Speaking to reporters this very minute, CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin said the Mountain View, California company is through with its recent belt-tightening, which included layoffs and cutbacks in the company's famously posh perquisites. "We're increasing our hiring rate and investment rate in an anticipation of a recovery," Schmidt said, according to Peter Kafka of All Things D, who has been liveblogging Schmidt's meeting with the press.

Pressed further, Schmidt, net worth $5.5 billion, added:

From our perspective, the low point was somewhere in the spring. Which is why I said worst was behind us in May, June. Noticed recovery "Juneish". The conventional wisdom is that US recessions are 18-24 months. Bernanke sees a recovery too, which we agree with.

Added Brin ($15 billion), "And we're good indicator for consumer spending, and you can see for yourself by looking at Google Trends."

Meanwhile, national unemployment stands at 9.8 percent and Alan Greenspan, an actual economist and former Federal Reserve Board chair, predicts the economy will just get worse and then stagnate for a good long while. But he cited absolutely zero Google statistics for his prediction, nor does he get free food and laundry and transportation and snacks and internet access and literally actual trips to Disneyland provided for him free at work, so can you really trust it?

After a lot of ruckus last week about Google or Microsoft buying Twitter (they're not — yet), Twitter investor Fred Wilson came forward to say that the company wants partnerships, not a payday. And he invents a new metric: "tweet views," or the number of times someone sees a message posted on Twitter, whether it's on the Twitter website, a cell phone, Facebook, or the countless number of Twitter apps people use to read and write tweets.

What does a tweet view profit Twitter? Nothing. In making up "tweet views," Wilson is returning to a practice of the late-1990s dotcom boom: imaginary measurements for fictitious businesses.

Why blame him? Anything which can be measured can be managed. And people's expectations for Twitter — A $500 million Facebook acquisition! No, make that $1 billion from Google! — are utterly unmanageable. Twitter has next to no revenues, and no plan for making money. Pressed on this issue, Williams and his cofounder Biz Stone say that they're watching how people use the service and will come up with something based on that. Translation: They're making it up as they go along.

It's far better for Twitter to be valued based on people's imagination of what it might become, rather than the reality of what it is — a "poor man's email system," according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, or instant messaging 2.0. (AOL hasn't figured out how to make real money off of AIM, either.)

So what's Williams's big news tomorrow? Here's a preview: The day after tomorrow is even bigger.

One thing everyone agrees on: The current economic contraction, which began a year ago, will be the longest on record since the Great Depression. The optimistic scenario, voiced in the New York Times, is that it will end by the middle of 2009, as the housing market recovers and the government pours money into public works. That will put the recession at 18 to 21 months. Even playboy economist Nouriel Roubini, the professional doomsayer who installed a wall of vaginas in his personal misbegotten real-estate venture, thinks that the worst-case scenario is a recession that ends by December 2009 — 24 months. Consumers are resilient, economists say, and love nothing better than earning money and spending it.

But that's a rather U.S.-centric forecast, amid a globalized economy. (Who knew the halls of economics departments were filled with such isolationists?)

There are, even today, sectors of industry which make physical things. So old media, I know! The business is called manufacturing, and its forecasts are abysmal. A strengthening dollar, predicted as the rest of the world suffers economically, will hurt manufacturers' exports. And weak foreign markets will hurt many of the technology giants which thrived on overseas growth.

So could the recession last through 2010? Quite possibly. But it's a scenario no one's contemplating — even the most bearish of economists.

(Photo via the New York Times)

The current contraction was a year old before we even figured out it was happening, which makes it longer than the average postwar recession. Here's why it could be exceptional.

In the middle of this decade, then-revered Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan believed that information technology had transformed the very nature of recession. Just-in-time inventory, supply-chain dashboards, and an army of permalancers made adapting to changing business conditions so easy, so quick, that old-school recessions, defined by two consecutive quarters of economic shrinkage, would be a thing of the past. Instead, we would experience a series of microrecessions — a down month here or there, followed by upticks — all happening so quickly we barely felt the prick.

Ah, for the good old days of microrecessions.

What's happened now is something akin to the introduction of automated trading on Wall Street. What made 1987's Black Monday stock-market crash so devastating was the unforeseen triggering of an avalanche of selling by computer. After that, the market installed circuit breakers to prevent a recurrence.

What Wall Street had two decades ago, we now have business at large. Idiocracy, the hilariously dystopian Mike Judge movie, has a scene where the clueless CEO of a giant corporation complains that the computers laid everyone off when the stock dropped. That's something close to what happened in the Panic of '08. As bad news cascaded through the system, they triggered layoffs and cutbacks, which then prompted consumers to cut spending, causing yet more danger bells to ring.

And all of this unfolded amidst a global economy already in recession. China and India, once seen as engines of growth for the world, are in parlous states. Most frighteningly, China's imports, which have propped up old-world economies like Germany, dropped 18 percent from a year ago. India, already running a large budget deficit, has little room to stimulate its economy. Dropping oil prices, meanwhile, have taken the wind out of petroeconomies like Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia.

