During the past month, I’ve written approximately 450 short “micro-blog” messages on Twitter; that works out to approximately 15 “tweets” a day. During the same time, I’ve managed to find the time to write approximately 5 blog postings/articles. That’s quite a difference: five blogs per month, versus 15 tweets per day.

What’s the explanation? Simple: I’ve been really, really busy for the past month — tons of work, deadlines, and two weeks of travel to India and Russia. It usually takes me an hour or two to compose a blog posting (this one is much shorter, but take a look at my “Visiting Russia” blog for a more typical example) — and when I’m really, really busy, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to find the time.

By contrast, a Twitter message takes less than a minute, and often just a few seconds. There is rarely any organization, preparation, investigation, analysis or other time-consuming activity. It’s just 140 characters (or less) of quick typing.

As I acknowledged in my earlier comment about the blogging/micro-blogging distinction, it’s certainly true that some of my Twitter messages are banal and trivial. But here’s a contrast: while I’ve been typing this blog entry, I’ve been watching (out of the corner of my eye) the steady stream of Twitter messages from my small community of “followers”. I noticed someone saying “I wish there was a version of Windows Live Writer for the Mac. I like using the Mac to write but blogging with the Mac blog tools is not fun.”

Without any serious thought, I typed a quick reply to this individual: “Have you tried Ecto as a Mac blogging tool? Works pretty well for me.” (And indeed it does: I’m using it to compose this blog posting!). My message took about 15 seconds, and barely represented a interruption/distraction at all; and while it didn’t transform society in any fundamental way, it may have provided some small benefit to one individual. Indeed, it might have been mildly interesting to a few dozen others who happen to see my tweet on their Twitter display.

It’s also interesting that the number of people who “follow” my Twitter messages has grown to the point where it’s approximately equal to the number of people who visit my blog … except that my blog-visitors are more likely to be frustrated by the fact that I’ve only posted five new articles in the past month. And the Twitter followers (as well as “indirect” followers who see my Twitter updates on Plaxo and Facebook) are likely to see a dozen “tweets” a day, which may help them remember who I am (in contrast to the person who posted a comment on my “Visiting Russia” blog posting that said, “Who is mr. Yourdon btw? Well known businessman?”).

Bottom line: hopefully my schedule will calm down in a couple of weeks, and I’ll be able to spend more time on old-fashioned blogging. But in the meantime, while things are busy, Twitter turns out to be a more effective way for me to stay in touch…

To put my vintage-2008 impressions in perspective, I should also mention that I’m a child of the Cold War, and never expected that I would ever visit Russia during my lifetime. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I was certainly aware of Sputnik and the military might of the Soviet Union; and I watched in fascination as the Soviet empire disintegrated into roughly a dozen separate republics and transformed itself into a capitalist economy. But the knowledge was all academic, and removed from my day-to-day experience — just as the news that most Americans read today about events in Baghdad and Tehran is more abstract than real.

But putting all that aside, here are my two basic impressions of the country: first, St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) is a beautiful city whose history and wide streets and historic palaces and art-filled museums (including the Hermitage, with over 3 million items of art) made me smile with pleasure. And second, Moscow is a huge, throbbing, aggressive, traffice-jammed, breathtakingly expensive powerhouse of a city, with 14 million inhabitants who seem ready to compete with New York and London and Tokyo and Shanghai and Bangalore and every other center of power around the globe. As such, the contrast between St. Petersburg and Moscow was roughly similar to the contrast an American sees between Boston and New York.

But Moscow actually reminded me somewhat more of Las Vegas than New York: much of the downtown area was garish and brightly lit, with casinos doing their best to lure patrons in for gambling; well, perhaps it was a little like Times Square in New York City. Of course, Times Square isn’t a good representation of the entire spectrum of neighborhoods and regions of New York City (especially when one thinks of Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx and Staten Island); and in a similar fashion, I eventually traveled through various other parts of Moscow that seemed more residential and settled.

The “expensive” aspect of Moscow was an interesting anomaly: a Westerner staying in a first-class hotel can expect to spend $200 for an average bottle of California wine, and even more for French wine. Breakfast for two in our hotel room was a hundred dollars, and a small can of diet-Coke in the mini-bar was $15. But “average” Russians obviously don’t spend that kind of money, and I could even see the contrast while visiting an icon of American culture: lunch for two at McDonald’s was a little under $9. (There are now a couple dozen McDonald’s restaurants in Moscow, and they seem jammed at all hours of the day: when I was there, there were 20 separate lines of people, and each line was at least 10 people long.)

