This week, Bill Gates joined Twitter. (In a matter of hours, he had over 100,000 followers.)

Roughly 200 miles above the earth, someone else also was sending a first message to Twitter. NASA astronaut T.J. Creamer posted "Hello Twitterverse!" (surely the 2010 equivalent of "Hello world!") directly to the social networking site from aboard the International Space Station. According to a CNET article, previous astrotweets had to be emailed to ground control, which then posted them.

Happy New Year! Welcome to 2010. No flying cars yet, but it still feels like the future.

And Skype is hoping to help make our future a little clearer.

When I was a kid, there was a little exhibit tucked away in one of the theme parks in Orlando, FL--either Walt Disney World or Universal Studios, though the nostalgia part of my brain has long since turned all of that into an indecipherable mash of childhood joy--displaying a single, futuristic device that, at the time, seemed as amazing to me as a personal jet pack. It looked like an ordinary office telephone--lots of buttons, a little on the bulky side--but it had a single distinguishing feature that made it better than any other phone I'd ever seen: a video screen.

Google this week unveiled Google Dashboard, which brings all of the information that we knew Google was collecting about us into one convenient, tidy browser window. All those accounts--Gmail, Blogger, Google Docs, Picasa, Feedburner, etc.--and snippets about their most recent activity now can be accessed from a central location.

And, of course, the reactions have been mixed. For some, the ability to see and edit all these accounts (e.g., to delete search histories) is a matter of convenience. For others, seeing all that information in one place is a bit of a privacy nightmare and makes Google look even more like the "Big Brother" some critics have made it out to be in the past.

The Gartner technology research firm broke some conversational ice earlier this week when, at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando, analysts told attendees that their corporations should stop with the heavy-handed restrictions on social networks in the workplace. "Banning access to social media from the corporate network is futile. The world we live in is digitally enabled and socially connected," CNET News quotes Gartner vice president Carol Rozwell as saying.

Ever since the word "google" became synonymous with "search for on the Web," I've been interested in how the Internet affects language. More on that will have to wait for another post, but the subject serves only as an excuse to ask the following:

Are you a waver? Have you found other people to wave to? Do you find that waving increases or decreases your productivity?

There was much to-do this week concerning Google Wave, the search giant's still-in-the-works communication tool.

Search has been at the center of the Internet since the first mom walked in and said, "Come on, guys. This series of tubes is a mess. How do you ever find anything in here?" But the main goal of search has been, at least for the most part, efficiency. The way to search better is to search faster and more with more correct and accurate responses.

During the bubble days, it seemed like everyone was running a search engine from his garage. I'm sure there still are numerous search engines available, but I don't know what they are. And who would want to go up against a behemoth like Google—or even lesser search beasts like Microsoft or Yahoo!

And so we are left with the Cola Wars of our day. Now that everyone's got great algorithms that find things faster and better, it's time to find things shinier. Enter Microsoft Bing's Visual Search.

 I know it must sometimes seem like the only software news these days is the result of some Web service's meltdown, but it's hard to argue with the tens of thousands of people discussing it on Twitter at the moment, the tech blog coverage, and the "Top n lists" of "things to do while Gmail's down."

Comment from a friend:

"Tomorrow's headlines: Twitter is down ... worldwide productivity skyrockets."

Of course, that isn't taking into account all the people who tried to post to Twitter and, finding it wasn't there for them, froze in place, never to be heard from again waiting for things to return to normal.

It was forty years ago today that the Apollo 11 lunar lander touched down and delivered the first people to the face of the moon. It was hailed then (and still is today) as one of humanity's greatest achievements. And though the moon hasn't become a vacation spot (or even a regular destination for astronauts), kids who have grown up in the past four decades have recognized that glowing, shifting orb of the night sky as not just a source of light or even Earth's greatest satellite, but also as a place to which it is possible to travel, given a great deal of money and some pretty stupendous technology.

But, as noted by Erik Peterson in a blog post at testingReflections.com today, we've come a long way since the technology of the Apollo mission.

It isn't often that something comes across the StickyMinds news desk that surprises me. A bug here, a hacker there. Someone won't reveal the passwords to the city network of San Francisco. Someone's hiding Trojan horses in Harry Potter videos.

But I wasn't prepared to see the headline "CompuServe Signs Off."