Mike Elgan

Normally, people love good products and hate bad ones. But three of the most lovable and popular tech offerings are in fact horribly designed and conspicuously flawed. Facebook Facebookis one of the worst-designed Web sites on the Internet. Status Updates, the so-called News Feed, Posted Items, the Inbox, your Wall and categories of messaging and […]

Imagine if you had a time machine and could travel back to a era when people were excited about the future — say, 1955 — and talk to a group of knowledgeable, educated Americans. You could share the disappointing news that, in the future, there are no flying cars. Meals don’t come in pill form. […]

Nearly two years ago, I wrote a column in this space called “Getting Things Done In 60 Seconds.” The piece was a practical, immediately usable summary of David Allen’s popular productivity book, “Getting Things Done. I wrote that column after discovering that many people want to embrace Allen’s system, but never do so because, ironically, […]

Two years ago, Chinese President Hu Jintao called on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members to “assert supremacy over online public opinion, raise the level and study the art of online guidance and actively use new technologies to increase the strength of positive propaganda.” After Hu’s speech, Communist Party officials and the State Council issued an […]

It’s that time of year again! No, not the holidays. It’s the season for self-appointed “experts” and “pundits” to freak everybody out with outlandish predictions — most of which will never come true. Newspapers, magazines, blogs and TV news shows eat these up, because they’re sensational. And unlike real news, they don’t require the cooperation […]

The microblogging site Twitteris growing like a weed, threatening to become a full-fledged mainstream phenomenon. A new report by HubSpot called “State of the Twittersphere” says that between 5,000 and 10,000 new users join the service every day, that 70% of current users joined within the last year and that 20% have joined within the […]

The industrial revolution didn’t arise out of nowhere, and it didn’t arise everywhere. It was made possible by the emergence of a set of personal values that came to be known as the “work ethic.” The idea behind this meme — inconceivable 400 years ago — is that hard work is good for its own […]

The recession is hitting everyone. But print media companies — newspapers, books and magazines — are getting hit harder and sooner than most. It’s their own damned fault. Like the US automakers and the music industry, print media companies squandered most of their time and money during boom times clinging to the past rather than […]

It’s an article of faith that PCs and consumer electronics always get faster and cheaper at a mind-blowing rate. But that’s not really true, is it? Sure, they get a little faster and a little cheaper, but nothing like the performance and price gains the pundits and vendors promise. The Gold Standard for predicting performance […]

Consumer technology evolves fast. It’s hard to believe that just two years ago, the Apple iPhone, Asus Eee PC, Amazon Kindle and Twitter didn’t exist. Only college students were on Facebook. And Bill Gates still worked at Microsoft. What’s harder to fathom is our own evolution. As technology changes, technology changes us — how our […]