In between the low-cost fast-food economy, and the rarefied world of Bentleys and Mercedes and hundred-dollar bottles of wine (note: the Wikipedia article on Moscow claims that it is the home to the largest number of billionaires in the world), I assume there’s a middle-class society, with middle-class salaries and expenses — though someone did tell me (seriously, I think) that there is no middle class in Russia — and that people are either very poor or very rich. A week’s visit isn’t long enough to get any real sense of proportion about such issues; and even if I could have understood the social/economic demographics of Moscow and St. Petersburg, I have no idea if it represents the rest of this enormous country.

Indeed, I got a brief impression that Moscow and St. Petersburg might well be isolated enclaves, unlike the rest of the country, during a 5-hour train ride between the two cities. The train was punctual and efficient and comfortable, though it seemed a little more drab than the Amtrak Acela that whisks people back and forth between New York and Washington; but what really struck me was the drab nature of the countryside as we rolled along the relatively flat, wooded terrain. After passing through grim suburbs outside St. Petersburg, and then cemeteries and construction sites, most of what I saw (aside from birch forests and stands of pine trees) consisted of small villages along the train track, with tiny wooden homes covered with corrugate-iron roofs. It reminded me very much of the small towns and villages in the interior of Alaska, though I never got off the train to actually see what any of these villages was really like.

Aside from the garish, high-priced nature of Moscow, one of the other unforgettable impressions was the traffic: massive gridlock and traffic jams everywhere, at almost every hour of the day or night (except at 4 AM, when we headed from downtown to Domededovo Airport for our flight home). In many cases, traffic is literally at a standstill for long periods of time; and parking in the downtown area seems utterly chaotic. As a result, many people depend instead on the Moscow metro for local travel; in 2007, it was the most heavily-used metro system in the world, exceeding both Tokyo and New York.

My impressions of Russian culture and people are somewhat haphazard, and quite possibly inaccurate; but I’ll pass them along for whatever they’re worth. First, I was impressed by the complete absence of trash and littler in both Moscow and St. Petersburg. Perhaps this is because I arrived in Russia after spending a couple days in Bangalore, India — which is quite filthy by comparison. But New York is filthy, too, by comparison: in Moscow and St. Petersburg, I saw no trash, no newspapers blowing along the street, no food-wrappers, no plastic cups. Also: most of the men were relatively unattractive and poorly dressed. By contrast, the women were tall, thin, attractive, stylishly dressed in miniskirts or tight jeans, and consistently wearing high-heeled shoes even in places where it made no sense (it seemed almost impossible, for example, to walk across the cobblestones in Red Square in high-heeled shoes; but women did so without hesitating).

The stylish women, by the way, as well as the frumpily-dressed men, were uniformly young — either in their early twenties, or even younger. I did see a few “babushka” women begging for coins in various places, but I didn’t see any old men; perhaps that’s because the average life expectancy for Russian men is only 56 years. Because of a combination of low birth rates, high abortion rates, alcoholism, stress, and various other health problems, the population of Russia has been declining — in absolute terms — for the past several years, and is not expected to stabilize until approximately 2020.

Also, I found it interesting that almost nobody hesitated to offer a wide range of criticisms and cynical comments about Vladimir Putin, though I couldn’t help noticing lots of plain-clothes police throughout Moscow, with sunglasses and dark-tinted official cars. On the other hand, no one offered any criticisms — or even showed any interest — in the politics or actions of George Bush. For that matter, nobody showed any curiosity about the current U.S. presidential campaign, sports, movies, music, or any other aspect of American culture; and I only saw (or heard) one American tourist during the entire trip (but lots of American, British, and European business people in the hotels where I stayed).

