Asheron's Call 2 was the one of the first really big modern MMO worlds to shut down, so when the world actually came to an end, not much happened: The logged-in players got a perfunctory note from the developers, and then they were booted offline. But now that economic hard times are here, more online worlds are dying, and here's the interesting thing: They're realizing that they owe it to their long-time players to make it into a sort of event. Game designers are realizing that ending their world in a dramatically satisfying way is actually a very interesting logistical, ludogical, and emotional trick. In essence, we're slowly seeing the emergence of eschatology as a design challenge.

Exhibit A is the Tabula Rasa, an online world that shut down in on Feb 28, 2009. Chris Remo of GameSetWatch wrote a terrific report of the end here -- during which the designers engineered one last massive apocalyptic battle. The problem? So many players got wind of the impending badass finale that the servers slowed down under the load. So, much as you might expect in a real-world eschatalogical event, you got trippy time distortions, teleportation, and direct communications from the actual Creator.

A few choice snippets:

Some players tried to predict what exactly would happen when the event began, and where it might be focused. Some seemed to want closure, frantically attempting to obtain the final pieces of certain equipment sets or to finish uncovering all areas of the world.

Some thanked the developers for their continued support of the game until the final days; others cursed NCsoft for a perceived botched publishing job; many did both. A few stayed in character, attempting to rise to the occasion. "Men and women of the AFS, it has been an honor serving with you," offered Nebalain.

By the afternoon, the West Coast server Hydra was the last server standing. As more and more of its citizenry logged on for the last hurrah, and foreign players from dead servers poured in to squeeze a few more hours out of the game, it became increasingly congested, buggy, and lag-ridden.

The intended scenario was indeed playing out not just in the game and the fiction but as a metagame: the active duty population swelled as humanity prepared to make its final stand, while the very world itself strained under the considerable weight and struggled to keep itself together ...

Then, hundreds of players all over the world began being involuntarily teleported to an extraction location connected to the "Last Stand" area on Earth -- a small string of camps in Manhattan serving as the final holdout against the invasion ... The GMs reciprocated with server-wide missives: "ADMIN MESSAGE: As the clock ticks down, we'd like to take one last moment to thank everyone for playing. It's been a fantastic ride, and we're happy you stuck with us for the last year." ... Similar back-and-forth exchanges followed, with the GMs even breaking out that most classic of old internet chestnuts. "ADMIN MESSAGE: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US," declared the server.

If you want to see more, here are a bunch of screenshots, and some videos of Tabula Rasa for the last five minutes until it ended.

Sometimes I wish the folks who made the Left Behind game would do a game that is straightforwardly based on the narrative of Revelations -- which is, of course, one of the original design documents for the end of the world. Or maybe make a game out f the final moments of C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle, which fried my tiny brain when I read it as a child.

You can check out the column in the print mag (on newsstands now!), at Wired's web site, or via the archived copy below:

Taming the Comment Trolls
by Clive Thompson

"Obama sucks."

When Barack Obama relaunched Whitehouse.gov in January, a cry went up from his supporters. Obama had promised to take the democratized, wikified mojo of his campaign Web site -- with its open-to-all discussion threads -- to Pennsylvania Avenue. But when the Whitehouse.gov blog went live with no way for the public to post comments on it, critics began carping.

The challenge Obama faces in allowing conversation at the digital White House is obvious: trolls. Discussion-thread veterans will tell you that politics attracts more vicious, raging, insult-hurling trolls than almost any other topic. So how can Obama truly liberate the White House site without having it go irretrievably toxic? How could we actually have a nationwide political discussion area? By tapping into new techniques for troll taming.

Patient Zero here is Slashdot, the tech site that pioneered one elegant way to police trolls: crowdsourcing. Slashdot has an automated system that randomly picks a handful of readers and gives them, for a day or so, the power to describe others' comments with terms like "funny" or "off topic." Those descriptions are translated into a score from -1 to 5. Readers can set their filters so they see only comments with high ratings -- and trollery effectively vanishes. One academic study found that the majority of Slashdot readers filter out comments rated 2 or lower. Indeed, the concept of crowd-voting has worked so well that sites as high-traffic as the The New York Times now use it.

Here's another hack: selective invisibility. It was invented by Disqus, a company whose discussion software handles the threads at 90,000 blogs worldwide (including mine). In this paradigm, if a comment gets a lot of negative ratings, it goes invisible. No one can see it -- except, crucially, the person who posted it. "So the troll just thinks that everyone has learned to ignore him, and he gets discouraged and goes away," chuckles Disqus cofounder Daniel Ha.

My personal favorite innovation is disemvoweling, a technique pioneered by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who moderates the discussion threads at the geek-culture blog Boing Boing. Whenever Nielsen Hayden encounters a nasty post -- an ad hominem attack, for example -- she leaves it up but removes all the vowels: y r fckng sshl, for example. The result is incoherent enough that it's neutered, yet coherent enough that no one can cry censorship. The comment hasn't vanished.

Best of all, because disemvoweling is visible, it trains the community. "You're teaching the other commenters what the lines are by showing them comments that have stepped over the line," Nielsen Hayden says.

Now, most veteran moderators will tell you that automated systems and crowdsourcing go only so far. Most told me that if you've got a high-volume site with political content -- like Whitehouse.gov -- you'll also need to moderate postings by hand, hiring staff to look over each comment and delete the truly crazy hate-speech ones. The Huffington Post employs up to 25 people at a time to comb through its 35,000 comments a day.

If the White House were to use humans to filter posts, it could get into some dicey political situations. If it were to outright ban them, it could draw First Amendment lawsuits. So the genius of modern troll-taming techniques -- leaving trollery intact, but mitigating its impact -- neatly fits the bill. Moderation software could grow even more sophisticated at the task, perhaps incorporating collaborative filtering tools that recommend the best posts based on your likes and dislikes.

Mr. President, bring on the trolls. The commentosphere is ready for them.

(The picture above is courtesy the CC-licensed Flickr stream of Robert of Fairfax!)

NASA’s online contest to name a new room at the International Space Station went awry. The comedian Stephen Colbert won. The name Colbert beat out NASA’s four suggested options in the space agency’s effort to have the public help name the addition. NASA’s mistake was allowing write-ins. Mr. Colbert urged viewers of his Comedy Central show, “The Colbert Report,” to write in his name. And they complied, with 230,539 votes. That beat Serenity, one of the NASA choices, by more than 40,000 votes. Nearly 1.2 million votes were cast by the time the contest ended Friday. NASA reserves the right to choose an appropriate name, and an agency spokesman said NASA would decide in April.

