Twittering from brain to PC.

Earlier this week my attention was caught by another marketing spin for twitter. Doctoral student Adam Wilson from University of Wisconsin-Madison has successfully tested a "brain twitter interface". The story made all the way up to the CNN headlines. According to CNN article twitter is simpler than e-mail.

"If I am locked in and I want to e-mail someone, the format is all wrong. You have to be able to select recipients and group them, copy, paste, send. ... We don't think about that much as normal people, but it can become unmanageable.
"Twitter takes care of all those things. They just have to get [the message] to a location where people can come and find it,
to Twitter publishing interface, allowing him to compose a message merely by thinking and publish it to the arguably too-popular microblogging service. "

Why it is simpler i can't say, if you look on the video demonstration of this experiment. After you've managed "to shoot with your brain" right letters from the flickering screen you shoot "twitter rectangle" and out of the blue appears twitter window. But in the same way it could be e-mail window, or anything else for that matter, another microblogging tool, "full blogging" interface, you name it. Overall all this experiment looked somehow fishy: I don't know how old was the monitor, but it was old. It is strange that you are using CRT monitor from web zero generation to demonstrate how web 2.0 tool will enhance your user interaction experience with PC.

If earlier i was ridiculing twitter, now I'm starting to hate it. May be for the wrong reasons, but i really don't like all this excessive marketing hype, propelled by the sites like Techcrunch: "Worldwide visitors to Twitter.com increased 95 percent in the month of March from 9.8 million to 19.1 million" and now more and more by the mainstream media like CNN.
Even academics from Universitiess are willing to ride on the wave to promote their research.

As for the technology itself, I'd like to recall another example of brain to PC interface from Emotiv Systems, which to me seems much more revolutionizing. Unlike this twittering hype which is based on letter to letter input, Emotiv technology enables recognizing mental states right from the brain waves skipping alone human language representation.