Friends Swap Twitters, and Frustration - WSJ.com

Friends Swap Twitters, and Frustration - WSJ.com

Twitter is a bizarre service. I have no idea if I like it or not but all the cool kids seem to be using it.

Updating Twitter via iChat or AIM status message

Updating Twitter via iChat or AIM status message

Handy, though not too user friendly as you have to execute it via the Terminal.

Twitter

Twitter

Signed up for this a bit ago and never did much with it. An odd service that could be fun if lots of friends were on it.

oh, don't forget...

oh, don’t forget…

This could be very useful for setting up an alibi…

Reinventing Radio: On Phonetags... (plasticbag.org)

Reinventing Radio: On Phonetags… (plasticbag.org)

Interesting concept for booking marking a song you hear on the radio using text messaging so you can go back later and figure out who it was by, browse by similarly-tagged songs, etc.

Text Like a Little Girl

None of my friends use SMS text messaging (or if they do then they’re all ignoring me). For a while I wrote SMS off as a silly technology that teenage girls use to chat with each other instead of AIM. But I don’t think chat is the real point of it all. Cell phone keypads are bad input devices for text, even with T9. Sure, you can get used to them, but they’re still not that great for extended messaging sessions. But that’s not the point, they’re for short messaging.

Often I’m going somewhere to meet some people and I’ll realize my phone has a voice message. I dial into voicemail and get this: “Hey, it’s me. We’re meeting at 9:30, not 9.” Total time of the message: about 4 seconds. Total time it took me to see I had a message, call voicemail, press 1, listen to the caller’s number and timestamp, hear the message, press 7 to erase it, and hang up: about a minute. This is the sort of message that SMS was designed for. “Meeting @ 9:30.”

Part of the problem is that Sprint PCS does a terrible job with text messages and most of us had Sprint when we should have been figuring this sort of stuff out. It used to be the case (and probablly still is) that in order to get a text message on a Sprint phone you had to have an internet plan, which no one did. But times have changed, and though we all have iPods, broadband internet, and sophisticated video game systems, we’re losing out on communication efficiency as compared to your average teenage girl.