Obviously, the comedy here is drag-and-drop perfect. But what really snapped my head around wasn't about the Colbert stuff -- it was that NASA-picked, second-place name: Serenity.

Because "Serenity" is, of course, the name of the spaceship in the dementedly brilliant Joss Whedon TV show Firefly, which Whedon made into a movie after Fox stupidly cancelled Firefly. And seriously, if you haven't seen Serenity -- the name of the movie -- then just drop whatever the hell you're doing right now and go rent it, because it is, hands down, the best sci-fi movie made in probably a decade; nerds like me watched it with the chest-ripping sensation of watching a Big Damn Trilogy being born, only to weep hot bitter tears that can burn through titanium-reinforced concrete after the movie narrowly failed to earn its investment back, which pretty much dooms any chance of sequels.

But I digress. Sort of. The point is, if "Serenity" was one of the names that NASA itself had picked as a contestant for the contest, I can only suspect -- as do many other Whedon fans -- that NASA's internal folks probably a) knew about the Whedon associations, and b) picked it because they're crazy Whedon fans too.

This would not surprise, given that fact that the mythopoeic internal lives of actual astronomers and astronauts are inextricably entangled with sci-fi; as I've blogged before, NASA's own prose -- when it describes the travels of its own space probes -- is about as hallucinogenic as Philip K. Dick at his acid-fascinated best/worst. Indeed, I always sort of crack up when I hear the names that space agencies give to their vessels, because they sound so directly plucked from Star Trek: The various parts of the space station are named Destiny, Columbus, Hope, Star, and Dawn. I think they should throw over any pretensions of not being crazed fanboys and begin naming all spacecraft directly after famous sci-fi vessels. "At 7:43 am on Nov. 12, 2009, another successful space shuttle launch took place when the Millennium Falcon blasted off on a crystal-clear Florida morning."

A side note: When I read that Colbert article, I immediately thought, I bet this story has already been twittered like four million times. (And, of course, yep.) There ought to be a long German word for that: The sensation that, even though you're not actually logged into Twitter, something you're looking at is being heavily tweeted, even as you observe it.

Gromia sphaerica, as the organisms are known, are superbig amoebas, growing up to 1.5 inches in diameter. They were first discovered in 2000 in the Arabian Sea, and have since been found in various locations around the world. Then last year a team of biologists were diving near Little San Salvador Island in the Bahamas, when they discovered a new form of Gromia -- the "Bahamian" Gromia, as they're calling it.

The weird thing is, the Bahamanian Gromia were all found at the end of a trail -- as if they'd been somehow pushed or dragged along the seafloor. This didn't make sense, because the currents at that depth either weren't strong enough or were irregular, so they wouldn't push the Gromia in single, uniform paths, the way the trails lay. That left only one possibility: Somehow, these wee blobs are propelling themselves across the ocean floor, at a pace so slow it cannot be readily observed. In a paper published a recent issue of Current Biology -- "Giant Deep-Sea Protist Produces Bilaterian-like Traces" (PDF here)-- the scientists argue this is precisely what's happening.

As they said in a press release:

"We watched the video over and over," Johnsen said. The trails couldn't be the result of currents because they went in several directions at the same spot, and sometimes they even changed course. And they weren't the result of rolling downhill. In fact, one trail was found that went down into a small depression and came back up the other side.

"We argued about it forever," Johnsen said. "These things can't possibly be moving!" But they are, at a rate too slow to be captured on the sub's video. Johnsen guesses they move maybe an inch a day or less.

Here's the even crazier thing: If these guys are right, this discovery could completely upend our ideas about the "Cambrian explosion."

Remember those tracks the Bahamian Gromia left? They're found in the pre-Cambrian fossil record. For years scientists assumed that only organisms with complex body plans that are symmetrical down the middle -- "bilateria," as they're called -- could possibly move in a fashion that would leave such trails. Thus, biologists have argued that bilateria were around before the Cambrian explosion, which sort of primed the pump for that crazily rapid diversification of bilateria into all the major animal groups we have today. But now it looks as though all those pre-Cambrian seabed trails could have been left by rolling, grape-sized ameobas. Maybe -- who knows? -- the Cambrian explosion happened even more psychotically quickly than we think. Maybe bilateria weren't kicking around for millions of years later than we suspect.

The Rolling Grape That Rocked The Fossil Record. As I've said before, you can't make this stuff up, and thankfully you don't need to.

Check below the jump for pictures of the trails the Bahamian Gromia leave!

Two years ago I wrote a column for Wired News about "The Mythical 40-Hour Gamer", in which I bemoaned that fact that most narrative, campaign-based games are so long that people who can't play for 10 hours at a stretch -- read: most adults with families and responsibilities (read: me, waah waaah) -- never finish them. This week in my column I take another run at this question from the other side: In praise of a very short game, The Maw.

It's online at Wired News, and a copy is archived below!

In Praise of the 3-Hour Game
By Clive Thompson

When The Maw was released at the end of January, critics raved. The game had everything: cute, Pixar-like graphics, charming lead characters and a kooky game mechanic -- you control a bloblike sidekick that devours enemies, getting gradually bigger (and weirder) with each chew. What's not to like?

One thing: the length.

Granted, The Maw is indeed a wafer-thin repast compared to most games these days. I'm slow, so it took me four hours, but that's still only one-tenth the traditional "40 hours of play time" that has become the atomic standard in the game industry. Since most new games cost about $60, and The Maw is $10 -- about 16.7 percent of that price -- you could argue that by math alone The Maw ought to be a few hours longer. (40 hours x 16.7 percent = 6.68 hours, if you want pinwheel-beanie precision.)

Still, the uniform kvetching about The Maw's short span made me wonder: Why exactly is 40 hours considered the natural length of a videogame? Is The Maw really too short?

Or is it more possible that other games are simply too long?

Forty hours might sound like a reasonable amount of play. But the truth is that very few games offer an experience that truly requires -- and rewards -- 40 hours of play. After all, one of the chief joys of gameplay (which nongamers tend to misunderstand) isn't in having mastered it. It's in the process of mastering it. You start off stumbling around, not really knowing what your goals are, how your enemies and obstacles behave, or the complexities of your weapons and abilities.

Then, largely through a process of head-slapping trial and error, you begin to sense how the system works. If the game is incredibly complicated -- like chess -- you've got years and years of play ahead of you; you may never really apprehend all its nuances.

But most videogames aren't anywhere near the complexity of chess. Nor need they be: They're intended as a more-immediate and user-friendly sort of entertainment. Another central pleasure of being a videogame devotee is in constantly sampling new types of play mechanics -- like the gravity-bending of Prey, the dimension-flipping of Super Paper Mario or the space-tripping of Portal. It's like dim sum for the brain: We love being handed a slightly newish (but not completely foreign) treat to puzzle over and test-drive.

