In yesterday's item, on social networking, I linked to some curmudgeonly mutterings on the subject from Patrick Barkham. They included these sentiments:

If you're single, every second spent perusing other people's photos on Facebook is a second less to catch the eye of a gorgeous passerby in the street. If your mind-numbing job plonks you behind a computer all day, every minute spent on Facebook is a minute lost to do something about your stultifying situation.

I wonder what he'd make of this toy, Twittervision, which displays against a map of the world the latest postings on the Twitter system. It was designed by David Troy and is a fine example of misapplied ingenuity. (Twitter itself came up as a topic in this item, ten days ago.)

Mr Troy has also done a toy for Flickr, which shows the picture and its place of origin for each new posting to that system.

Both gadgets are as useless as the human appendix but are far more interesting to look at. So, if you really have nothing else to do with your time...