That was the juiciest topic last Friday at New York University during the Future of Television Conference, a gathering of TV brass such as the CEO’s of Showtime and Univision, senior executives from MTV Networks, Discovery, and Yahoo, and founders of Internet video startups. The subject also permeated Pepcom’s Wine, Dine & Demo  tech show the night before, where about a half-dozen Internet-to-TV products were being shown.

The conclusion, at least to this reporter, is that cord cutting is about as real now as growing new organs in vats. Consumers will do it–but they won’t do it in droves just yet.

There are a few reasons why.

Perhaps most important: Few people  want to do it (yet). Todd Cunningham, chief consumer researcher of MTV Networks (with about a dozen channels like Nickelodeon and Comedy Central), explained the results of a November poll by the Cable Association that summed it up. About 11 percent of Americans are watching TV online. But most of those online viewers (84%) are watching the same amount or even more regular broadcast TV than before.

Even if switching to online does become a mass movement, cord-cutters will have to grapple with reason number 2: They won’t have much to watch.

Networks are keeping a tight leash on their shows. HBO and Showtime, combined, have about 35 million handsomely paying customers. So why mess with that?

Of course, you can get streams at a few pirate sites like Megavideo (if you know how to find them). And you could buy episodes from iTunes, but most consumers downright resent pay per view. Netflix streaming has a growing selection of shows, but not enough to replace TV. You can also download a torrent. but again, regular folks can’t be bothered. They just get cable.

Even network TV shows more than a few episodes old are walled off, unless you subscribe to Hulu Plus (which virtually no one is doing). And if the networks ever find that Hulu is killing their business, they can shut off the spigot.

There’s another, big barrier to Internet video on the TV: The process generally sucks. Netflix is a hit on Blu-ray players and other devices, but most other services struggle. Google TV, once promising, has big problems.

OK, a search bar for video is great. But why does the interface have seven different screens? And what are all the icons on those screens?

What’s the difference between apps and shortcuts? Between the Spotlight and Sony Recommends menus (on Sony gear, of course)? As Harry said of the Logitech Revue, “In short, if ever a Google product needed a “beta” label, it’s this one.”

Maybe geeks will grok this stuff. But normal people can’t be bothered. “Women don’t want to set shit up…They can, they just don’t want to,” said Tobey Grumet Segal, tech reporter for InStyle, referring to Internet set-top boxes.

Also, why can’t we get online video from any of the Big Four networks on Google TV? Oh right, because they block it. The studios can give TV shows, and they can take them away.

None of this means that cord cutting won’t happen, but it will take a while. Networks and cable companies will fight hard to make sure they don’t lose money.

“It’s a great business,” said Showtime’s CEO Matthew Blank about the status quo. To go to streaming, he said, “You better be very certain that [your programs] are going to be more profitable,” than they are now.

And maybe they could. “It’s not about putting everything out for free,” said Boxee’s Avner Ronen. “People will be willing to pay for the content…I love HBO. I would love to pay for it. I have no option to get HBO,” at least not without a giant cable bill.

Though subscription numbers dropped a bit recently, most people may not leave cable. But what if the next generation never comes to it? Taking the students at NYU as an example, Ronen said that it’s not about cord cutting, but “cord-never-getting.”

If cable companies (which are also Internet companies) see new customers dropping off in a few years, they may take a different view. And if networks numbers drop, they will have to go along.

Said Frank O’Connor from Microsoft’s Halo team, “In ten years, you’ll be able to watch whatever you want, wherever you want, whenever you want.” That sounds about right.

1. If I can’t find a cable around the house that I need and resort to going out and buying a duplicate, the first one will inexplicably appear from nowhere and spring at me, anaconda-like, the moment I return home.

2. I will periodically wind up with a mysterious stack of empty CD-ROM envelopes with the serial numbers printed on the back. 65% of those envelopes won’t mention the name of the software they once held. 85% will have serial numbers printed in an exotic font in which the B, 8, 0, and G look exactly the same.

3. Similarly, I have an entire file cabinet full of power bricks which I can’t identify.

4. At least half the time I call for tech support, I will know considerably more about the product I need help with than the person on the other end of the line. Even if I hardly know anything at all.

5. The only times my TiVo will fail to record a TV show is when it’s one of the rare programs I really, really want to watch.