But the truth is that most game mechanics simply do not need 40 hours to reach their limits. For example, I loved Fallout 3's fight mechanics and moody design, and played it for several evenings in a row. But then battles and environments began to feel too similar, and my attention started wandering. Sure, I know there's another 120 hours of stories and environments to explore. But I don't care: 10 or 15 hours is more than enough.

In contrast, The Maw felt like the perfect length -- because the game ends precisely at the moment that your learning curve flattens out. After three hours, I felt like I'd figured out every permutation of weird trick I could pull with my ever-expanding Maw -- so when the ending arrived, my brain felt perfectly exercised.

The Maw's designers understood that a campaign-style game isn't merely about keeping players going by offering them more story or more environment. It's about keeping them going by offering new wrinkles in the play. If designers run out of play before they run out of story, the game dies.

The truth is, tons of very good, very enjoyable narrative games have only about four or five hours of really serious play in them. They probably shouldn't drag on for 36 more hours. There's even a practical benefit to being shorter: A four-hour game appeals to a much larger pool of gamers -- including the many adults out there who want to experience the delicious sense of closure you get from completing a narrative game, but who simply haven't got the time (as I argued in my previous piece on "The Mythical 40-Hour Gamer").

Now, there are some obvious practical pressures on game designers to keep things long and drawn-out. Really complex modern games cost a lot of money to make, so you probably need to sell them for $60 -- gamers likely won't pay that much for a few hours of play. The market pushes designers into the temporal equivalent of bloatware. (Bloat-time?) It would be wonderful, of course, if every game hit a golden mean -- with play mechanics that simultaneously reward a couple of hours of play, yet also deepen and enrich after literally months of play. (Many argue this is precisely how a good online game functions, be it World of Warcraft or Halo, or a super-addictive casual game like the new -- and derangedly awesome! -- Drop7.)

But for my money, I'd love to see more designers aim for The Maw's mix of brevity and innovation.

So I was tickled to see that James Bridle has taken this conceit to the extreme -- by publising two years worth of his tweets as a hardcover book. He hoovered them out of Twitter using a custom script, designed it nicely, and sent it to Lulu.com to be printed up! As he notes:

When Twitter is inevitably replaced by something else, I don’t want to lose all those incidentals, the casual asides, the remarks and responses. That’s all really. This seems like a nice way to do it, and I’ll probably do it again in a couple of years time.

I love it: Backing up your tweets by turning them into a printed novel! Given the way Ma.gnolia went poof in January -- this idea might not be as idiosyncratic as it sounds, eh?

There's a picture of the cover of the book after the jump!

(Thanks to Britta Gustafson for this one!)

You can read the piece on Wired's web site, and a copy is archived below!

The Micromanufacturing Revolution
by Clive Thompson

Last summer I spent weeks shopping for an anniversary present for my wife. I searched all my usual retail sources but couldn't find anything that hit just the right note. Then I went to Etsy -- an ecommerce site where artisans sell unique handmade goods -- and found the microstore of ClockworkZero, a woman who turns old electronics gear into steampunk accessories. Presto: ClockworkZero's stuff was both gorgeous and geeky, precisely the vibe I craved. I came away with a necklace made from a vintage vacuum tube.

It turns out that I'm not alone in my search for that perfect one-off treasure. Judging from the explosive growth of Etsy and other online boutiques, the Web is spawning a curious new trend: micro-manufacturing. Consider the numbers. Etsy has 2 million users buying nearly $90 million worth of stuff annually. Its sales have increased twentyfold in the past two years. I was aware of the site but had dismissed it as some sort of urban-hipster thing -- until I started seeing chatter about it on discussion boards for wealthy professionals and stay-at-home moms.

The economy may be cratering, but people are stampeding to handmade goods. Why?

The other side of the equation is demand. The Etsy guys attribute their success in part to customers tiring of cookie-cutter products. "The '90s were the period of wearing big-box names on your chest," says Adam Brown, who heads up Etsy's cooperative advertising program. The site's popularity may also be a reaction to the slightly sour, rummage-sale feel that taints eBay, progenitor of the modern microbusiness.

But I believe our craving for one-off goods goes deeper yet. Digital culture has always been about customization and individuality: blogging your thoughts, designing monster houses in The Sims, Flickring your life, crafting gently unviewable MySpace backgrounds. It's all about creating a personalized aesthetic. After years of molding the digital world to suit our style, is it any wonder we want to do the same to the physical realm?

As Virginia Postrel wrote in her superb book The Substance of Style, Americans have become more discriminating over the past few decades. In the '60s and '70s, we worried about getting good-quality stuff, she says, because mass-market manufacturing was often of such poor quality. But most products these days are decent: the bargain-basement TV you get at Best Buy will last 15 years. So now we're focusing more on aesthetics, beauty, and uniqueness.

Indeed, as this market evolves, the physical world is going to be increasingly customized -- built to your specs by craftspeople. Etsy now runs a service that lets you describe something you want -- a pair of pants, a shoulder bag, a table -- and how much you'll pay, then artisans can offer to make it for you. (Ponoko.com has a similar setup.) And as high-end atom-hacking tools like 3-D milling and laser cutting become cheaper, those folks on Etsy will be able to quickly deliver you customized versions of a huge array of personal products: Laptops, bicycles, even robots. The Age of Bespoke Everything, as it were.

Oh, and for the record: My wife loved the necklace.

Other than the gorgeously anti-Madagascar-like narrative aspects of this story, it's also an important finding: This is apparently some of the first straightforward evidence that animals other than humans can make "spontaneous plans for future events". Normally when we notice that chimps are doing something complicated -- like fashioning a weapon -- it's really hard to parse what's motivating their actions: Are they thinking a few steps ahead? Or are they simply reacting to their immediate environment -- i.e. they're hunting right now, and so they need a tool?

In this case, the scientist observed the chimp for a full decade and noticed that he would gather rocks or manufacture "concrete disks" when he was calm -- so he can't have been motivated by any immediate, annoyed feelings towards the zoo vistors. It appeared that he was anticipating a period in the future when he would be pissed off at people staring at him, and, well, you'd need a couple of good rocks to throw at those idiots, wouldn't you? As a press release reports:

"These observations convincingly show that our fellow apes do consider the future in a very complex way," said Mathias Osvath of Lund University. "It implies that they have a highly developed consciousness, including life-like mental simulations of potential events. They most probably have an 'inner world' like we have when reviewing past episodes of our lives or thinking of days to come. When wild chimps collect stones or go out to war, they probably plan this in advance. I would guess that they plan much of their everyday behavior."

