Twitter is five, and like all good five-year-olds it’s about time it paid its way. Me, on Techradar:

I was in Glasgow’s famous Sauchiehall Street on Saturday night. If you haven’t been recently, it’s like a Hieronymus Bosch painting where the demons wear too-short skirts or G-Star Raw. It’s genuinely unpleasant, a seething mass of drunken, vomiting and occasionally fist-fighting imbeciles.

If you need proof that a significant part of the human race is as dumb as rocks, I can give you the postcode to prove it.

Or I can let you see Twitter on my phone.

The latest iOS update enables you to turn your iPhone into a wi-fi hotspot, sharing your 3G connection with other devices – and even though iPhone data plans are capped, you still need to pay extra to use the feature. Why could that be? I think I know the answer.

There are only two possible explanations.

One, iPhone data is a different shape from Android data. It’s triangular, or maybe octagonal, and it gets stuck in the internet tubes.

Or two, the networks are bastards.

The nice people at .net magazine have a spanking new website, and one of my pieces is on it: “What are words worth”, where I… well, you saw the headline.

In the age of social media and user-generated content, suggesting that your name on someone else’s website is “exposure” is like suggesting membership of the HTML Writer’s Guild will boost your chances of getting a well-paid agency job.

Apple’s unveiled some new MacBook Pros, and the big news is Thunderbolt, also known as Light Peak. It’s very clever, and could enable some very interesting things:

The new Macs look like iPads with keyboards. They’re clearly the latest iteration of Apple’s current design language, but what if they’re more than that? What if the iPad-ification of OS X and the iPad-like design of the MBPs are a sign of where this is all heading?

We’ve seen how quickly mobile processors are progressing, and it won’t be long before it’s possible to put the specs of today’s MacBook Pros into a MacBook Air-thin iPad. Quad or six-core processors, oodles of RAM and a couple of Thunderbolt ports in an iPad could produce something really interesting.

A wee piece by me on Techradar:

Google’s success has created a new kind of industry. Content farms are firms who produce what Google’s Matt Cuts calls “shallow or low-quality content”.

Cutts is a funny guy, and his screenshots show the parody site The Content Farm, but the point is a serious one: often, when you search Google for something, you don’t necessarily get content that’s been created for you; you get content that’s been created for Google’s search algorithm.

There’s nothing unethical or illegal about content farms – they’re not wicked, or dishonest, or evil – but their prominence in Google results means they can be an enormous pain in the backside.

I wrote about Nokia’s fading fortunes a few months ago and got into trouble for suggesting Nokia should embrace another OS – Android, say, or Windows Phone 7. Today, Nokia announced that Windows Phone 7 would be the central plank of its smartphone strategy. Naturally I think that’s a great idea, and I explain why over on Techradar.

Nothing in tech is certain, of course, and the whole partnership could end in disaster. But I’m really excited about this. Nokia makes stunning hardware, and Windows Phone 7 is a really nice mobile OS.

Me: why the HP TouchPad is another nail in Windows’ coffin.

What’s happening is incredible, and it’s happening incredibly quickly. Until very recently, personal computing generally meant Windows running on Intel, with a smattering of AMD, Linux and Mac OS X to keep the internet in arguments. Now, though, personal computing often doesn’t involve traditional computers at all.

The hills are alive with the sound of tech writers going “OMG! Apple will kill the Kindle app!” I’m not convinced.

The bit about Apple refusing to “let customers to have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store” isn’t a quote from Sony. It isn’t included in the Sony Reader blog’s explanation either.

Since such a policy would make Apple look quite exceptionally evil, you’d think Sony might have mentioned it.

I think the NYT is right and wrong at the same time. When it says Sony users can’t access content they’ve already bought, it’s perfectly correct: if you can’t have the app, you can’t have any content that’s delivered via that app.

Apple hasn’t banned the content. It’s rejected the app.

Of course, the fact that so many people think it will kill the Kindle app doesn’t say much for Apple’s public image…

Me, on Techradar:

In December 2009, on this very website, I wrote a very silly thing. “There’s no way any device, not even an Apple one, can live up to the hype the long-awaited Apple Tablet has generated,” I grumbled.

Oops!

Elsewhere on the site I’ve written a wee piece on the NGP, aka the Sony PSP2.

Sony’s codename for the PSP2 is NGP, which stands for Nice Gamey Playtime.