The world used to be simpler. There was the brick n’ mortar world, and there was the internet-y world. But with the passage of time, everything’s getting all mixed up. Here are three products and services that in some way blend the two worlds in ways that both useful, and confusing for someone of advancing years, such as myself or your Dad. And yes, they’re all available for purchase in time for the upcoming holiday season.

TweetBookz – Tweets, by design, are meant to be ephemeral and short-lived. You see a funny picture, think up a witty pun, or have an interesting bowel movement, and you tap out a quick 140 character post about it. It gets sent out to your friends and associates and is quickly read and forgotten. Or so we all thought. But TweetBookz take this uniquely online world and give it a permanent, paper-y presence on your coffee table. Or, more likely, in a dusty box in your attic. The idea is simple: you pick 200 of your very best tweets and this company turns them into a book, with one tweet per page. For the sake of veracity, you’re not allowed to go in and edit your tweets after the fact to make them more awesome. And you’re also not allowed to borrow any from some funnier, smarter or sexier Twitter user. It’s gotta be all you. So if I were to create a TweetBook myself, it would consist of 200 identical pages, each saying: “Got up, did some writing, watched reruns of The Office. Tty tomorrow!”  They cost around $25.50 for the hard-cover edition. And you have to go hard-cover, because this will be something you’ll want to read and re-read for decades to come.

Amazon’s Instant Video Streaming with DVD Purchase – What’s the crappiest part of buying  a DVD from an online retailer, instead of down at Best Buy? That’s right, it’s the infernal waiting for it to arrive in the mail. Well, the wait is over. Now when you purchase certain hard-copy DVDs from Amazon, you get instant access to a streaming version of the movie. It’s only available to US purchasers at the moment, and only for about 300 TV shows and movies. And, for now, it’s only for a limited time. But if it’s popular, you’d have to think they’ll roll this feature out on a much bigger level. The best thing about this is that you can buy DVDs as gifts for people, and still get to watch it yourself via the streaming version.

VeriFone’s iPhone Credit Card Payment System – So you’re selling some vintage Scobby Doo collectibles to a guy who saw your Craigslist ad. You meet him (somewhere public and well-lit, I hope) and he doesn’t have any cash. No problem. Just swipe his credit card through this little iPhone gizmo, and his money will instantly be yours to enjoy. It brings the joy and convience of ecommerce to the brick and mortar world of, well, wherever you happen to be. To operate this, you have to pay a monthly subscription fee, so it’s really only meant for relatively high-volume sellers, like delivery pizza parlors, door-to-door salespersons and prostitutes. But if there’s anyone like that on your holiday shopping list, you know what to buy them.

Do you love Twitter more than you love money? If so, I have the perfect product for you. It’s a gadget that can send tweets, receive tweets, search for tweets and…uh…absolutely nothing else. It’s called the TwitterPeek and it’s the world’s first dedicated Twitter device.

You can be forgiven if this news makes you look at your calendar to make sure it’s not April 1st. But it’s no joke. The company behind the TwitterPeek is called Peek. They’ve already released the Peek and the Peek Pronto, similarly single-use devices that can be used only for mobile email and text messaging, respectively.

The TwitterPeek features a small screen, and a full QWERTY keyboard. It’s always on, and always connected. Which, come to think of it, actually sounds like it could be kind of cool if you do a lot of tweeting. After all, the thing’s got to be really cheap, right? Right?

Well, no, not exactly. You can buy one right now on Amazon for $199.95. Which is about the price of an iPhone when you get a 3 year contract. And while iPhones include features like phones, compasses, mp3 players, and access to over 100,000 different applications, the similarly priced TwitterPeek lets you tweet. That $199.95 price tag does, however, include a lifetime of connectivity. So that’s something. You can actually buy one for only $99.95 if you only want 6 months of free service (with your network connection costing $7.95 per month after that period elapses).

The whole thing seems kind of crazy, though Peek definitely got one thing right – timing the product release right at the start of the holiday shopping season. Given how many people out there have very long gift-buying lists, it’s entirely possible that the TwitterPeek will be showing up under quite a few Christmas trees. If you do happen to get one, just remember to smile, thank the person who gave it to you, and try not to let them see you sending any tweets from your home computer, laptop, netbook, BlackBerry, iPhone or any of the other hundred or so gadgets that are already capable of handling your Twitter needs.