The paper -- with the tinder-dry understated title "Spontaneous planning for future stone throwing by a male chimpanzee" -- is online here, but, alas, it's behind a paywall and the researcher hasn't made it public on his own site.

(The chimp above is not the actual chimp mentioned in the study; it's a pic from the CC-licensed Flickr stream of =Thomas=!)

The current issue of Wired contains my latest feature for them -- a piece about the astonishing surge in the popularity of netbooks, those teensy little notebooks that were introduced about a year and a half ago. Essentially, it's a story about how innovation that was originally aimed at the world's poorest citizens wound up affecting -- and destabilizing -- the entire laptop industry.

You can still grab a print copy of the mag, or read it for free on Wired's web site. A permanent copy is also archived below!

(By the way, several people have asked: Which netbook did I use to write this story? I tried out several, but my favorite was the HP Mini, because it had the largest and most comfortable keyboard of any I sampled. The only cavaet: The contrast on the screen was a little low unless you tilted the screen back as far away from you as possible. The picture above is courtesy Masaru Kamikura's CC-licensed photostream!)

With that out of the way, here's the piece ...

The Netbook Effect
How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time
by Clive Thompson

Mary Lou Jepsen didn't set out to invent the netbook and turn the computer industry upside down.

At first, she was just trying to create a supercheap laptop. In 2005, Jepsen, a pioneering LCD screen designer, was tapped to lead the development of the machine that would become known as One Laptop per Child. Nicholas Negroponte, the longtime MIT Media Lab visionary, launched the project hoping to create an inexpensive computer for children in developing countries. It would have Wi-Fi, a color screen, and a full keyboard -- and sell for about $100. At that price, third-world governments could buy millions and hand them out freely in rural villages. Plus, it had to be small, incredibly rugged, and able to run on minimal power. "Half of the world's children have no regular access to electricity," Jepsen points out.

The miserly constraints spurred her to be fiendishly resourceful. Instead of using a spinning hard drive she chose flash memory -- the type in your USB thumb drive -- because it draws very little juice and doesn't break when dropped. For software she picked Linux and other free, open source packages instead of paying for Microsoft's wares. She used an AMD Geode processor, which isn't very fast but requires less than a watt of power. And as the pièce de résistance, she devised an ingenious LCD panel that detects whether onscreen images are static (like when you're reading a document) and tells the main processor to shut down, saving precious electricity.

Inspired (or perhaps a bit scared) by the OLPC project, Asustek -- Quanta's archrival in Taiwan and the world's seventh-largest notebook maker—began crafting its own inexpensive, low-performance computer. It, too, would be built cheaply using Linux, flash memory, and a tiny 7-inch screen. It had no DVD drive and wasn't potent enough to run programs like Photoshop. Indeed, Asustek intended it mainly just for checking email and surfing the Web. Their customers, they figured, would be children, seniors, and the emerging middle class in India or China who can't afford a full $1,000 laptop.

What happened was something entirely different. When Asustek launched the Eee PC in fall 2007, it sold out the entire 350,000-unit inventory in a few months. Eee PCs weren't bought by people in poor countries but by middle-class consumers in western Europe and the US, people who wanted a second laptop to carry in a handbag for peeking at YouTube or Facebook wherever they were. Soon the major PC brands -- Dell, HP, Lenovo -- were scrambling to catch up; by fall 2008, nearly every US computermaker had rushed a teensy $400 netbook to market.

All of which is, when you think about it, incredibly weird. Netbooks violate all the laws of the computer hardware business. Traditionally, development trickles down from the high end to the mass market. PC makers target early adopters with new, ultrapowerful features. Years later, those innovations spread to lower-end models.

But Jepsen's design trickled up. In the process of creating a laptop to satisfy the needs of poor people, she revealed something about traditional PC users. They didn't want more out of a laptop. They wanted less.

By the end of 2008, Asustek had sold 5 million netbooks, and other brands together had sold 10 million. (Europe in particular has gone mad for netbooks; sales there are eight times higher than in the US.) In a single year, netbooks had become 7 percent of the world's entire laptop market. Next year it will be 12 percent.

"We started inventing technology for the bottom of the pyramid," Jepsen says, "but the top of the pyramid wants it too." This bit of trickle-up innovation, this netbook, might well reshape the computer industry -- if it doesn't kill it first.

I WROTE THIS STORY ON A NETBOOK, and if you had peeked over my shoulder, you would have seen precisely two icons on my desktop: the Firefox browser and a trash can. Nothing else.

It turns out that about 95 percent of what I do on a computer can now be accomplished through a browser. I use it for updating Twitter and Facebook and for blogging. Meebo.com lets me log into several instant-messaging accounts simultaneously. Last.fm gives me tunes, and webmail does the email. I use Google Docs for word processing, and if I need to record video, I can do it directly from webcam to YouTube. Come to think of it, because none of my documents reside on the netbook, I'm not sure I even need the trash can.

Netbooks have ended the performance wars. It used to be that when you went to an electronics store to buy a computer, you picked the most powerful one you could afford. Because, who knew? Maybe someday you'd need to play a cutting-edge videogame or edit your masterpiece indie flick. For 15 years, the PC industry obliged our what-if paranoia by pushing performance. Intel and AMD tossed out blisteringly fast chips, hard drives went on a terabyte gallop, RAM exploded, and high-end graphics cards let you play Blu-ray movies on your sprawling 17-inch laptop screen. That dream machine could do almost anything.

But here's the catch: Most of the time, we do almost nothing. Our most common tasks -- email, Web surfing, watching streamed videos -- require very little processing power. Only a few people, like graphic designers and hardcore gamers, actually need heavy-duty hardware. For years now, without anyone really noticing, the PC industry has functioned like a car company selling SUVs: It pushed absurdly powerful machines because the profit margins were high, while customers lapped up the fantasy that they could go off-roading, even though they never did. So coders took advantage of that surplus power to write ever-bulkier applications and operating systems.

What netbook makers have done, in effect, is turn back the clock: Their machines perform the way laptops did four years ago. And it turns out that four years ago (more or less) is plenty. "Regular computers are so fast, you really can't tell the difference between 1.6 giga and 2 giga," says Andy Tung, vice president of US sales for MSI, the Taiwanese maker of the Wind netbook. "We can tell the difference between one second and two seconds, but not between 0.0001 and 0.0002 second." For most of today's computing tasks, the biggest performance drags aren't inside the machine. They're outside. Is your Wi-Fi signal strong? Is Twitter down again?

