the onda

A little while ago when the Twitter docs leaked out on the Internet, those poor guys were raked over the coals for writing (in an internal-only document) that their vision was to become "the pulse of the planet."

While I applaud the grand nature of it, I think it is highly unlikely if only because it would require everyone, and a lot of "things" as well, to start actively entering these little status updates as more than marketing signals or social gestures.

I do think though that the Internet is going to eventually bring us "the pulse of the planet—" it's just that that pulse won't be generated actively by humans any more than we consciously generate our own internal heartbeat. Instead, we're probably looking at billions of network-connected sensors, each passively monitoring some very narrow metric, and streaming its data over the Internet.

And right at the center of this sensor soup I think we'll find MEMS technology. The acronym stands for "Micro Electrical Mechanical System" which is a fancy way of describing a silicon-based motion sensor that is so accurate that it can sense your heartbeat just by sitting on the tip of your finger.

Think of a backyard trampoline with a giant level (of the sort you use to hang paintings) right in the center of it. Now shrink that down by several orders of magnitude and connect the level to a digital output and you've got the gist for how MEMS work. Oh, and did I mention that because they are made by the same process that Intel uses to make chips, they are cheap and on a joyride called Moore's law?

Surprisingly, MEMS manufacturing has a lot in common with inkjet manufacturing (the topic of a much longer blog post), which means that we've got some of the deepest pool of expertise in how to do it right, as the Register reported yesterday. Of all of the technologies I've seen in my two years here, none is as mind-blowingly exciting as what the engineers working on it, or as potentially world-changing.

It's funny to think that when it comes, the "pulse of the planet" is likely to be a close relative of the inkjet printer!