Jimmy Breeze's Library tagged future →  View Popular

Open up the device, point it at the street and ask it to show you what the place looked like 200 years ago, and it offers a photo or video. Ask it where to eat lunch and it highlights a restaurant that suits your tastes. If you are heatedly debating food choices with a companion when someone of marginal importance tries to call you, the phone will know better than to interrupt.

This blue-sky, composite prediction comes with a stiff warning: forecasts with a two-year horizon are especially chancy, technologists said, since those making the predictions are often overly optimistic about emerging designs and, at the same time, blind to some of the reasons the current generation of technologies looks as it does.

Even Scott Pack concludes Twitterstorms are "alright if they're basically about pointing out that someone has written something really, really out of order, and wanting to tell people about it". But some Twitterers, he says, published Jan Moir's home address. Others were plainly every bit as out of order as the journalist's piece: "It wouldn't be so good, obviously, if it reached a point where people were stopped from expressing an opinion."

The bottom line with Twitter, though, Pack argues, is quite simply that "I've got a way of saying something now. And if enough people agree with me, we can really make a difference." That, obviously, gives the site a mighty momentum – and be warned: a leaked internal document from Twitter suggests the site is aiming for 1 billion users by 2013. With that many Twitterers tweeting, the document reportedly says, "we will be the pulse of the planet".