That's why I think the recession could be far longer than the 18 months most economists predict. Where, exactly, is growth supposed to come from? U.S. consumers and businesses are reeling from debt. The rest of the world is hardly better off. The expectation that government spending will lift us out of this mess seems akin to expecting that President Change will deliver us all a new bicycle.

The Pollyanna response is that the same information technology which helped the recession unfold so quickly will help businesses spot opportunities for growth, making the recovery all the quicker. I doubt it. Human psychology teaches us that we are far more motivated by fear of loss than the promise of gain. (Greed, it turns out, is good — because it's so much scarcer than we imagine.) Singed by the suddenness of panic, we will be much less likely to respond to glimmers of hope. 18 months? We should be so lucky. Try three years — or longer.

1) Intel is not the bellwether that it once was. Personal computers and servers, the primary destination for Intel's processors, are not nearly as large a percentage of tech spending as they were back in 2001.

2) Layoffs in the economy have already begun. Fewer employees, fewer PCs needed.

3) Large companies are accelerating virtualization projects. Virtualization is a fancy word for running more applications on fewer servers. It is greener (less power), simpler (fewer servers to break), and cheaper. Good for companies looking to lower capital expenditure and operating expenses in a recession, but bad for Intel.

Hurley claims his own site's "exponential growth" means video is becoming the dominant means of communication — not just for news and entertainment, but for everyday communication between individual people. He ignores the real-world evidence that people vastly prefer text-based communications — email, IM, phone texting — rather than the video tools built into nearly all new computers and most phones. Because he's rich and works for Google, Hurley's claim will be widely quoted today, and conveniently forgotten in ten years. Here's what no one will ask him: Chad, why did you post your world-is-changing claim in text, instead of uploading a video? (Photo by AP/Danny Moloshok)

1998: Businesses will maintain separate networks for voice, video and data.

• ''What we try to do is demystify hype,'' Forrester's Maribel Lopez told the New York Times. ''The buzz, a lot of it has to do with data guys looking to sell the next router upgrade.''
• Jupiter's Abhi Chaki disagreed, correctly calling the convergence of phone and video networks onto the Internet "an inescapable reality."

2008: Businesses will not support the iPhone for a long time.

• "The features that make it a consumer success don’t necessarily translate to the enterprise," wrote Forrester analysts Benjamin Gray and Robert Whiteley. "IT can’t be expected to support each and every operating system their employees have brought into the company."
• Jupiter's Gartenberg spotted the Achille's heel in Forrester's argument: If the CEO, rather than the IT guy, brings one to work, "it becomes a de facto enterprise business tool."

(Photo by Michael Neel)

What it doesn't include is consumer services like Blogger, Facebook, Netvibes, and Twitter, says Forrester. These types of services are aimed at consumers and are often supported by ads, so they do not qualify as Enterprise 2.0 tools. Instead, collaboration and productivity tools based on the concepts of web 2.0, but designed for the enterprise worker will count as being Enterprise 2.0.

Newsweek completely missed the coming Facebook frenzy. As for the Year of the Widget, what happened to it? MySpace bought Photobucket — an image hoster, possibly the least sophisticated widget there is. And that's about it.

"Green" technology I live next to Whole Foods, so I overhear the most ridiculous self-serving pseudoscience while in line for my organic espresso. People think they're saving the Earth from Republicans by buying the right dishwasher soap to drive home in a Lexus hybrid that spews as much greenhouse gas per mile as the gasoline-engine version. You want to clean the planet? Demand that Al Gore stop India and China from becoming the world's new pollution supersource.

The semantic Web Tim Berners-Lee asks that you please stop having so much fun on the Internet. It's time to return control of the whole thing to a bunch of postdoctoral researchers who publish long tomes titled "Thoughts on a metamodeling architecture of Web ontology languages." You can read about it in this month's Scientific American, but — wait for it — the article's not published on the Web.

Facebook I use Facebook daily and truth is, there's not much there to write about. So I'm not sure why the entire mainstream media suddenly replaced "MySpace" with "Facebook" in the exact same overreaching misreportage they've been writing for three years. My theory goes like this: Every time some kid makes a few billion on paper, editors who know in their hearts they'll be juggling spreadsheets to make the mortgage payments for the rest of their lives get a little crazy. At the rate Web 2.0 is minting rich kids it's going to be a long, long year.

My favorite prediction isn't "The Intelligent Toilet" or "The More Intelligent Toilet," but "The Most Intelligent Toilet." That's the one that "takes your temperature and your blood pressure, analyzes your urine and stool, and weighs you when ever you use it." Only thing missing are 2 girls.

1. TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat and Read/Write Web will merge into one giant Voltron-like supersite I don't read. Whoops, already happened.
2. Apple evangelists are right: A second-generation Apple TV will have twice the success the first model did. What's two times zero?
3. Google will have the most amazingly innovative layoff ever.

(Illustration by Uncov)