Netbooks are evidence that we now know what personal computers are for.Which is to say, a pretty small list of things that are conducted almost entirely online. This was Asustek's epiphany. It got laptop prices under $300 by crafting a device that makes absolutely no sense when it's not online. Consider: The Eee's original flash drive was only 4 gigs. That's so small you need to host all your pictures, videos, and files online -- and install minimal native software -- because there's simply no room inside your machine.

Netbooks prove that the "cloud" is no longer just hype. It is now reasonable to design computers that outsource the difficult work somewhere else. The cloud tail is wagging the hardware dog.

MOST CONSUMERS HAD NEVER HEARD Taiwan's quiet, unheralded PC firms, but they've been behind some of the most important hardware of the past three decades. Quanta first gained notice in the '80s for cleverly cramming new components into notebooks. Then, in 2001, Apple contracted with the company to design its G4 notebook from top to bottom. The product was a spectacular success, and Quanta was soon doing engineering for every other major PC maker. Asustek and MSI, the two other giants of the Taiwanese laptop world, also branched out from motherboards into everything from LCD TVs to mobile phones. These companies are enormous: Quanta had sales of $25 billion last year, more than marquee firms like Amazon.com, Texas Instruments, and Electronic Arts.

Even though the Taiwanese manufacturers remained subservient to the well-known PC brands, they soaked up tons of knowledge over the years. For instance, when Intel created its x486 chip in 1988, Asustek built a compatible motherboard before Intel could make its own board work. Later, Asustek was producing components for Apple laptops. "Nine times out of 10," recalls John Jacobs, a former Apple manager who now covers the LCD market as an analyst for DisplaySearch, "when we said 'Jump,' they said 'How high?' That's how Asustek learned a lot."

But for all their success, companies like Asustek and MSI were outsiders. And when Asustek released the Eee netbook, big firms like Dell, HP, and Apple did nothing for months. "All the other brands were thinking, 'Oh, this is crap,'" recalls Lillian Lin, Asustek's global marketing director.

Dell and HP weren't going to pioneer a $400 laptop, because they were already selling laptops for $1,000. Why mess with a good thing? MSI had no laptop business at all, and Asustek had only a small business selling full-price machines under its own brand, mostly in Asia and Europe. Since the Taiwanese weren't addicted to selling SUV-class computers, they could swoop in like Honda with smaller, more efficient models. They also knew how to design on the cheap after years of producing motherboards with excruciatingly tiny margins.

In The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen famously argued that true breakthroughs almost always come from upstarts, since profitable firms rarely want to upend their business models. "Netbooks are a classic Christensenian disruptive innovation for the PC industry," says Willy Shih, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied both Quanta's work on the One Laptop per Child project and Asustek's development of the netbook.

The Taiwanese firms, Shih argues, now have enormous clout in the PC industry. In the US, we regard branding and marketing -- convincing people what to buy -- as core business functions. What Asustek proved is that the companies with real leverage are the ones that actually make desirable products. The Taiwanese laptop builders possess the atom-hacking smarts that once defined America but which have atrophied here along with our industrial base. As far as laptop manufacturing goes, Taiwan essentially now owns the market; the devices aren't produced in significant volumes anywhere else.

If you had asked Taiwanese hardware CEOs a few years ago about their relationship with Dell, HP, and Apple, they'd have told you that the American companies did the branding and sales while outsourcing their design and production to Taiwan. Today the view from Asia is increasingly the reverse. "When I talk to them now," Shih laughs, "they say, 'We outsource our branding and sales to them.'"

"BUT WHAT ABOUT PHOTOSHOP?" It's the standard retort from those who dismiss netbooks as children's toys. Sure, a dinky 1.6-GHz chip and Linux are fine for email and silly things like YouTube. But what about when you need to do some real computing, like sophisticated photo editing? The cloud won't help you there, kid.

In the narrowest sense, this is true: A really powerful application like Adobe Photoshop demands a much faster processor. But consider my experience: This spring, after my regular Windows XP laptop began crashing twice a day, I reformatted the hard drive. As I went about reinstalling my software, I couldn't find my Photoshop disc. I forgot about it -- until a week later, when I was blogging and needed to tweak a photo. Frustrated, I went online and discovered FotoFlexer, one of several free Web-based editing tools. I uploaded my picture, and in about one minute I'd cropped it, deepened the color saturation, and sharpened it.

I haven't used Photoshop since.

Keep in mind that I like Photoshop. I'm not doing this to make any geeky ideological point about how bleeding-edge I am or how much I hate paying for boxed software. It's simply that the hassle of finding my Photoshop disc now exceeds the ease of using FotoFlexer. The code for working with the browser-based app is a mere 900 KB, and "to the average user, that comes down really fast," as Sharam Shirazi, CEO of Arbor Labs, which created it, points out to me.

My Photoshop experience is just one example of how the software industry is changing. It used to be that coders were forced to produce bloatware with endless features because they had to guess what customers might want to do. But if you design a piece of software that lives in the cloud, you know what your customers are doing -- you can watch them in real time. Shirazi's firm discovered that FotoFlexer users rarely do fancy editing; the most frequently used features are tools for drawing text and scribbles on pictures. Or consider the Writely app, which eventually became the word processor part of Google Docs: When Sam Schillace first put it online, he found to his surprise that what users wanted most was a way to let several people edit a document together.

"It used to be, 'I'm buying a paint program, and I'll get the one with 5,000 features. I don't know what 2,000 of those features are, but I'll get it just in case,'" Schillace says. "Today it's just, 'Which one is most easily available? Which one is ready online?' So applications are competing on merit; they're not competing on bulk."

NETBOOKS ARE SO CHEAP, they're reshaping the fundamental economics of the PC business. Last October, British mobile-phone carrier Vodafone offered its customers a new deal: If they signed a two-year contract for high-speed wireless data, Vodafone would give them a Dell Mini 9 netbook. That isn't quite the same as getting a free computer; after all, Vodafone bills users $1,800 on that two-year contract, so it can afford to throw in the netbook. (In December, RadioShack offered a similar deal: a $99 Acer Aspire netbook for anyone who signed up for two years of AT&T's 3G service.)

What these deals signal is that computers are developing the same economics as mobile phones. Hardware is becoming a commodity. It's difficult to charge for. What's really valuable -- what people will pay through the nose for -- is the ability to communicate.