It may be a little early for Christmas shopping, but if you’re into books by authors like Stephen King and Dean Koontz, you may be able to benefit from a price war by three of the biggest eCommerce book sellers on the planet. About two weeks ago, Amazon and Wal-mart started selling a number of bestsellers at way below market price. In marketing terms, it’s called a loss-leader…selling a much sought-after product at a steep discount to attract customers who will hopefully buy other stuff while they’re poking around on your website.

In this case though, the deals were so good that the online retailers realized they were shooting themselves in the foot. The deal affected ten books bound for the bestseller list in the holiday shopping season. Hardcover copies of these books, that would normally retail for anywhere from $25-$35 each, were on sale for as low as $8.98. Since they were selling the books at below-wholesale price, small book sellers ran in and scooped up multiple copies so they could re-sell them in their own stores.

Now, two weeks after the sale started, the big retailers realized what was going on, and have just placed a limit on the number of copies each customer can purchase. Now you can purchase anywhere from 2-5 copies, depending on the retailer and the book; plenty enough for your gift list, but not enough for a smaller retailer looking to cash in on the re-sale bonanza. As usually happens when Amazon goes head-to-head with smaller book-stores, you had to know that, sooner or later, Amazon would make sure the little guy couldn’t scratch out any sort of advantage.

After Jim Balsilie’s Phoenix Coyotes bid is for the final time rejected by the American judiciary, RIM remembers to give a specific date to the relase of the new Blackberry Mac Desktop Manager. Turns out it’s tomorrow! The new software will be available as a free download on the Blackberry site to eagerly awaiting Mac users, excited to futher synch their cult-like Mac lives.  I am not a member of this cult, but my wife is. Now there can be synergy between their Mac contact lists, schedules, tasks, and reminders and their Blackberry- I’m surprised society has held it together for this long without this kind of synchronicity. Maybe we can blame the recession on this? The software will also allow users to schedule back-ups, encrypt files, and install new software updates for their ever usefull BlackBerry devices.

In other related RIM news, the software and ICT giant recenlty announced a partnership with Queen’s University. The company will be working with the school to tackle the growing challenges in dealing with massive amounts of customer data. According to the Globe and Mail “…RIM and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada have invested $5-million to create a new industrial research chair in software engineering at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.”  The research will tackle problems of efficiency and optimization in “huge” systems. Citing companies like Facebook and Amazon whose databases include hundreds of millions of entries, the research will be looking for problems in ecommerce transactions, or looking at other processes where deviations, anomolies and irregularities occur; within massive quantities of information these can sometimes be hard to spot and it can also be hard to see trends when they are burried within these large amounts of data. Like looking from above for untied shoolaces at a stadium or hockey rink full of people. You like that analogy? I didn’t want to use needle in a haystack, like chairholder, computer science professor and former RIM employee Ahmed Hassan who spearheaded this partnership. I wanted to really creatively explore my simile options. Maybe I’ve got Vancouver Canucks on the brain. Season opener! Go ‘Nucks! I wonder who Mr. Balsilie will be cheering for this season? Better luck next time Jim. You might not have a hockey team, but you’ve got a great company.

The undisputed heavyweight of eCommerce seems poised to soon become one of the biggest retailers on the planet. As of earlier this year, Amazon’s sales figures crossed a significant threshold. For the first time, their sales of what is perceived as their core products – books, movies and music – was surpassed by their sales of consumer products. That same threshold should be crossed by their worldwide operation later this year.

It’s this shift that has allowed Amazon to weather the recession and the overall slowing of the online sales of media like books and music. In fact, they aren’t just weathering the storm, they’re thriving. Despite the economic climate, their sales figures continue to rise, on the back of strong sales in those non-traditional consumer products. Last quarter, for example, their sales of media products rose by only 1%. But their sales for what they call “electronics and other merchandise” went up a startling 35%, to $2.07 billion dollars.

With eCommerce predicted to become anywhere from 10-15% of total retail in the next decade, and with their strong online market share, Amazon is in a position to become the ubiquitous Wal-Mart of the online retail world. Like Wal-Mart, Amazon saves huge amounts of money by revolutionizing the back-end of retail. Amazon doesn’t have to pay for retail stores, they do such a huge volume of business that they don’t have warehouses full of slow-moving merchandise, and their business model even allows them to pay supplier well after they’ve already sold the products.

