I try to stay positive about all things technical. Somewhere between if you can't say anything nice and being negative shuts you off from further explorations. Saying no to any possible computer future seems to me to be a rather silly thing to do.

Anyway, Dave Winer has been a proponent of adding what he calls payloads to Twitter for a long time now. I'm not sure how he would implement these payloads but I would rather think that it would be some sort of hash code type of pointer to an object like an image or video or something entirely unique. What ever can be digitized could be a payload. The payload it self would probably exist on the cloud some where in something like Amazon's S3. There are any number of clouds bases coming on line right now.

So the tweet would have maybe a little glowing bubble at the end of the text which would signify that there is a payload. User would click the bubble and the payload would be downloaded to the user.

Seems to me that this is very similar to attachments on emails. The thing to remember about email attachments (and Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo have made careers out of saying this) is you don't open email attachments.

The biggest difference is that if you send a video of your dog bonzorella to 100 of your closest friends by email 100 copies of the video now exist, one on each of your friends computers. With a twitter payload (assuming they did it the way I think Dave wants it) there would be just one video out in the cloud.

So while I think Dave Winer is one of the most selfless individuals on the net, there are others with less scrupulous motives who would like nothing better than to have a vehicle for passing on the same sort of dredge you get with email attachments.

I've embraced the 140 character world of twitter. The casual conversational format is a bit of a waste sometimes on a 1920x1280 screen but keeps within the limitations SMS and the small screen of a phone device. Disclaimer I no longer get twitter messages on my cell phone as I have somehow allowed myself to follow over 300 people. The messages just come to fast and furious. Which brings up another point, the twitter stream is much more transient than the email stream in that emails stay around until you physically point to them and say go away. The Twitter stream is much more dependant on how many of those you follow. The payload could be on third page before you have a chance to react.