A few years ago, people involved with collaborative computing got very excited about the Mac OS X. I believe it’s time their attention focused on another Apple technology: the iPod. Metcalfe’s Law says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of uses of the system, which means that we have reached a “pervulsion”* or unknowable and magical variation in the usage of a word.

Specifically, the iPod is about to become a network, or collaborative, device, and it will have an unprecedented number of users. The iPhone has pulled the cork out of the bottle, and the genie is gleefully looking at all the cool things it can do with a wireless iPod.

The mystery, of course, is why the genie has slept so long. I can remember my first glimpse of the Palm Pilot in 1995 and my instant question to Ed Corrigan was, “When will you build a phone into it?” – a question that provoked utter bafflement. At that time, I didn’t understand how badly broken the US mobile phone infrastructure was. But that is changing.

Mobile data will never be all the things the visionaries have hoped. But it will be enough to make the iPod spawn a viable ecosphere for data collaboration. And, sadly, the obverse of that valuable coin: a viable Macintosh virus industry.

*pervulsion: a word I stole from Jack Vance. Look it up!