Among HuffPo’s top 11:

• iPod: little needs to be said, except, do you remember your life before having gigabytes of music in your pocket to listen to on demand?
• iTunes: made digital music downloads mainstream
• TiVo: the neutron bomb that hit TV. Do you remember when you had to watch TV in the order it was presented, or pop in a VHS tape to “time-shift”? How last millennium!
• Blackberrys/crackberrys/iPhones/PDAs in general: a computer on your belt or in your purse that is way more powerful than the computer you used to have on your desk, and it’s a phone and it’s connected to the web too!
• Kindle: still on the upswing, but do you remember where you were when Gutenberg invented the printing press? (don’t worry, it was 1439). You’ll tell your grandkids about seeing the first e-book. Yes, it’s that big.
• USB flash drives: flash memory in general is an absolutely revolutionary tool, as it allows us to record visual images (photos, video) on tiny devices that can go anywhere and record anything (which can then be uploaded on the worldwide communications platform we call The Internet). It also allows us to carry up to 300GB of data in our back pocket and hand it (say, nuclear secrets) to anyone we want.
• HDTV: 50 years after the commercialization of TV, the next step in picture quality, opening up all sorts of possibilities, but mostly, allowing men to watch football on giant screens.

Huffpo’s list is mainly “gadgets,” in other words tech hardware with some nifty software inside. What about things that were either sold or used only as software, on existing hardware? No diff really, but Huffpo skipped those, so here are a few I’d add:

• Google: came out in 98-99, but it didn’t gain popularity until 2000. Changed web search from a frustrating and incomplete exercise into an extension of our brains and thoughts.
• Facebook: changed online personas from sock puppets/imaginary selves to real people knitting their lives together.
• Twitter: it’s the first wave of the ‘real time web’ where information is shared almost as soon as it is created
• Blogging/content management systems: Took the creation of web content away from computer professionals and put it in the hands of everyone.
• Wikipedia: the open documentation and organization of all the world’s information
• YouTube: the first major step toward moving TV/video content onto the web. Trust me, by the end of the next decade, you won’t use a satellite dish or cable or rabbit ears to get TV content. It will all come over the Internet.
• Skype: buh bye, copper phone lines. Hullo, cheap voice and video phone calls over the web.
• BitTorrent: An amazingly simple way to share huge files containing entertainment (movies, concerts) over the net. I can now download a three hour, 1GB Springsteen show in about 15 minutes. At the beginning of the decade I was trading audio tapes by mail with people. How easy will it be in another decade?

1. Is Facebook over its capacity today? I’m getting lots of error messages today — could it be that everyone who is off today has jumped on FB and pushed their traffic beyond capacity? That’s what it looks like to me. If so, it’s a problem we’d all like to have — being too popular. i’ve gotten ‘system down’ messages just trying to get in, then I’ve gotten to my profile and it doesn’t load anything from my wall and when I tried to friend someone, I got an error message I hadn’t seen before.
2. I saw this parking sign in my dysfunctional hometown of Oakland, CA, yesterday (a Wednesday). What does this mean?

In other words: currently I am user #748461753 on Facebook, but come Friday night West Coast time, I will jump on Facebook and try to grab my vanity URL, so that my listing on Facebook (and hence the web) will be something like www.facebook.com/myvanityurl.

Why?

Because this will make my Facebook profile easier to search for on the web, and is part of the move toward the “semantic web” that is coming down the pike. The “semantic” web is all about getting richer and more useful information when you look for something on the web. For instance, in my case, I want people to find all my writing and services in one place when they search for me. That’s not what you get when you Google me — you get a page that has lots of my stuff, but a) not all of it and b) it’s interspersed with other results.

Anyway, back to Facebook. If you are a Facebook user, you should definitely plan on getting a vanity URL at your earliest convenience. One can assume that it will be pretty tough to get through to the FB servers in the minutes and hours immediately after 12:01 am ET, so plan on trying some time this weekend. You can read more about it on Facebook’s blog here or on these many news and blog posts.

Here’s a timely resource that may come in handy, especially if you use Facebook for your product or services: Adam Metz has posted a Facebook Vanity URL Action Plan.