So much for the culture of Moscow and St. Petersburg. What about the computer industry, which was my official justification for visiting the country? Again, my visit was too short to form any in-depth conclusions, and I didn’t have a chance to visit any IT organizations or Silicon-Valley-style software shops. But here are the quick impressions I got from meeting and chatting with a couple hundred people in five different presentations that I gave during my visit:

1. Everyone seems well-read, and well-informed about current developments in software engineering, project management, and computer science. They’re hungry for knowledge, and they’re willing to do their homework.
2. For example, virtually everyone in my audiences was familiar with the concept of “function points” as a language-independent metric for measuring the size of a computer program.
3. Also, I was surprised by the number of people in my presentations who said their software organization had received an SEI-CMM “Capability Maturity Model” assessment, and even more surprised by the number of people who said their IT organization had achieved level-3, level-4, or even level-5. It’s not as high as one might expect in India, but significantly higher than what I’ve seen in the U.S.
4. On the other hand, I didn’t see much evidence of tool usage. An informal survey, for example, indicated that far less than five percent of the people in my presentations were using software estimating tools based on models like COCOMO; in the U.S., the figure is typically closer to ten percent.
5. The English literacy rate was much higher than I expected. When I give presentations in most parts of Europe, Asia, or South America, at least half of the audience listens to simultaneous interpreters via headphones; in Russia, roughly 75% listened to me in English, without translation.
6. I saw two Macintoshes in the audience; I’m not sure whether that’s good, bad, or irrelevant — but I found it interesting.
7. There is a very large and active group in Moscow discussing and debating agile software development; I was encouraged by this, and was again impressed by how well-read and well-informed people were on this topic.
8. I learned that while it’s amusing for Americans to joke about being banished to Siberia for various forms of misbehavior, it doesn’t make any sense to Russians in the software industry. The largest city in Siberia, Novosobirsk, is home to a thriving software outsourcing industry, and many Russians consider it a pleasant place to live.
9. Notwithstanding the success of outsourcing firms in Novosobirsk, St. Petersburg, and Moscow, I did not get the impression that Russia is likely to mount a serious competitive challenge to the outsourcing industry of India or China. Historically, Russian programmers have succeeded with outsourcing, especially for customers in Europe; but their salaries have increased dramatically in recent years (partly because of the inflation associated with the oil industry), and the labor rates are now almost comparable with Europe and the U.S. Aside from that, the population of Russia in January 2008 was a mere 142 million; that pales in comparison to the one billion inhabitants of India and the 1.3 billion inhabitants of China.

So … that’s what I saw, and what I learned, during my whirlwind visit to Russia. My wife and I took a couple hundred photographs during the trip, and we’re organizing them into a coherent collection (and removing most of the redundant pictures of Lenin’s Tomb and St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square). Once we’ve finished, we’ll upload everything into an album on my Flickr archives; check back from time to time to see if they’re there…

… and yet … and yet … I couldn’t help being tempted every time I saw one, every time I saw an advertisement, a billboard, a TV commercial. Maybe it’s the seductive power of Apple’s marketing, maybe it’s just a case of utterly irrational geek/gadget lust; but whatever the explanation, the reality is that I finally succumbed, about a week ago, and ordered one of the damn things. It showed up a few days ago, and it seems to be working fine. The big test is on Monday: I plan to take on my next business trip, which includes stops in Detroit, Bangalore, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. It may be a non-event, it may be a disaster, and it may be an entirely new and interesting experience. We’ll see …

My friends and colleagues are somewhat surprised and bemused by this sudden change, especially since I had been fairly consistent in my opinion that there was no rational justification for getting the skinny, sleek, lightweight, sexy, oh-so-cool machine. Interestingly, what changed my mind was a review by David Pogue in the New York Times, entitled “Can Blogger-Bashers Predict the Success of a Product? Unlikely.” What caught my eye was Pogue’s comment about trying to switch back to his existing Mac laptop, the five-pound MacBook (which is what I’ve been using as my primary computer. “After the Air,” Pogue said, “it felt like a piece of Soviet Army field equipment. When I tried to pick it up one-handed, I thought I’d break my wrist.”

For some reason, this really made an impact; I don’t know why, because I normally stuff my MacBook Pro into a backpack or briefcase, which I then sling over my shoulder. But I also carry a backup battery in the same case — indeed, not just one, but two backup batteries, just in case I should suddenly find myself on a 14-hour flight to Tokyo. And then there are the cables and adapters and assorted odds and ends, which probably results in a cumulative weight of something closer to ten pounds.

With the MacBook Air, there is no option of a spare battery: the existing battery is non-removable. I’m sure that will be a problem someday, but I have to admit that it’s been a couple of years since I’ve experienced the need to swap batteries. On my upcoming long flights from Detroit to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Bangalore, and Moscow to New York, I expect to connect my Air laptop to Lufthansa’s onboard AC power system; I may end up being disappointed, but at least for now, I’m willing to take the chance.

