If it is a big event, I want to get a phone call or an email or letter, not a Twitter broadcast going out to your 5,000 so called friends. As for value in commerce, I’m sure it has value to the inventors and investors, but I haven’t seen anything significant that it offers me that the internet doesn’t already provide.  And the Internet sits quietly waiting for me to access it instead of hounding me all day with a continuous stream of nonsense.  I heard someone suggest that people sit around twittering so they can tell each other about “great deals” that some store may have and therefore it’s a great business tool to have a twitter account.  Hmmm. I get an involuntary email about every two minutes from some e-commerce knucklehead that does the same thing. And I spend time deleting those as soon as I can. If I had a twitter account, I’d just have to spend more valuable time deleting them too.  As for Facebook, there is nothing that I want everybody to know about me — my friends and family know enough already. What I want to know about you I’d rather get face-to-face so I can try to determine if you’re lying or not.
Then there are all these “apps” that are supposed to make our lives easier. You know, push a button and find the closest restaurant, tire store, phone store, bathroom, gas station, etc.   You’d think we are a society of people that just get in our cars and drive around willy-nilly with no specific direction or purpose until we have a need.  Personally, I have very specific goals in mind about where I’m going, when I’m going there and what I’ll need when I get there. I try to prepare before I go and use the internet from the comfort of my office or home before I leave — saves me time and gas (not to mention, keeps me from being distracted while I’m driving).  Having to find the nearest “scotch tape store” after I’ve left on a trip because I forgot to put it my trip plan is inefficient. Besides that, trying to read anything like a map or information on a Smartphone is downright frustrating.  The font size is too small to read unless you zoom in and then you can’t tell anything about the map. Every time I do this I find myself sitting in a parking lot messing with the phone wishing I’d just brought an old fashion, fold-out map with me and thinking about the time I’m wasting.
However, all is not lost because the technology marches on and maybe somebody will invent a larger “pad” technology that will work better than a Smartphone….oh yea, they already did. And I think I just saw a bunch of people driving around “willy nilly” messing with their I-Pads.