Twitter is a micro-blog service that is also a social network, think Facebook if it were only status updates.  Users can post up to 140 characters long posts, called “tweets”.  The social aspect comes into play when you follow other people’s twitters and they can follow in turn follow.  If you want to reply to what someone said, you can send an @reply, which will be published publicly.  To send a private Direct Message, you must follow the person and they must follow you back. From time to time, users tag a post by using the pound sign followed by a term, for example #twitter.

There are many ways to post a tweet besides just using the website.  There are a number of popular desktop Twitter clients for heavy Twitter users.  TweetDeck and Twhirl are two slick programs that use Adobe AIR.  Also the all in one IM program Digsby supports Twitter, although it is Windows only.

If you are away from your computer, there are still a number of ways to tweet.  The simplest way is to text your tweets.  No special software is needed, you just need to register your phone number on the website.  For iPhone and iPod touch users, there are a number of Twitter apps available.  Go check out Evan’s Cage Match review of the two most popular apps, Twitterific and TwitterFon.  Finally, BlackBerry users can download TwitterBerry to feed their tweet-addiction.

Evan has written about RSS feeds before.  The best analogy for podcasting is radio shows that you can listen to on-demand that you download from the internet.  Many popular news outlets and radio shows have podcasts.  Nowadays, some podcasts come in the form of videos and are sometimes referred to as vodcasts.

Most websites with podcasts will have a way for you to download or stream the episode straight from the site itself.  If there is a show you like or that you may want to listen on say, your iPod, as you ride the bus/train to work, you can subscribe to a podcast in iTunes.  iTunes has a large library of podcasts that you can choose from, anyone can submit a podcast to be on iTunes.  Once you subscribe to a podcast, iTunes will download the latest episode whenever it comes out.  You can then listen to it on your computer or put it on your iPod for portable listening.

Other music managers for MP3 players have similar features, and you can always download the audio file and put it on your MP3 player manually.

Cloud computing is using the internet for computing services as opposed to applications and files stored locally on your computer.  Your files and even the programs themselves float in “the Cloud” of the internet.  This is a very broad definition of cloud computing; it encompasses many everyday websites people visit.  All of the Web 2.0 sites, like Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook, fall under the umbrella of cloud computing since data is stored on some server out there and is accessed over the internet.

But there is so much more to cloud computing than just that.  Read on to find out about the dream of “the Cloud”.

The ultimate dream of cloud computing is the simplification of the personal computer down to the bare bones.  These machines, called thin clients, would be little more than a relatively slow processor, RAM, some storage space, and an internet connection.  All the heavy duty processing and computing is moved to the server, so the thin client just needs to serve as a gateway to access and manipulate the data.  Thin clients have caught on in some corporate environments, but are not by any means mainstream.

This is not for want of attempts though.  Larry Ellison tried back in the day to push his New Internet Computer (NIC) idea.  The NIC was a very basic computer that ran Linux off a CD.  It was both an internet appliance for home use and a thin client for business use.  The machines did not find much of a market with either audience and soon disappeared from the market place.

Recently, a company called CherryPal resurrected the formula of the thin client with their CherryPal C100 desktop.  The hardware is meager, but CherryPal plans to offer programs such as iTunes, OpenOffice, an IM client and more all through modified version of Firefox that the machine runs.  Each machine will get 50GB of storage on the server.  The C100 costs $249 and was supposed to ship this month but has since been delayed.  Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out to be vaporware.

The ultimate goal of cloud computing and thin clients makes so much sense that you must believe in it.  With cloud computing, you detach yourself from your computer.  Your information is available anywhere there is internet.  And thin clients provide the portal to all that data without the complexities of a full computer.  While these concepts are easy to believe in, there has yet to be a manifestation of these ideas that lives up to the promises.

Linux is really not that different than Windows or Mac OSX, in fact many of the things you probably love about Windows or Mac OSX were stolen from Linux. "Spaces" which were just recently added to Mac OSX have been in Linux for some time now, even Windows has a powertoy to give it similar functionality. The big difference between Linux and Mac OSX and Windows is that Linux is Open Source, which means in general Linux is free.

Linux is pretty powerful these days and can run on low end PC’s making it ideal for some old computer sitting in your basement or garage. There are tons of different distributions of Linux, you’ve probably heard of Ubuntu, which is one of the most popular. My favorite distro is Fedora, but some other popular ones are openSUSE, PCLinuxOS, and Linux Mint (actually a variation of Ubuntu).

Edit: Some people have commented or contacted me saying they want more of an explanation for this article, which I am willing to do, but the purpose of this site is not to be too technical so I’m trying not to get too deep and start talking about kernels and what not. I would rather not mention things like Unix, but Linux very similar to Unix (see the wikipedia article on Unix-like for more). Maybe you’ve never heard of Unix, but if you’re a Mac user, your on the most widely used Unix-based OS in the desktop market (according to Apple).

Linux uses various desktop environments, most popularly GNOME and KDE, which can cause problems, being that programs made for one will not always easily run on another. People will say that KDE is nicer looking than GNOME, but it’s a matter of opinion, I tend to go for GNOME over KDE. Many popular Linux distributions will offer a choice of desktop environment, Ubuntu uses GNOME, but also makes Kubuntu, which uses KDE, and Xubuntu, which uses Xfce.

That’s it, a brief rundown of Linux. If you’re not happy, keep posting complaints and I’ll probably keep adding more.

Open Source Initiative Logo

I figured I should give an explanation of Open Source before I do the Linux article. To put it simply Open Source is when a team of programmers releases the source code to the public so that other people can help out with the project. Two awesome things that come out of open source projects: free software and great software. You may have noticed that a lot of the software we review here at JPT is open source, and for good reason. Read after the jump to learn more.

I’m a huge supporter of open source software, because as I said its great software and its free. If you want a textbook example of popular open source software then look at Firefox, one of the best programs out there, and if you really wanted you could help out with its development. Now that I’ve set the foundation expect the WTF is…Linux article in the near future.

RSS is great because if you know how to use it than it will keep you up to date with the newest stories on your favorite web sites. The first thing you need to do is find an RSS reader to use, most browsers these days have them built in. My personal favorite is Google Reader, because you can access it from any computer with internet access.After you have a reader, you go to your favorite web site and look for the little orange logo shown above, that’s the symbol for RSS. Add that feed to your reader and you’re set, any time a new story is added to that web site it will quickly show up in your feed reader. So now instead of constantly checking 6 different sites for new stories, you just check your feed reader.

P.S. This site has an RSS feed, you should probably subscribe to it.