What’s most interesting, at least thus far, is that the Air computer has forced me to “clean house,” and just load/install the essentials; after all, I’ve only got a paltry 64 gigabytes of solid-state storage. That’s a big change from my traditional practice, when setting up a new laptop: I’ve normally taken advantage of a one-click option provided by Apple, which simply copies everything from one’s old computer to the new computer. All of the programs, all of the data — and also all of the preference files, all of the leftover temporary files, and all of the flotsam and jetsam of programs that I had installed, used briefly, and then deleted (but not “uninstalled”). Believe it or not, my MacBook Pro has over a million files on it; only a small percentage are really relevant for my day to day work.

I did order an external, USB-powered 250GB hard disk, and I also ordered the external “superdrive” that provides CD/DVD storage; that takes up some room in my briefcase, but it’s still much lighter than the 2 backup batteries that I used to lug around. And I’ve uploaded some secondary files to a0GB Internet-based storage facility that Apple provides with its .Mac service (for Apple fans, I’m talking about iDisk here). And most of my mail, which I now delete pretty quickly, is on the Internet so that I can access it from anywhere; and my 14,000-picture photo archives are all on Flickr now. So 64GB of storage may well prove to be more than enough; at the moment, I’ve got a little more than 30GB of free space.

As Pogue concluded in his recent review, “this [MacBook AIr] machine doesn’t make a great primary computer, thanks to its smallish hard drive.” But it may turn out to be the perfect traveling machine, especially in an age where mobility and portability are becoming more and more essential.

I’ll let you know how things turn out in the coming weeks …

Meanwhile, I began using the Twitter “micro-blogging” site sometime in October, 2007 — which means I’ve been twittering for approximately six months. During that time, I’ve posted 2,277 “tweets.”

Thus, while I’ve been writing “formal” blog postings for approximately four times longer than I’ve been twittering, I’ve published roughly 5.5 times fewer blogs than tweets. Or to put it another way, my frequency of twittering is approximately 22 times greater than my frequency of blogging.

I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing; and I’ll be the first to admit that some of my twitter messages will have absolutely no impact on the human race. When I get up in the morning, I’ll often type the message “Good morning, Twitterverse!” into my Twitter reader (depending my mood, I use either Twhirl or Twitterific or Snitter). And when I wrap up my work,often late in the evening, I’m prone to type a message that says something like “Done for the day, going to sleep. Back tomorrow. Twitter on, dudes!” I don’t bother telling the 240 people who “follow” my Twitter messages every time I sneeze, or have a cup of coffee, but a certain percentage of my tweets are nothing more than “noise” — harmless and relatively non-intrusive noise, to be sure, and possibly of interest to a few friends and colleagues — but not something that needs to be archived on the Internet for eternity.

But even if half of my Twitter messages were as banal as the examples above — which I really don’t think is the case — that would still mean that I’m twittering 10 times more frequently than blogging. Again, that’s not necessarily good or bad; but it’s definitely different. And while my behavior might possibly be unique in this respect, my hunch is that you’ll find a similar disparity between twittering and blogging among other Internet users.

In my case, there’s a very simple explanation: Twitter messages are, of necessity, short; they’re restricted to 140 characters or less. So they tend to be one or two sentences long, and they can be written quickly. Sometimes it’s a brief answer to a question that some other Twitterer has raised; sometimes it’s a brief question of my own. Sometimes it’s a URL link to a news article that I think my Twitter followers would find relevant and newsworthy; sometimes it’s a hilarious YouTube video that someone has just sent me …

By contrast, blogging is a time-consuming activity. This will be a relatively short blog posting (by my standards), but it’s already seven paragraphs long. It has taken half an hour to compose, though that’s partly because I’ve been distracted while writing it, and have looked at a couple of websites and responded to a couple of emails. Generally, though, I have to block out a full hour to write a typical blog posting; and while the resulting material is likely to be more substantive than “Good morning, Twitterverse!”, the reality is that it’s really tough to find an hour in my schedule, day after day after day…

Some bloggers, of course, do manage to write very short blog postings; those are the folks who somehow manage to post 5-10 blog entries per day, every day. If it works for them, and for their readers, that’s fine too. But it seems like a lot of overhead (in terms of wasted space on a browser screen, not to mention old-fashioned things like CPU cycles and bandwidth, which we’re not supposed to care about any more) to have an entire blog page within nothing but a sentence or two of “content.”