6. Even if I’ve used a particular type of cable (USB, say) for a decade, I will attempt to insert the connector upside-down at least half the time.

7. The worst problems that Macs can inflict upon you are just as maddening and maddeningly random as the worst Windows ones. It’s just that they happen less often.

8. I can’t always find a backup of an important file I created within the last month, but I can still lay my hands on cartridge-tape backups I made in 1999.

9. When I attempt to fix a computer problem–especially one I basically brought upon myself–chances are better than even that the first thing I do will make the situation worse.

10. Odds are 100% that I will factor a rebate into a buying decision, even though I consistently urge people not to do that. But only 45% that I will remember to send the paperwork in.

11. I’ll click the “Register Later” button in an application’s splash screen thousands of times, over the course of many years, until I’ve devoted infinitely more time and effort that it would have taken to register the software in the first place.

12. If I swap an SD card out of a camera, I’ll reliably place it unprotected in a shirt pocket full of other stuff, forget it’s there, and never see it again.

13. Any camera I buy (with the possible exception of Sony models) will have an on-screen battery gauge that never seems to appear on screen until it’s frantically flashing red to tell me I’m about to run out of juice. The battery will completely die within ninety seconds of this gauge’s first appearance.

14. Most of the time, anything I do involving syncing a PC and a device such as a phone or PDA has only two possible outcomes: 1) all data will be accidentally deleted on both devices; or 2) all data will be accidentally duplicated on both devices.

15. Anything I buy with a metal case, such as an Apple laptop, will develop dents and deep scratches whose origins are inexplicable to me–even if I put it into a protective case the moment I buy it. It’s as if I sleepwalk with my tech gadgets and treat them poorly when doing so.

16. My bookmarks, over time, will be made up primarily of default one from browsers I haven’t used in years for stuff like My Excite@Home and items I needed once in 1998, all of which have been imported from browser to browser over the years.

17. If I go into a store and want to be left alone, salespeople will cling to me like barnacles. If I go into the same store and need help, it’ll be like Pompeii or something.

There, I feel better. At least slightly. Thanks for listening.

For a dozen years or so now, the Internet has been a mainstream communications medium, and its history has been pockmarked with examples of big-time services choking for extended periods–often a lot longer than today’s Gmail blip. The most famous examples of unplanned downtime have a lot in common: They usually last longer than anyone expected and get blamed on cryptic technical glitches. Almost always, angry consumers announce they’re done with the service in question; almost always, the service eventually recovers.

Oh, and one more thing: The biggest and most embarrassing failures all seem to happen during the summer months. Maybe technology, like human beings, just doesn’t work quite as hard when the weather’s hot and there are distractions like baseball games, picnics, and vacations to contemplate.

Now that Gmail’s back, it’s worth recapping a few other outages that made headlines when they happened–and since the ones that follow are in alphabetical order, they begin with maybe the most famous one of all (hint: it involved a company whose initials are A.O.L.)…

Who? America Online, the company that was synonymous with online services in the mid-1990s.
When? August 1996.
How long? 19 hours.
Why? AOL CEO Steve case blamed it on problems with the installation of “”high capacity switches within the local area network.“
Upshot? The service’s 6.3 million users received refunds for the downtime.
Saving grace? Steve Case’s artful and honest work as chief apologist made him even more famous as AOL’s public face.
Any other problems? AOL suffered multiple embarrassing outages in the era (here’s another one), then pretty much got over having ‘em–though a 5-hour e-mail meltdown in 2006 felt like old times all over again.

Who? eBay, then as now the world’s biggest auction site.
When? June 1998.
How long? Almost a day–reportedly the biggest outage in online history at the time.

Why? “[The] problem resulted from a failure in the software that was used to list items for sale and update bids. He insisted it was not a problem with the site being strained to capacity and said it was not clear why it had failed.” Matters were complicated further by the fact that eBay hadn’t quite finished implementing a backup system.
Upshot? eBay lost an estimated $3-$5 million in sales and was forced to offer refunds, extend auctions, and waive fees by way of apology to sellers whose auctions were affected.
Saving grace? Some eBay users who had bid early on items in auctions that were scheduled to end during the time the service turned out to be down got bargains.
Any other problems? This outage was one of several catastrophic ones that eBay suffered in 1998 and 1999.