So netbooks have sent a sort of hot-cold shudder through the computer industry. Sure, it's great to have an exploding new product category. But this is a category in which it's incredibly hard to make a dime: At $300, a netbook sells for barely more than the sum of its parts -- and sometimes less. "The profit margins on these things are nonexistent," chuckles Paul Goldenberg, managing director of Digital Gadgets, which created a line of netbooks under the Sylvania brand. "Everyone is saying 'We're losing money now, but we'll make it up on volume, right?'"

Nearly every company in the PC industry has had its game plan uprooted by netbooks. Microsoft had intended to stop selling Windows XP this summer, driving customers to its more lucrative Vista operating system. But when Linux roared out of the gate on netbooks, Microsoft quickly backpedaled, extending XP for another two years -- specifically for netbooks. Most experts guess that Redmond can charge barely $15 for XP on a netbook, less than a quarter of what it previously sold for. (Microsoft corporate vice president Brad Brooks assures me the company is earning "good money" on the devices and plans to make sure its next OS, Windows 7, can run on netbooks -- Vista performs poorly on them.) For its part, Intel is selling millions of its low-power Atom chips to netbook manufacturers. "We see this as our next billion-dollar market," says Anil Nanduri, Intel's technical marketing manager -- except that the company makes only a fraction of the money on an Atom chip as on a more powerful Celeron or Pentium in a full-size laptop.

The great terror in the PC industry is that it's created a $300 device so good, most people will simply no longer feel a need to shell out $1,000 for a portable computer. They pray that netbooks remain a "secondary buy" -- the little mobile thingy you get after you already own a normal-size laptop. But it's also possible that the next time you're replacing an aging laptop, you'll walk into the store and wonder, "Why exactly am I paying so much for a machine that I use for nothing but email and the Web?" And Microsoft and Intel and Dell and HP and Lenovo will die a little bit inside that day.

The decision is probably out of American hands. Indeed, living in the US -- where netbooks are only just taking off -- it can be hard to grasp just how popular the devices have become in Europe and Asia and the degree to which they're already altering the landscape. As Shih told me, "I was talking to the chair of one of the major Taiwanese notebook manufacturers, and he said, 'This is where my next billion customers comes from.' And he was not referring to the US." He meant the BRIC countries -- Brazil, Russia, India, China -- where billions of very price-conscious customers have yet to buy their first computer. And the decisions they make -- Windows or Linux? Microsoft wares or free cloud apps? -- will have enormous influence on how computing evolves in the next few years.

Netbooks could drive production of even crazily cheaper, lighter-weight computers. "If everything you're doing is online, then the netbook becomes a screen with a radio chip. So why do you need a motherboard?" OLPC designer Mary Lou Jepsen says. "Especially if you want the batteries to last. Why not just make it a screen and a really cheap $2 to $5 radio chip?" The cloud is also probably going to get powerful in ways that now seem like fantasy. AMD is working on an experimental 3-D graphics server farm that would run high-end videogames, squirting a stream out to portable devices so you could play even the most outrageously lush games without a fancy onboard processor. Patrick Moorehead, AMD's vice president of marketing, recalls that in 2007 gamers had to buy special powerful desktop machines loaded with RAM and $600 graphics cards to play Crysis: "Now imagine you've got servers running Crysis and streaming it to an iPhone or a netbook, sending just the vectors that let you navigate the game."

Because this is the future of hardware. For a few users who need a high-performance device, PC makers will offer ever-more-blisteringly fast, water-cooled boxes with screens the size of your living room -- at $2,000 a pop. For everyone else -- lawyers looking for something to do on the train, women desperate for something that fits in their handbag -- netbooks will dominate. It's the rise of the very small machines.

I greatly dig satellites, to the point where I actually spend time sitting around comparing which ones are cooler. To date, my #1 favorite is Gravity Probe B, largely because it contains roundest, smoothest spheres ever created by humanity. But today I heard about a satellite that has moved in my #2 slot.

Step forward, Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer! Otherwise known as GOCE, this satellite is designed to measure fluctuations in Earth's gravity. Because the planet is irregularly shaped, and different parts are composed of more or less dense rock, the pull of gravity is different all over the globe. These changes are, of course, derangedly small, so GOCE is equipped with three accelerometers that can detect even-yet-more-derangedly-small pertubations in The Force. As one of its designing engineers explained to the BBC:

"Imagine a snowflake, which has a fraction of a gram, slowly falling down on to the deck of a supertanker. The acceleration that the supertanker experiences from that snowflake is comparable to the sensitivity of our instrument," he told BBC News.

Hot damn. But there's a catch: To measure gravity with such precision, GOCE must fly at an orbit much closer to the Earth than other satellites -- just under 270 km. When you're flying in orbit that low down, the thermosphere apparently still has enough residual bits of atmosphere to cause teensy bits of turbulence, which of course would irreperably throw off GOCE's instrumentation. The solution? To stabilize the craft, the engineers put on three swooping, elegant rocket fins, and installed an ion engine. GOCE will thus not merely circle around the globe; it will cruise around it. Satellites are always inherently rather sci-fi, of course; but with those svelte wings and thruster, GOCE is one of the few satellites that actually looks sci-fictional. Indeed, it looked so oddly familiar that it took me a few seconds to realize what it was reminding me of:

One of the Viper fighter ships from Battlestar Galactica! Minus the nose, of course.

For a comparison picture of a Viper, look below the jump ...

Collision Detection reader Paul Gemperle is a big fan of the "Dumbo octopus". As am I. And really -- who isn't? Only someone with an anvil for a heart could be unmoved by the gorgeous and thoroughly extraterrestrial spectacle of the noble Grimpoteuthis, which looks sort of like a gelatinous ghost from Pac-Man, with two floppy 'lil ear-thingies on top.

So Paul and I were both excited and saddened to see this footage of a Dumbo octopus that, according to the Youtube poster, was caught during a beam trawl. "Excited" because it's cool to see these things up close, but "sad" because, as Paul points out, the octopus doesn't seem very happy.

Humanity, watch it. I've said it before and I'll say it again: You mess with the Kraken, you'll get the seven-mile-long Cthulhuian tentacles. I shudder to think of what sort of charges will be levied against us during the cephalopod truth-and-reconciliation commissions a few decades from now.

(Other researchers have argued persuasively that this isn't the case; when I profiled the neuroscientist and record-producer Daniel Levitin, he noted that people who have Williams syndrome often have fantastic musical abilities, even though their traditional IQ never rises above that of a small child -- they almost never acquire any basic math at all. So the link between math and music can't be that linear.)

Anyway, the Twitter exchange I had with Magee came back to me when I stumbled upon this: A bunch of music professors have invented a new way to visualize music -- as points on different-dimensioned spaces. That picture above? It's from this video, in which they represent the chord changes in Chopin's E Minor Prelude as a set of dots moving around the periphery of circular "pitch class space". Even trippier is this one, which maps the chord changes through a four-dimensional space.

