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These days there's something extra revitalizing about cracking open a book. I don't just mean in a strictly geektastic, hooray-for-reading kind of way. I mean, it's actually mentally refreshing. For those of us who live online, there's no better way to wrap up a hyper-connected day of status updates, tweets, and pageview-thirsty headlines than by diving into a single, focused, long-form story or work of nonfiction. Well, it'll be nice as long as it lasts, anyway.

If it wasn't already obvious, the era of social books is right on the horizon. One of the companies leading us there is Readmill, the purveyor of a social reading app that takes Amazon's crowdsourced highlighting concept to the next level and makes e-books more interactive than ever. Not to be outdone by some scrappy startup, Amazon will integrate the next version of its Kindle Paperwhite e-reader with Goodreads, the book-centric social network Amazon acquired in late March. Neither of these new social reading environments amounts to a full-blown, Facebook-inside-your-book type of experience. But the line between social networks and books is only now beginning to blur. Prepare to get even more distracted.

As my colleague Michael Grothaus--himself a paper-loving e-reader holdout--wrote recently, "e-books are going to explode beyond just containing stories, becoming niche social networks where we discuss our favorite passages with other readers and even authors and publishers buy our data to make more informed decisions."

Sounds awesome! Damien Walter, writing for the Guardian, fleshes out the picture in enticingly forward-looking detail:

Imagine reading a book published in 2013 in the year 2063. In the 50 years between now and then, dozens of critical texts, hundreds of articles, thousands of reviews and hundreds of thousands of comments will have been made on the text. In a fully networked reading experience, all of those will be available to the reader of the book from within the text Authors are able to shape the discussion on their books, moderating comments in a system similar to a blogpost And perhaps most interesting of all, readers can find each other through the books they read.

Normally, the prospect of a more networked, collaborative form of mass media is something I find very exciting. And indeed, the potential here is enormous, especially for academic and nonfiction works. Yet I can't help but cringe a little at the thought of classic novels morphing into mini-Facebooks.

My attention span is already stretched thin. The deluge of new things to read is relentless, kicking off mere minutes after I wake up in the morning. It starts with the day's tech news headlines (required reading in my line of work) and stories in Flipboard, Feedly, and Reddit. After a hefty round of work-related reading and mining for story ideas, Twitter incessantly projectile-vomits headlines my way. I don't dare check Facebook during peak hours, lest I get roped into another nostalgic BuzzFeed listicle. The stories and blog posts that do pique my attention (but aren't germane to me doing my job) get corralled into Instapaper using the "Read Later" button. Of course, every saved article is another item in the bedtime reading queue, which has a way of piling up faster than I can keep up with. When I do finish an Instapaper reading session, I close my iPad's cover and place it down atop a stack of print magazines, through which I'll eventually plow. Hopefully.

This massive, permanent backlog of must-read material has made it more and more difficult to carve out time to read anything longer than a few thousand words. In the last few years, I've found myself reading fewer books and those that I start take longer to get through. There's just too much other stuff to read.

I am, of course, not the only one to feel somewhat overwhelmed by the Internet's firehose of insights, imagery, and information. Taking some sort of "digital detox" as Baratunde Thurston recounted in a recent Fast Company cover story is now a common practice among the uber-connected. Indeed, the very phrase "digital detox"--which was added to the Oxford dictionary in May--effectively compares our reliance on the Internet to a junkie's desperate need for a fix. Meanwhile, a growing stack of journal articles, magazine cover stories, and books have weighed in on the subject of whether or not the Internet is literally driving us all insane. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what those books are about. I got a few press copies in the mail, but I haven't had a chance to page through any of them yet. Maybe someday.

Lately, I've started reading more books. That's because I've been more deliberate about shutting off the Internet and setting aside time solely dedicated to reading. Much of the time, I'm paging through good, old-fashioned paper books. When you've conditioned your brain to expect to switch tasks at any moment (even as I write this, there's a nagging feeling that an editor or source sent me a really important email), going back to reading things on paper feels that much more focused and relaxing.

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Social networking site Twitter has submitted documents ahead of a planned flotation on the stock market.

The announcement was made on the site itself and explained that a form had been submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ahead of a planned initial public offering (IPO).

The tweet read: " We've confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale."

The firm followed up the tweet with a picture of the Twitter offices and a message reading: "Now, back to work."

Twitter was founded in 2006 and is based in San Francisco. There are some 200 million users worldwide, including 10 million active users in the UK, and 400m tweets are sent a day.

It is one of the largest and most powerful social media platforms in the world and disseminates a huge volume of information throughout the world.

As it has grown, it has been used as a tool by celebrities, journalists and millions around the globe.

The announcement to float on the stock market has been long-expected for a while and is expected to be valued at up to 10 billion dollars.

