majority of users, the Open Office programs are equivalent in features, stability and useability. Files are saved either in the native file type, in the equivalent Microsoft file type and many other options. Plugins are available for Microsoft users who wish to open files from the native Open Office formats. Neo Office is a Mac version of the Open Office suite.

Open Office reports that 100 million downloads of their software have been completed, with 50 million of version 3.0 alone. Open Office is popular with businesses and governments trying to cut IT costs.

As an open source suite of programs, Open Office hosts an community of programmers, who contribute coding and capabilities to the project.