Who? MobileMe, Apple’s brand-new service for synching information on iPhones, Macs, and PCs.
When? July 2008
How long? Several weeks of at least sporadic issues for some users.
Why? Apple’s MobileMe blog mentioned multiple technical gremlins, including “a lot more traffic to our servers than we anticipated,” a bug “that was preventing MobileMe IMAP mail folders from syncing correctly between the web app and Mac OS X Mail or Outlook,” and “a serious problem with one of our mail servers.”
Upshot? Apple extended all MobileMe accounts by a month; Steve Jobs said that the MobileMe launch wasn’t “up to Apple’s standards” in a widely-published internal memo and put a new Apple exec in charge of the service.
Saving grace? None to date, although it’s been a rare opportunity to see Apple eat crow.
Any other problems? As I write this, it appears that the worst of MobileMe’s woes may behind it, but grumbling continues; on June 29th, an Apple blog post promised an update later in the week, but none have been published.

Who? MSN Messenger, the instant-messaging service from the world’s largest software company.
When? July 2001.
How long? For some users, about a week.
Why? “[An] extremely rare set of circumstances occurred when one of our database servers had a disc controller fail.“
Upshot? Some unhappy users decamped to AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and other IM services.
Saving grace? The outage didn’t help people feel better about Microsoft’s scary HailStorm initiative for serving as a one-stop repository for all of consumers’ data and probably helped to kill it.
Any other problems? MSN Messenger also went down in 2003 and 2005.

Matthew uses this Twitter post by Mashable’s Adam Ostrow as a springboard to discuss why he’s finding bookmarking less and less relevant:

I found the whole notion of bookmarking being passé to be not only intriguing but surprisingly cathartic–because I’ve never been much of a bookmarker, and I’ve always felt sort of guilty about it.

How come I’ve never bookmarked? Mostly because it’s always felt like work that didn’t result in adequate payoff. It’s required a few clicks that always seem like a distraction that interferes with whatever I’m doing at the moment. (Pretty much by definition, you bookmark something because it’s valuable; I’m usually so engrossed in the content that I forget to bookmark it.) Bookmarks require folders (or folder variants such as Google Toolbar’s labels); managing folders makes me feel like a librarian tending to a card catalog, and I always seem to end up with multiple folders that duplicate each others’ purpose. Which means that even once I’ve bookmarked something, I have trouble finding it.

Another issue with bookmarks that I’ve never found closure with is that it’s harder to remember to get rid of bookmarks than to create them in the first place. Any time I’ve ever made a concerted effort to bookmark stuff–and God knows, I have–I’ve ended up forgetting to bookmark some sites I go to everyday…and leaving bookmarks related to projects from years ago cluttering up my folders.

For a long time, I had a good excuse to avoid bookmarks: They were tied to a particular browser on a particular machine, and I’ve always been a multiple-browsers-on-multiple-computers kind of browser. In theory, that excuse went away years ago when Web-based bookmarking services started to pop up. (Backflip sticks in my mind as the first one I saw and kind of liked–and it’s still around.)

I’ve tried a bunch of approaches to putting bookmarks on the Web and/or synching them across multiple PCs, but I’ve never found one that made me into a long-term believer. I couldn’t even remember the original Del.icio.us’s name, let along figure out its cryptic interface. I liked Google Browser Sync until it started creating phantom duplicate bookmarks–and if I’d kept with it I would have ended up irritated with Google when they discontinued the service. These days, I use Google Toolbar’s bookmarks–sort of–but still fumble with the fact any browser I use also has its own bookmark system. (I sometimes forget where I’ve bookmarked what.)

When I say that bookmarking is difficult, what I’m really is that other means of finding information are easier. That’s always been true, and it’s only more strikingly so today. I can find nearly anything I need on the Web in Google in ten seconds or so. I’ve always gone back to sites by typing their names into the browser’s address bar, and with the “Awesome Bar” in Firefox 3 and its cousin Flock, it feels like the browser figures out what I’m looking for within my first two or three keystrokes. (Firefox 3 also makes strides in removing some of the hassle of bookmarking, but the Awesome Bar is so good I haven’t felt the need to bookmark anything.)

