News came out late yesterday that the wife of Evan Williams, chief executive and co-founder of Twitter, has been tweeting whilst giving birth. Now this immediately seemed to be wrong on so many levels Sneak could not even marshal his thoughts.

But then in a moment of clarity Sneak realised that, whilst standing for all that is bad with the world, it is utterly right and natural that it happened. In the land where there's an app for everything, where egg white omelettes, juice bars, roller blading, frozen yoghurt, and Gwen Stefani came from, it is entirely natural that a woman should inform the world via a web-based micro-blogging service that her nether regions are slowly dilating. It should be a warning lesson to us all in fact - there is such a thing as TOO MUCH INFORMATION.

There is a future not too far away, where everyone is talking about everything all the time. Not listening, you understand, just updating their profiles; sending out their tweets, posting their ill-informed claptrap on blogs not dissimilar to this one - pushing out endless streams of pointless information.

In what is surely the perfect vignette of San Francisco life in the Noughties, Williams' wife, after informing the world that her waters had indeed broken, said she was timing contractions on an iPhone app. Lord have mercy on all our souls. An iPhone app for that? In this regard Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker surely has the best idea on what to do to followers of the sinister iPhone cult:

"An app that makes the iPhone scream 'I'VE GOT AN IPHONE!' each time the user pulls it out of their pocket. Once activated, it would be impossible to switch off. The only way to stop the constant embarrassment would be to repeatedly crack the device against a wall, or preferably your own face, until it shattered."

Can we make Brooker the next chief information officer of the world please?

11 Aug 2009