The professors argue that their new representational system could produce some cool innovations:

"You could create new kinds of musical instruments or new kinds of toys," he said. "You could create new kinds of visualization tools -- imagine going to a classical music concert where the music was being translated visually. We could change the way we educate musicians. There are lots of practical consequences that could follow from these ideas."

"But to me," Tymoczko added, "the most satisfying aspect of this research is that we can now see that there is a logical structure linking many, many different musical concepts. To some extent, we can represent the history of music as a long process of exploring different symmetries and different geometries."

I'm all in favor of new ways to let people visualize -- and play around with -- music. A lot of electronic music software embraces this sort of visual mess-around aesthetic -- like the incredibly cool Nintendo DS game Electroplankton (which I wrote about for Wired News a while back), or even Korg's Kaoss Pad, which, by letting you control two variables at once on an X-Y grid (like "resonance" and "frequency", so that when you slide your finger around it creates a wah-pedal like effect) quite directly map musical/audio concepts into a spatial dimension.

I've often wondered whether someone could similarly use software to create a better way to teach the harmonica. A lot of the cool dynamics of harmonica playing are about embouchure -- the different shapes you make with your lips, tongue, cheeks and jaw. The overall shape inside your mouth changes the resonance of the harmonica almost the way a particular X/Y position on a Kaoss Pad (using in "filtering" mode) changes the sound of in instrument passed through it. Drop your jaw and tongue down low and you "bend" a harmonica note downwards; push your finger on the Kaoss Pad up and to the left and you'll filter the instrument so you only hear the very lowest frequencies.

The cool thing about a Kaoss Pad is that you can see the relationship between where you slide your finger and the attendant musical effect. But with harmonica, it's really hard to visualize what's happening inside the harmonica player's mouth. "How to play the harmonica" guides tend to trip over themselves trying to explain precisely where the hell your tongue and cheeks and jaw and lips are supposed to be, and how relatively tense or loose they're supposed to be, and how hard or soft you're supposed to be blowing. I wonder if it'd be possible to create a sort of MRI-like visualization of what's going on inside your mouth while playing the harmonica -- as a visual aid? Or could you even create a virtual instrument that let you play a virtual harmonica using Kaoss-like controls?

That chart above summarizes the results. It's slightly alarming to me, because I sometimes listen to my Sansa Fuze player -- using earbuds -- at 80% or 90% of the volume, in part because when I'm walking around Manhattan, the ambient noise is pretty high, so the music has to cut over that. If hese guys are right, I can listen for no more than 1.5 hours, and possibly as little as 22 minutes, "without greatly increasing their risk of hearing loss". Mind you, who really knows: As the scientists note in their writeup, people's auditory physiology varies quite a lot.

But there's also some more, and newer, nifty research from this team -- about the listening habits of young people. One public-health-policy concern these days is that young people are listening to music waaaaaay too loud, and are all gonna be deaf by their mid 40s. To figure out whether this was true, these same scientists studied 30 Denver-Boulder-area teenagers.

It turns out things aren't so bad. Only a small minority of kids -- between 7 and 24 per cent -- are listening to their MP3 players at eardrum-shredding levels. "We don't seem to be at an epidemic level for hearing loss from music players," Portnuff said. What's more, boys tend to listen to music louder than girls, teenagers tend to listen at quieter levels as they get older, and some teenagers appear to have trouble judging precisely how loud they're listening.

But dig this ...

The study also showed that teen boys listen louder than teen girls, and teens who express the most concern about the risk for and severity of hearing loss from iPods actually play their music at higher levels than their peers, said CU-Boulder audiologist and doctoral candidate Cory Portnuff, who headed up the study. Such behaviors put teens at an increased risk of music-induced hearing loss, he said. [snip]

"We really don't a have good explanation for why teens concerned about the hearing loss risk actually play their music louder than others," he said.

Heh. Maybe it's because they've been listening so loud for so long that it's just begun to unsettle even themselves . Not enough to stop, yet, but enough to start wondering, hmmm, isn't this gonna make me deaf?

Spoiler warning: This blog posting contains a lot of spoilers about the video game Flower!

In recent years there's been a heartening surge in "art" video games -- games that use play mechanics to explore an idea or evoke a mood. The creators use gameplay as a rhetorical technique: They use physics, music, action, perspective, goals and challenges of the game as metaphors. A couple of months ago I wrote my Wired News column about Passage, a fantastic little video-game meditation on life and death. This week, I wrote about Flower, an insanely beautiful game released two weeks ago for the Playstation 3 by Jenova Chen. In the game, you control a gust of wind that blows a flower petal along, and you do ...

... well, lots of things. You touch other flowers, opening them up and releasing their petals; if you do a lot of this you start to bring dead, dry land back to life. Sometimes you also cause huge rocks to shift and groan and open up like petals themselves. Other times dead trees explode with color and leaves, or winds start blowing that power wind turbines. The final "boss fight" -- such as it is -- consists of a crazy, massive "awakening" of an entire grey, dead, "fallen" city.

The visual metaphors and the gameplay are sufficiently open-ended enough -- yet evocative enough -- that critics have been arguing, interestingly, about what precisely the game is supposed to be saying. So I wrote my column arguing that it's essentially a game about the environment, or climate change.

Of course, the game isn't solely "about" climate change, in the sense that Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" isn't solely "about" longing for death, horses, the winter solstice, obligation and freedom, or snow. Flower is amorphous enough that you could say it's "about" any number of things, ranging from i) spiritual renewal to ii) the vague delights of conquering obstacles to iii) the Cartesian mind/body divide (all that hard steel! all those soft flower petals born aloft on a mere breath of air!) to iv) the sheer weird tactile fun of hurling petals into the wind. When you head into a thunderstorm and watch, close-up, as a handful of floating petals are illuminated from behind by a sudden flash of lightning, it's clear that Chen is having enormous fun with the artistic traditions here ranging from chiaroscuro to, probably, Katinka Matson's scanner-photography.

What particularly interested me was how straightforwardly Chen's imagery in the game was rooted in super-ancient Western mythologies about a dry, broken land healed by a heroic quest. Now, plenty of video games use this as their substructure -- hell, you could argue that Super Mario is sort of in that tradition -- but Chen strips everything back to pure, raw metaphoric imagery. Yet because so many of those images are so peculiarly contemporary -- power windmills, out-of-control electricity, brooding weather, corroded industrial towers -- I couldn't escape the idea that he was deploying all this rich tradition to rummage around in our modern unease about the environment.