It all adds up to a huge amount of trouble for the competition. Amazon has already been a contributing factor in the disappearance of a lot of small bookstores. And now they seem poised to gobble up a lot more of their competition, or run them out of business. They recently purchased an online competitor, Zappos.com, for what amounts to about $930 million dollars. And, if things keep going the way they are, that’s only the beginning.

Remember libraries? Back when people used to read paper versions of books, you could walk down to the corner library and borrow as many books as you wanted for a month or so, for free. Assuming you didn’t return them late and wind up owing the library a bunch of nickels, it was a pretty sweet system. Alright, obviously both hard-copy books and libraries are still around. In fact, according to some recent news, libraries have teamed up with Sony to make a nifty end-run around the Kindle, and the eCommerce model of eBook distribution.

If you buy a Kindle you can get some free books. But most of them will cost you somewhere around $9.99 when you buy them from Amazon. Substantially cheaper than buying most books at the store, but not exactly free. Enter the Sony Daily Edition Reader and OverDrive.com. The SDER is Sony’s newest Kindle competition. It’s coming out in December, and should set you back about $400. But the big news with the new reader is their very clever cross-marketing partnership with  OverDrive.com, which is, among other things, a “Digital Library Reserve”. That means it provides download services for over 9,000 public libraries in the US…libraries that, in some cases, carry huge collections of eBooks that you can digitally borrow for weeks at a time, at a cost of $0.

If consumers start seeing the value in getting their eBooks for free, it could spell trouble for Amazon and the Kindle. I’m not going to lose any sleep worrying that Amazon will crumble, but it could definitely impact their eBook sales. Traditionally, one of the knocks against libraries is that you don’t get to keep the book. And, as the many bookshelves that line our walls attest, we love hanging onto books. But with eBooks, there’s no real fun in owning them after you’ve read them. You can’t display an eBook version of Ulysses on the shelf to impress dinner guests. And so why pay for one if you can get it for free, instantly, from the library?

When I was reading about all this, I did have a thought. What will be really interesting is when some clever librarian decides to start lending out popular music mp3s and digital versions of video games…

One of the knocks against e-books, compared to old-fashioned paper and ink, is that they lack a certain permanence. But with the growing popularity of the Kindle, it seems that more and more people are happy to sacrifice having a hard-copy, for the sake of the convenience and lower price point offered by an e-book. And, after all, when you buy a book for a Kindle, you do own it forever, or as long as your Kindle functions.

Or so most of us thought. But this morning, hundreds of people discovered that the books they had purchased and downloaded had suddenly disappeared. In fact, Amazon had sent out a little electronic recall order, deleting the books off the personal devices of people that had already purchased them. And what makes this extra delicious…one of the books was George Orwell’s 1984.

It seems the issue arose when the publishers of 1984 and Orwell’s Animal Farm reconsidered their decision to offer those titles as e-books. But instead of just not allowing anyone else to purchase the books, Amazon went ahead with the, yes, Orwellian move of deleting already-purchased copies from private Kindles. Yes, customers were refunded the money they spent on the books, but that’s not really the point. With Amazon so willing to put the desires of the rights’ holders ahead of readers, it certainly raises the old question of how permanent any electronic media purchase really is.

Rhode Island doesn’t get a lot of press. It’s right up there with Delaware and South Dakota on the where-the-hell-is-that list. But in a move destined to get them some much-needed attention, the government of Rhode Island decided to take on Amazon, and other web retailers, over the issue of sales tax. Namely, the issue that online retailers never actually collect any tax, or, even worse, ever deliver any of said sales tax into the state coffers. So Rhode Island, and a number of other states, decided to fight back. They introduced legislation that, if passed, will make it law that online retailers will have to collect sales tax if that retailer operates any affiliates (i.e. small businesses that make some of their money by referring customers to Amazon, etc.) within the state.

According to an article posted today on AOL news, Amazon immediately fired back….by closing down all affiliate operations in any of the battleground states. What that means is a whole bunch of small businesses in the affected states suddenly losing a big source of their revenue. And, ironically, that could mean a loss of some tax base for those state governments, as those small businesses shut down or move to a friendlier state.

So far, the governments of New York, Hawaii and North Carolina have joined Rhode Island in introducing similar legislation. And other online retailers, like Overstock, have followed Amazon’s lead by suspending all connections with any affiliates, or at least threatening to, in those four states. From the look of it, this is only the first attack and counter-attack in what is likely to be another protracted battle over the contentious issue of online retailers and sales tax. But, even if nothing has been solved so far, at least it gets people talking about Rhode Island.