For years, I thought the fact that I didn’t bookmark much meant that I was secretly a clueless newbie. I assumed that serious Web users were serious bookmarkers, and that my failure to become one was a sign I was disorganized and wasteful of my own time. So I love the notion that bookmarking doesn’t matter much anymore. Whether or not it’s valid.

And now that I’m feeling better about not being a bookmarker, I may even find the courage to explain to you why I’m not that much of an RSS user…

1) I worked for a large company that used Lotus Notes–as large companies are wont to do–and there was no good way to get Notes on an iPhone;

2) Every time I tried Mobile Safari, I got depressed by how hobbled such an excellent piece of software was by the slow AT&T EDGE data network;

3) I didn’t want to buy a phone that could only run the applications that Apple itself decided to produce.

Problem one went away when I departed the corporate world to start Technologizer. (Side note: I’ve been using Gmail and Google Calendar to do the stuff I used to do in Notes.) The iPhone 3G solved the second one. And with the advent of the Apple 2.0 software, the iPhone can run third-party applications, of which there are already hundreds in the iTunes Store. So last Friday, I got myself up at 2:30am and braved the lines to buy an iPhone 3G–and a week later, I’m mostly extremely pleased with it.

Already, the library of iPhone apps is impressive: I’ve been downloading and enjoying applications such as Twitterific and Facebook, and am giddy at the prospect of other cool programs to come. But I’m glum about the fact that there’s one major category of software that appears to simply not exist on the iPhone: Utiltiies that change the standard functionality of the phone’s operating system and built-in applications. There are tons of such programs for Windows Mobile, and I used a bunch of them on my Tilt to make it that much more personal.

As far as I can tell, the lack of such programs on the iPhone–the App Store does have a “Utilities” section, but it includes no true utilities–is intentional. When Apple’s explained the architecture of the phone as an application platform, it’s talked about how applications are sandboxed so as to limit the damage that a poorly-written program can do. You can’t both sandbox apps and let them dig into OS itself and change its functionality. That means that other developers can’t build the tweaking tools that are commonplace with Windows Mobile. And even in the iPhone 2.0 software, Apple provides only a handful of ways for users to customize the phone.

So right now, the iPhone interface is what it is. What it is is by far the best interface ever produced for a mobile device, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of ways I’d change it if I could. Such as…

1. On my Tilt–and I know this is geeky and atypical–I’d programmed just about every button I could to do something that made the phone faster to use. (One press on a button normally used for Push to Talk brought up my calendar; two presses on it brought up my to-do list.) The iPhone, of course, has only one real button, and it takes you to the Home screen; Apple does let you configure it to take you to your phone Favorites or the iPod features if you press it twice. At the very least, I’d like to be able to specify that it launch any Apple or non-Apple app I choose when I press it twice. And hey, if you could configure it to do custom things if you pressed it three times–or, God help me, four times–I’d probably use that, too.

2) How about also being able to specify what the Home button does if you press it and hold it down for awhile?

3) Steve Jobs was so pleased with the iPhone’s “Slide to unlock” feature that it was just about the first thing he showed at the iPhone’s unveiling at Macworld Expo 2007. It is indeed a clever and useful feature. Despite that, I’d like the ability to turn it off, or to specify that the iPhone not need to be unlocked for a specific period after it first shuts itself off. Sliding to unlock feels a lot less cool when you do it dozens of times a day, as I’m doing now.

4) Here’s another goofy, geeky idea I’d use: What if you could set up multiple Slide-to-unlock sliders that took you to different apps?

5) Sticking with the iPhone’s behavior when you first turn it on for a moment, the customizable wallpaper is nice, but I wish I could skip the wallpaper and simply see whatever application I’m in before I slide to unlock. I’ve usually forgotten where I was, and it takes a millisecond or two for me to remember; I’d rather be reminded instantly.

6) Speaking of which, the app I was in last time I used the iPhone is often not the one I want to use when I turn it back on. If you could configure the phone to return to the Home screen rather than to the last app used, I might do that.

7) When you return to an app you’ve been out of for awhile, the iPhone takes you to wherever you were when you left–such as a particular inbox of one of your e-mail accounts. Which makes perfect sense, but if I could, I’d at least experiment with returning to the top-level screen of the app. (It can take a lot of thumbpresses to back your way out.)

8) There’s lots of opportunity to let uses program custom finger-swipes. What if you could launch a specific app or perform a certain task by swiping your finger quickly from to bottom–and another one by swiping from bottom to top?