The company, which recently installed a "report" button following a number of complaints of abuse on the site, has been using adverts to boost income ahead of the announcement.

The move comes after Facebook floated on the US stock market in May 2012 for 104 billion dollar (66.2 billion) and, despite seeing an initial slump in shares, has since had a resurgence.

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Twitter tweets its flotation plans

The social networking titan hopes a more scaled-down approach, in which Home comes in bits and pieces, will win over more fans than its botched initial attempt.

Mark Zuckerberg insists that people still want Facebook Home. After this next shift in strategy, he may not sound so delusional.

Facebook Home, in case you need a refresher, was the social-networking titan's big push to take over the smartphone and firmly establish its presence in the mobile world. It failed. Badly. The collection of apps that made up Home barely resonated with consumers, and the only phone to come loaded with the software, the HTC First (colloquially known as the "Facebook Phone"), was a complete flop.

After all that, it would be easy to conclude that Home is a complete failure. Indeed, Zuckerberg, during a public appearance at TechCrunch Disrupt on Wednesday, candidly confessed that he was disappointed by the reception Home has received. But disappointment and defeat are two different things, and Zuckerberg and Co. have gone back to the drawing board to diagram a new, more scaled-back plan. Facebook's new proposition for consumers: Grab the parts of Home you want, forget the rest.

"I still fully believe that this is going to be something that a lot of people want over time," Zuckerberg said. "Getting content delivered to your home screen and being ambiently aware of what's going on is, I think, a very valuable thing."

Facebook appears to be humbled by its early failures. The company has given up on being the be-all, end-all center of your smartphone and will settle for being a handy conduit between you and the people you care about, Facebook friends or otherwise. As Facebook Home is made up of several different components -- a home and lock screen called Cover Feed that acts as an alternative panning interface for News Feed, a cutesy messaging experience known as Chat Heads, and an application launcher -- the company will look to push the pieces individually.

Facebook Cover Feed

Look for Facebook to promote the Cover Feed lock screen as its own feature, just like other custom Android lock screens. The company will open its lock screen to hand-selected partners, which means that instead of only showing panning Facebook photos, you'll get Instagram pictures, and content from other yet-to-be-named apps. Chat Heads, meanwhile, is already widely used as a messaging component of the Facebook app that 819 million people turn to each month.

You've seen this strategy at work in recent product releases that have separated the parts from the whole so that people can use Chat Heads or Cover Feed independent of the rest of Home, and you've heard it directly from Zuckerberg, who talked openly about adding more social content from Instagram and third-party applications to the lock screen.

Zuckerberg might be right about the appeal of an ambiently aware screen. For starters, he was not the first to come up with the idea. Windows Phone live tiles push social updates to the home screen in a design that many people find appealing. As a standalone lock screen, a more inclusive Cover Feed would provide a passive look at what friends, celebrities, and others are sharing in a captivating fashion, but not interfere with your ability to get to your apps, which is Home's biggest flaw.

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Why there's still hope for Facebook Home (seriously)

Eric Ly, a co-founder of the professional social networking site LinkedIn, was in San Antonio on Wednesday to speak to local entrepreneurs about taking their companies to the public market. He was a guest of the Entrepreneurs' Organization San Antonio, a networking group for business owners. Ly spoke with the Express-News about taking a company public, his current venture and the future of social media.

Q: What are some things people should consider when the decision is made to take a company public?

A: The most obvious reason to go public is that there's a certain amount of validation. From the financial perspective, it's really about raising more money to help the company expand the business. But at the same time, it comes with a lot of responsibilities. Now you have to be accountable to public investors, do a lot more reporting, and basically the company has to be at a certain maturity level before it should be subject to all the scrutiny from the public markets.

Q: At what point should a company look to go public?

A: The first thing is that your business has to have profitability. You want to definitely fill out your executive team and have people in all the key positions. The most important of that group is the (chief financial officer), who is going to be dealing with the public investor market and they need to be ready for that. And finally, you need a vision for the future.

Q: What are some of the challenges associated with taking a company public?

A: One of the common challenges is that investors, who have previously invested in the private company, are pushing the company to go public before it is ready. And sometimes the private company is not quite ready for the demand public investors have. I mean, public investors basically expect things to continue to look up. There is such a thing as going public too soon. When you have to report your financial results and there's a bad quarter, that can do some significant damage.

Q: Can you talk about your current venture, Presdo?

A: We're taking all the things that have been done with social media and professional networking and applying that to the face-to-face world. The ultimate goal of social media is to bring people together face-to-face once they've had a chance to talk online. Our product is geared toward events like conferences and trade shows where people are meeting for business and nurturing relationships. And we want to apply social media to help connect people.

Q: In what ways will social media evolve?

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LinkedIn co-founder goes public