Anyway, enough blathering about the column. (My intro is nearly as long as the column itself!) The piece is online free at here the Wired News web site, and a copy is archived below. Above is a bit of gameplay via Youtube!

What the hell is Flower about?

People have been arguing about this gorgeous little tone poem since it was released two weeks ago. As many reviewers have noted, the game is very abstract. You control a flower petal, guiding it with a gust of wind through blighted, brown landscapes. As you touch different flowers, you gradually bring the landscape back to life -- and trees and grass burst into color.

Later, though, the world that you bring "life" to becomes specifically industrial. For example, when you finish a level, it generates winds that power windmills, creating electricity. Then you're plunged into a dark, murky landscape, where hissing power lines sear your fragile little petals, and corroded-metal electrical towers attack you like diving sharks. When you succeed, you clean up these dark, satanic mills.

At which point I decided, okay, okay, I get it.

Flower is about climate change.

What's more, it may be the first -- and only -- truly good game about climate change.

When I say that Flower is the first game about climate change, I don't mean that it's the first game to refer to climate change. Plenty of post-apocalyptic games have been set in a near-future world ravaged by global warming -- like last year's Fracture, where two warring tribes scrap amongst the ruins of the depleted planet, or the upcoming game Fuel, where Mad Max-style drivers race across a United States complete with global-warming-created tornadoes and floodplains.

But in these games, climate change is merely part of the background. You're not supposed to do anything about it; the damage has already been done. (Indeed, Fuel appears to regard the damage as totally awesome, because it has created such badass racing environments! Woo-hoo!)

What makes Flower different is that it is "about" changing or improving the situation — and making you feel wonderful over how you've renewed life that was destroyed by industrialization.

And what's most remarkable is that Flower manages to do this without being cloying and preachy. Indeed, the game is amazingly subtle.

At first, it doesn't seem that way. On the contrary, Flower pretty much clobbers you over the head with its metaphors. Flowers, flowering grass and wind blowing through renewable-energy windmills = good. Gray urban blight; angry, weird weather; nasty electricity; and corroded old power line towers = bad. Got it?

These allegorical algorithms are about as old as civilization itself. Our literature is full of them: In the Bible, spiritual salvation is regularly characterized as water flowing and trees blooming over dried-up land. T.S. Eliot's masterpiece The Waste Land — with its vision of a corroded, parched world desperate for life — reads practically like a design document for Flower. (Particularly "What the Thunder Said"!) If you've ever read any fairy tales or belonged to any world religion, you've had these dark materials flash-burned into your soul — which is precisely why Flower packs such a kick.

Given how old and venerable these metaphors are, you could argue that the game isn't about climate change at all. It could be merely about the age-old eternal struggle between man and nature, right? Don't litter, kids! And sure, I agree: Flower is a work of art, and works of art have many meanings, including some the creators never intended.

But at the same time, it's pretty hard to jingle these particular cultural tokens around in your mind — violent weather? wind turbines? power generation? — without finding yourself at least thinking about global warming. Climate change is the emotional operating system for modern environmental metaphors; you cannot really get around it. While I found Flower genuinely thrilling, at points the implicit politics felt somewhat like watching the tear drip down the Indian's face in those "ZOMG what are we doing to the environment?" public-service announcements from the '70s.

Yet here's the ultimately cool thing: Flower does not, in the end, demonize human civilization. When you begin the game, you start with a bleak, gray-scale vision of a city, where cars stream through the dark streets. At the conclusion of the game, if you succeed in bringing the various blighted fields and areas to color and life, what's your reward? To hang around and glory in those lovely fields of gold?

Nope. In the final scenes you return to the city where you began. Cars still zoom around town, and plenty of overpasses remain — but this time, trees and flowers are abloom amidst the concrete. In Flower, the "saved" world is one where humanity has figured out how to balance its industrial life with the natural world. We get to keep our automobiles and our greenery — our PlayStation 3s and our roses.

Well, wonder no more! Over at the Mashable blog, viral-marketing expert Dan Zarella did some fascinating research into "the science of ReTweets." Because Twitter has a very open and generous API to their enormous firehose of everyday Tweets, anyone can grab the data and try to parse it for patterns. Zarella decided to look at ReTweeting amongst a sample of 20,000 users to see if he could spy any rules. So what did he find?

Firstly, he discovered that the identity of the original Twitterer isn't the be-all and end-all. You might imagine that getting ReTweeted is simply a matter of being a huge Twitter celebrity with 15,000 followers; with so many people paying attention to your Tweets, it would stand to reason that you'd have a much greater likelihood of your utterances going viral, right?

That's true, Zarella found -- but only to a degree. If you control for the number of followers someone has -- and thus compare Tweets to Tweets on an equal basis -- then the content of the Tweet is actually more important than the identity of the person who originally wrote it. What specific type of content was most likely to be ReTweeted? Original stuff -- bits of news and information that is exclusive to the original Twitterer. In particular ...

- Calls to action (as in: “please ReTweet”), while they might sound cheesy, work very well to get ReTweets.
- Timely content gets ReTweeted a lot.
- Freebies are popular.
- Self-reference (Tweeting about Twitter) works.
- Lists are huge.
- People like to ReTweet blog posts.

The most ReTweeted words and phrases were, in order, "you", "twitter", "please," "retweet", "post", "blog", "social," and "free". Indeed, as Zarella points out, saying "please" is very powerful -- "polite calls to action" have a high incidence of getting ReTweeted. We're social beings; we like to help out!

The final intriguing trend he found is time of day. It turns out Twitter is currently governed by the circadian rhythms of Eastern Standard Time -- because the amount of ReTweeting overall starts at a low level in the predawn period EST, then climbs during the workday and peaks at 3 pm. (Check out the chart after the jump.)

So if you want to get really well ReTweeted? Tweet something with nifty original content, ask if people will "please" pass it around, and post at 9 am EST.

One of the things that fascinated me about Zarella's work here is that it appears to support Duncan Watts' debunking of the idea that viral spreading of trends, memes or utterances is dependent upon "influentials" -- incredibly well-connected people who are all-important "hubs" in the social network. (I wrote about his work last year in Fast Company.) The "two-step" theory of influence, developed in the 50s and popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, is that these superinfluential folks are key to the spread of a big trend. Watts doubted this was true, and developed some mathematical models and real-world experiments that cast a lot of doubt on the idea that "influential" people can really have that much influence. And indeed, Zarella seems to have found that being an "influential" on Twitter -- i.e. having tons of followers -- isn't as important as the quality and content of the message.