In my case, I think I’ll continue taking advantage of both blogging and micro-blogging (i.e., Twittering). Blogging is great for writing a page or two of reasonably serious commentary on some topic of interest; and Twittering is great for brief, rapid-fire commentary. It’s also interesting that Twitter creates a much stronger sense of an active “community”: if I ask a question, tell a joke, or recommend an interesting Web site via Twitter, I’m likely to get a response from people within a matter of seconds. By contrast, if I write a thought-provoking blog posting, I may not see any comments attached to that entry until a day or two later — by which time I’ve often forgotten the whole subject, and have moved on to something else.

Blogs have been around a lot longer than Twitter, so it’s probably way too early to be making these comparisons and distinctions. Check back here in six months or a year, and perhaps I’ll have some additional epiphanies to share with you on the subject. Meanwhile, this blog posting has now consumed 50 minutes and 10 paragraphs of material. Enough!

Happy reading!

Eliza would begin, back in 1966 as well as in today’s web-based version, by displaying the following message:

Hello. I am ELIZA. How can I help you?

If you responded by typing something like,

“My mother hates me,”

(as I did just now, with the Web-based version) it would then ask,

Who else in your family hates you?

And if you said,

Nobody. Just my mother.

Eliza would respond with the message:

Surely not everyone?

You have to admit it: it’s a little creepy. But you can also see what’s going on: Eliza looks for certain key words and phrases, and regurgitates your answer with a follow-on question. Once the basic algorithm has been articulated in this fashion, you tend to shrug — especially if you have any ability to program computers — and say, “Of course!” And I well remember Professor Weizenbaum’s prophetic comment, in a January 1966 Communications of the ACM article entitled “ELIZA — A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine,” that “to explain is to explain away”:

It is said that to explain is to explain away. This maxim is nowhere so well fulfilled as in the area of computer programming, especially in what is called heuristic programming and artificial intelligence. For in those realms machines are made to behave in wondrous ways, often sufficient to dazzle even the most experienced observer. But once a particular program is unmasked, once its inner workings are explained in language sufficiently plain to induce understanding, its magic crumbles away; it stands revealed as a mere collection of procedures, each quite comprehensible. The observer says to himself “I could have written that”. With that thought he moves the program in question from the shelf marked “intelligent” to that reserved for curios, fit to be discussed only with people less enlightened than he.

The object of this paper is to cause just such a reevaluation of the program about to be “explained”. Few programs ever needed it more.

Weizenbaum, as you may have gathered from this brief excerpt, was a humble man, and had no illusions about the intrinsic novelty of the program he had created. I had a chance to see this, first-hand, in early 1966 when I worked as a programmer at Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC). I can’t remember the details of how we did it, but (a) we got a version of Eliza running on our R&D DEC PDP-6 time-sharing system, (b) we dialed up the Project MAC time-sharing system at MIT with a low-speed communication link, and got a copy of Eliza running on that machine, and (c) we got the two copies of Eliza talking to each other. But the problem, as you can tell from the brief exchanges cited above, is that Eliza doesn’t want to (and is utterly incapable of) talking about itself: it wants to let you talk about yourself. So the exchange between the two Elizas degenerated very quickly into exchanges of, “Thanks, but let’s talk about you,” and “No, no, let’s talk about you.

It was hilarious, but also somewhat deflating to those of us who had studied under the likes of Marvin Minsky, and thought that AI would someday accomplish what Steven Spielberg envisioned in his 2001 movie, Artificial Intelligence.Much of Weizenbaum’s subsequent career was devoted to challenging and critiquing some of the lofty — and occasionally exaggerated — claims and predictions about the future of artificial intelligence. Some ten years after he developed Eliza, Weizenbaum published what I have long thought was one of the seminal books in the computer field: Computer Power and Human Reason: from judgment to calculation. I’m delighted to see that (used) copies are still available today from Amazon.

So why am I mentioning all of this? Simply because my wife — who has heard my stories about the DEC/MIT exploits with Eliza enough times to groan every time I repeat it, but who had no idea who Joseph Weizenbaum was — tore out a page from the obituary section of the New York Times yesterday, and brought it into my office.”Ever heard of this guy?” she asked. The obituary was titled, “Joseph Weizenbaum, Famed Programmer, is Dead at 85.”

Well, god bless you, Joseph Weizenbaum. I hope you and Eliza have been ushered through the pearly gates, and are enjoying the beginning of a peaceful eternity together.