Why Thomas Hawk is my iPhone Canary.

                               [Thomas Hawk at work. Photo by Shel]

I sat smugly this morning reading Thomas Hawk's compelling five reasons not to upgrade  to the new 3G iPhone. I stroked in comfort my the one I obtained in the quaint old days of September 07. Still works works fine. The battery lasts me up to three days. It has a killer app that lets me actuall talk in real time to another human.

Thomas reminded me of why I sometimes think I am Silicon Valley's latest early adopter. Most people I know around here seem greatly enamored with each and every "shiny new object." And around here shiny objects pop up like the movie theater's popcorn maker.

The term, "shiny object" itself reminds me of fishing when I was a kid. The shiniest lures seemed to hook the biggest fish. It was great for us kids, but the fish all wound up dead. It was perhaps then that I started shying away from shiny new things.

A few years back, Tara Hunt, seemed dismayed and disappointed that I preferred working on a Word document to Writely, an early Internet-based word processor.

"You are so Web 1," she said to me, her head shaking from side to side. Of course, Writely became a key component of Google Documents, and I now use it all the time.

Yet Tara's love of shiny objects can't dust the feet of my friend and erstwhile colleague Robert Scoble who pursues the newest of the new in technology; the same guy who stood all night in a line with his son to get the now antiquated version of the iPhone; the same Scoble who writes about shiny things with the same reverence that others might reserve for the discovery of recombinant DNA.

Of course, these are my tech friends. They dwell on one end of the worm hole. 

I have other fr...