Google, meet Gabble.

Gabble is a new site from Hewlett-Packard that lets people post videos online. But unlike Google’s YouTube service, which is geared to sharing with the masses, only people invited to your Gabble group can view your videos.

H.P. thinks that its orientation toward privacy will appeal to families uncomfortable making their home videos public and to businesses that want to use videos as a collaboration tool.

In the Depression, smart college students flocked into civil engineering to design the highway, bridge and dam-building projects of those days. In the Sputnik era, students poured into the sciences as America bet on technology to combat the cold war Communist challenge. Yes, the jobs beckoned and the pay was good. But those careers, in their day, had other perks: respect and self-esteem.

Big shifts in the flow of talent can ripple through the nation and the economy for decades with lasting effect. The engineers of the Depression built everything from inter-city roads to the Hoover Dam, while the Sputnik-inspired scientists would go on, often with research funding from the Pentagon, to create the building-block innovations behind modern computing and the Internet.

Today, the financial crisis and the economic downturn are likely to alter drastically the career paths of future years. The contours of the shift are still in flux, in part because there is so much uncertainty about the shape of the economic landscape and the job market ahead.

Byron Herman rolled out of his dorm bed, yanked on snow pants and a beanie and stumbled across the parking lot to his 8 a.m. math class.

By late morning, the 19-year-old Tehachapi student was on his snowboard, cutting crescent shapes into a mountain slope glistening under ice-blue skies. What was unusual about this scenario last month was that Herman attends not a select academy or elite university, but Cerro Coso Community College, a public two-year institution with a campus in Mammoth Lakes.

His apartment dorm is the latest in a new wave of student housing at community colleges, as the commuter culture at such schools gives way to a more traditional college experience.

Experts say rising university tuitions are pushing more traditional college-age students into two-year schools, and community colleges are also aggressively recruiting athletes and international students, who often prefer or need on-campus housing.

Social Matchbox has a new vibe these days.

The networking event was first known as “speed dating for geeks” because start-ups could give three-minute pitches about their idea in hopes of finding business partners, landing customers or even securing a bit of funding.

Now many of those geeks are running full-fledged businesses, even if they aren’t yet profitable. Some, like GeniusRocket, a Bethesda-based “crowdsourcing” marketing firm, and DubMeNow, a McLean-based start-up hoping to help people exchange digital business cards via smartphones, have become familiar names in the local technology scene. The entrepreneurs behind those companies now help make connections and recommendations for other, younger start-ups at the meet-ups.

When Steve Hamrick left his last job as manager at a software corporation, he had at least 25 unheard messages in his office voice mailbox. And that’s not counting the unreturned calls on his cellphone or landline at home.

It’s not that he doesn’t like to talk. But with the cascade of messages he receives by e-mail, texting and on Facebook, Mr. Hamrick, 29, a self-described “voice mail phobic” from Cupertino, Calif., said he’d found better ways to keep in touch.

“I had to give up something and that, for me, was voice mail,” he said. “It’s cutting out some forms of communication to make room for the others.”

This Twitter thing has been coming on like gangbusters. The messaging site has been around for a couple of years, but its popularity seems to have exploded just recently.

Everyone from Barack Obama to John Cleese to NASA to the consulate of Israel has a Twitter account. Heck, even yours truly does! Do you? Follow me and I’ll follow you back.

Twitter is really more of a social commons than a full-blown social network like MySpace or Facebook. It pretty much does one thing: allows people to “tweet” what they’re up to (or what they’re thinking about) in 140 characters or less.

A surfboard with Internet capability, cars that drive themselves, gadgets that recognize forgotten acquaintances, the extinction of humans by supercomputers. All are possible, according to Silicon Valley innovators Butler Lampson of Microsoft, Irwin Jacobs of Qualcomm and Vinton Cerf of Google, who spoke recently at a symposium sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Stanford President John Hennessy, himself a key player in the computer technology revolution, moderated the discussion, which took place on Feb. 28 at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. The event was one of several held as part of a monthly academy meeting, “The Public Good: The Impact of Information Technology on Society.”

“What are the things that have really transformed our digital future?” asked Hennessy. “It really was the personal computer, cellular wireless communication and, of course, the Internet.”

Tough economic times call for harder scrutiny of marketing dollars, among other belt-tightening measures. To help institutions hone in on the best use of marketing dollars, Campus Technology talked with higher education marketing expert Bob Johnson. Johnson has been studying, writing about, and lecturing on student recruitment practices since the early ’80s and now consults with colleges and universities. His focus has shifted to online marketing in higher ed. “At some point,” he said, “[universities] stopped asking me how to do a better view-book. [Now], people are interested in how to make Web sites stronger for recruiting.”

In this first segment of a two-part interview, he talks about new ways in which technology is being used to connect with students and parents–and how students use technology to find schools. Johnson also discusses why putting excess effort into a school’s home page isn’t the best use of online marketing funds. Johnson blogs about the topics discussed here, and much more, at bobjohnsonblog.com.

The Twitterverse is expanding.

Twitter, that microblogging tool that caught on with teens and twentysomethings using it to tell loyal followers what they’re doing at any given time — in 140 characters or less — is now becoming part of the business strategy for a wide range of brands, from Skittles to Fairfax County.

As exciting as it may be to hear about what your friends, or total strangers for that matter, ate for breakfast, some companies are realizing that a more effective use of Twitter is to mine it for clients, recruit employees and answer customer service questions.

Teachers are often portrayed as being clueless about technology, but ever more of them are putting that stereotype to the test.

Web 2.0 technologies in particular have found a receptive audience among educators. Many use blogs to share ideas on teaching and technology, some of which might surprise students.

One idea in the teacher blogosphere: In the age of podcasts, kill off the classroom lecture, or at least rely on it less.

Why fill classroom time with passive listening in a chemistry class if it could be better used for practice and interaction? Lectures can be listened to at home as a podcast.

In response to another blogger’s post on the topic, Pennsylvania teacher Louise Maine suggests: “Students can listen to it as many times as needed, make notes of questions to ask in class, and maintain for a reference. We can require notes to be shown for evidence of work having been done.”