I got up this morning to find the world going crazy about the new Twitter iPad application – see this glowing Engadget review and the Techcrunch titled Twitter Just Killed Something Else: Their Own Website – the title gives a hint of where I’m going with this post. (Apologies for the fact this link is to the shortened post on TC – the full one seems to be currently unavailable).

So I installed the Twitter iPad app on the iPad I have in my kitchen at home, and  – I loved it too.  I won’t go into the features here (check out the Engadget review for that), but I will say that I got lost clicking around my timeline, user profiles and the tweet history of individuals in a way I haven’t done for a while.  Put simply, the Twitter iPad app is a much more engaging way to use the Twitter service than any other interface I’ve seen.

Even though books have been around for well over 500 years, we're still dealing with a working definition for the word book. Tina Seeling (Executive Director of STVP, author, and Stanford professor) threw out the following definition: "A committment to a deep-dive on a topic using the written word." The panel took a deep dive (with the spoken word) on what a book is and what the future of the written word is, but only after Tina showed off some of her favorite students and their exploration of the future of the book publishing industry. Apple's iPad, the Nook, Amazon's Kindle, and the entire concept of ebooks have forever changed an industry that fell asleep at the wheel.

In early June, Apple changed it's developers Terms of Service. Here's the important jargon:

3.3.9 You and Your Applications may not collect, use, or disclose to any third party, user or device data without prior user consent, and then only under the following conditions:

- The collection, use or disclosure is necessary in order to provide a service or function that is directly relevant to the use of the Application.