The Gartner Hype Cycle has become pretty famous for mapping out the ups and downs of technological innovation in a way that appeals to our yearnings for order in a fast-moving marketplace.

The Hype Cycle is a curve graph illustrating the pattern of growth, maturity and adoption of technologies. "Expectations" about the technology is graphed along the x-axis of "Time". It was created as a way of providing a cross-industry perspective on the technologies and trends that IT managers should consider in developing emerging-technology portfolios.

A graph of technologies typically starts at with an innovation or investment "Trigger", rises rapidly on the hype of something new until it reaches a "Peak of Inflated Expectations", followed rapidly by a steep fall to the "Trough of Disillusionment", then moving to the Slope of Enlightenment" and onward to the "Plateau of Productivity".

In its latest Hype Cycle Special Report, IT research firm Gartner evaluated 1,650 technologies. Those at the Peak of Inflated Expectations this year include cloud computing, e-books and internet TV. Social software and microblogging sites, for example Twitter, are over the hump and have started the plunge to the Trough of Disillusionment.

Cloud computing, a reference to the use of software over the Internet as a service, has resulted in a "deafening" hype, with every vendor expounding its cloud strategy and variations, Gartner says.

"Cloud computing is the latest super-hyped concept in IT," the report says. "Although cloud computing is about a very simple idea - consuming and/or delivering services from 'the cloud', there are many issues regarding types of cloud computing and scope of deployment that make the details not nearly so simple."

Meanwhile e-book readers such as those currently sold by Sony and Amazon are held back by proprietary file formats and digital rights management technologies, which along with price, limits their adoption and will drive them into the Trough of Disillusionment.

Social networking and microblogging through Twitter are just starting their disillusionment phase among corporate types. Businesses have been experimenting with using social networking to get their message out, reach more consumers and get them actively involved in the brand.

Disillusionment is beginning based on the realisation that much more work must be done to build an effective social software deployment. As for Twitter, microblogging through this channel has exploded in use to the extent that the "inevitable disillusionment around 'channel pollution' is beginning.

Still, it is no hype that CIO Magazine features a "Twitter Bible", claiming to provide chief information officers with the ultimate guide to getting their corporations on the microblogging site.

CIO Magazine justifies the series of articles by quoting Jeremiah Owyang, a senior Forrester analyst.

"Most Twitter users are hyper-connected," says Owyang. "They are influencers and really want to share opinions with others. Many of them keep blogs. They are very different than the mainstream Facebook users."

Compare this phase of microblogging (about to plunge into disillusionment) to regular blogging, which for corporations is now at the mature phase of adoption, on the rising Slope of Enlightenment. Other technologies on the same slope are: mobile phone payments, social network analysis, Web 2.0, idea management, the Tablet PC, electronic paper, wikis, location-aware applications and speech recognition.

When examining a technology's real benefit - the Plateau of Productivity rather than the hyped expectations - Gartner believes that Web 2.0, cloud computing, Internet TV, virtual worlds and service-oriented architecture (SOA) will become mainstream in less than five years. Longer term, RFID, 3-D printing, context-delivery architectures, mobile robots, and human augmentation will become transformational across a range of industries.

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Last week's column on the changeover from Vista to Windows 7, prompted this response from an informed reader: "After a decade or so of Windows use, working in an IBM-dominated world, I loathed Vista SO much and was SO annoyed at having this piece of expensive garbage foisted upon me, that a little over two years ago I, made the switch to an Apple Mac. I have to say, it was one of best things I've ever done for my sanity and I've never looked back."

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