9) I like the fact that you can move your program icons around on the Home screen, and that swiping your finger lets you jump to additional Home screens as needed. I’d be even happier if there was a way to set up Home screens for particular types of apps–say, one for productivity tools and another for games.

10) I don’t understand why the iPhone’s otherwise wonderful YouTube app, when I flip the phone into horizontal mode, doesn’t notice whether I’m holding the phone with the Home button on the left or right. It always shows up assuming that the Home button is on the right, but I always instinctively have it on the left, perhaps because I’m a lefty. Which means that YouTube is upside-down and I need to flip the phone around.

11) On the Tilt, I was stuck with Microsoft’s archaic Pocket Internet Explorer, but it was a lot less archaic once I installed a nifty utility called PiePlus which added most of the features that IE lacked. Safari doesn’t need help in the way that IE did, but I’d still like to see the ability for third-party developers to add features to it.

12) Once you’ve made a call with the iPhone, the on-screen keypad goes away until you bring it back with a press. I wish it could stay onscreen at all times during a call; there seems to be enough real estate to make that happen.

13)  One last wonky desire: If there were a Bluetooth keyboard for the iPhone that I could use instead of the onscreen one, I’d probably buy it. I’m not sure whether third-party developers have access to the iPhone’s Bluetooth, though…or whether they could suppress the on-screen keyboard when the real one was in use.

I could list another twenty things I’d love to see, and maybe I will at some point. My guess is that Apple will eventually implement a feature or two I mention above, and there are others that they’d absolutely, positively refuse to add. That’s their right. But it would be swell if independent iPhone developers made this amazing phone do just about anything that iPhone users wanted it to…

Without Summize’s search, Twitter was sort of like a gargantuan party that was such a mob scene that you most likely ended up hanging out only with folks you already knew or who you encountered through pure serendipity. With Summize search, it’s going to be a cinch to find conversations you want to join and people who share your interests. Already, searches such as iPhone battery life and Iraq news make for good reading, and after I blogged about my new Humanscale Freedom chair, I idly searched for it–and was startled to discover that the chair has been the subject of lots of Tweets.

As a Twitter fan–I am, by the way, harrymccracken over there–I’m looking forward to seeing search become a big part of how I use Twitter. But I’m also thinking about other ways I’d improve the service–aside from the obvious hope that its days of frequent outages are behind it. So herewith, a short, highly personal wishlist.

I wish Twitter had…

1. Threaded conversations–real ones, I mean. The most interesting Tweets are part of discussions among two or more people, but the current form of threading on Twitter is a kludge that doesn’t work very well. It’s often hard to tell what a reply’s replying to, and impossible to read a conversation all on one page. A service called Quotably attempts to address these issues, but it only works some of the time…and who wants to go to a different site to experience what should be one of Twitter’s core features?

2. Threaded permalinks. Speaking of threading, I often want to point people to Twitter dialogs–sometimes ones from the distant past. I’d love a way to create a link to any snippet of conversation I chose.

3. Photos in Tweets. TwitPic lets you share photos via Twitter, and for what it does, it works quite nicely. But I wish that there was a way to make images show up in Tweets themselves. Maybe Twitter could even use MMS to push those photos out to folks who follow Twitter on their phones. (My take on Twitter is skewed by the fact that I mostly use it on the Web.)

4. More ways to find really worthwhile people and discussions. Right now, I discover new people on Twitter largely by accident or word of mouth, and I know that there are countless conversations going on that I might want to join…if only I knew they were happening. I’m sure Summize’s technology will help here. And maybe there should be a mechanism for rating Tweeters and/or the Tweets they produce.

5. Features that were just slightly more like e-mail. I say “just slightly” because it would be easy to ruin Twitter by complicating it. But I’d like to see something akin to an address book in Twitter; currently, your lists of people you’re following and those who are following you are separate and (I think) permanently arranged in the order they were added. And Twitter users have both user names and screen names, a distinction that’s fuzzy enough that I keep forgetting what’s what and when to use which one.

One thing I hope Twitter never does is allow you to create Tweets that are longer than 140 characters long. The fact that you’re forced into haiku mode when Tweeting is a huge part of the joy of Twitter…

So how would you change Twitter if you could?