I have just installed skype on my mobile phone and have yet to test it. it’s wifi enabled phone which means that anywhere there’s a hotspot I should be able to make phone calls via skype.
it’s going to be fun to chat with people without paying for the connection.
Twitter is one of those places that takes some time to get the hang of but once you do it’s going to suck you in and won’t spit you out till you’re exhausted. It’s a little bit like seesmic except that in this case you don’t look like you’re so in love with your computer that you’re talking to it.
In reality twitter is just the surface of our interaction with the groups of friends we have met and made through this network. Twitter is first and foremost about short messages to say what you’re doing right now. Over time though it’s become much more. As more and more people started to use it so the want to comment on what people are doing increased. Overtime as more and more comments were made so conversations occured. These conversations are a little more complex than you may think. Initially conversations via instant messaging services like ICQ, Skype, Yahoo and others are about one to one communication. Twitter is about the overheard conversation. In other words as I’m talking to one person another person overhears what I’m saying and they want to join. Over time a community forms. Some call it the twitterverse, others the twittosphere, and some call us the twitterati. The result is the same.
It’s a community of people based around twitter. They are for the most part involved in the social media although a growing number of people are “tourists”, in other words they’re looking at this social networking system or tool and seeing how they can apply it to their own lives and business practices.
There’s another dimension. The invisible conversations that are taking place. With some people I have exchanged hundreds of messages in private, via direct messages. With other people it’s via google talk and in other cases via the skype chatrooms. In other words it’s a dynamic conversation across a number of instant messaging services. There are a number of uses. In some cases some conversations are too personal to have out in the open, with others the conversations are very focused and the community is a community through a skype chatroom or conference call. As a result there is a strong feel of belonging within certain communities.
Seesmic is one website and over time a community that has profited greatly from twitter, and I mean in terms of the members of the community rather than the wealth generated. As people created videos so a link with the video title would appear. As the “Seesmic” tag appeared more and more so a buzz was generated to create interest. As more people were invited through friends using twitter so more interest grew. It was also a two channel conversation. One channel being twitter where short messages could be exchanged easily and the second channel video where opinions could be exchanged through visual means. Quite a few parties took place then.
Many questions are also asked by those that use twitter. Some of these questions are easy to answer within 140 characters and a list of responses is left as a blog entry. It’s a quick method of getting a number of points of view efficiently. Occasionaly entire conversations come to life about a number of topics and multiple people talk to multiple people and after three or four hours results and conclusions are drawn up and a comprehensive blog post covering a range of issues can be written up.
Twitter is a simple way of keeping in touch with what friends are doing but it also creates links with people we would find very hard to get hold of using more contemporary methods such as facebook, e-mails and other. This is a glimpse of what the future of communication will hold. Skype, seesmic, gtalk, facebook are all there to add depth to the twitter conversations.
Twitter is a short message that are only 140 characters long. It can be used in three ways. The first is by instant messenger, the second is by text messaging to your mobile phone and the third is via the web interface.
It’s referred to as microblogging, although not by me. I see it as being something more powerful.
The BBC, Google, and other companies have already used it for showing people what the latest news is. Of course, with such a medium you have to be careful not to send too many messages or people will give up.
Where it would come into its element is traffic info, radio schedules, or even event notifications. Imagine that you knew about this before rag week and that many of your friends were members. You could tell them “just finished ragging, on my way back to uni” or “only 20 tickets left for an event”. In other words, you can let people know what an organisation is doing quite easily.
Another way to enhance this is when you’ve got quite a lot of friends and they’re all members. “Hey, just handed in my assignment, going to sit in the grass outside halls, welcome to join” and many people who might have been bored now know where to find you.
Of course, you’re paying the price of SMS (text messaging) if you’re away from the computer but it’s at a local tariff to the best of my understanding. It’s an interesting development, similar to the status bar in many of the current messengers and on Facebook.
Our mobile phones are almost always near us, or on us. The only time we don’t have our phone with us is when we’re scuba diving, driving, unless we count Waze as a game. When I am home alone I usually don’t play mobile phone games because I’m distracted by other things.
One of the flaws with plenty of games today is that they are pay to win, or pay to play. I don’t like this model. I also don’t like games that require you to follow instructions, rather than play and experiment. I want to play, not follow instructions.
Garmin, Strava, Pacer and other apps do provide us with gaming when we walk, run, cycle or more. They count our steps, our distance, our climbing and more. I am currently walking the Appalachian Trail via Garmin, walking the Coffee trail on Pacer and more. I am also competing for step counts with others. Some games require you to be physically active to progress. Others require you to sit still and stare at a phone.
Ingress is a game that I played for a while. I travelled to Paris, to Florence, to Fribourg and other places specifically to play the game with other people. It was a great way to meet unenergetic geeks and to explore geographic space. It’s similar to geocaching, but with virtual portals that are monuments, bridges and more. That data was then used for Pokemon Go and other games.
Ingress requires a lot of walking, or driving. I found that it is quite fun to play while cycling. You can get to distant portals more quickly than walking, but without the carbon footprint of using the car, which is another reason I slowed down the playing.
The key factor that got me to play far less is time. From a certain level upwards, especially if you live in the countryside it goes from taking days or weeks to level up, to months. If you live in town then it’s easy to make progress, but if you’re in a rural setting then you get stuck on a level for months or years, as I have.
At first I didn’t like TrainStation2 because I expect to play a game for the time that I am free for. I don’t like to wait for hours in between actions. You can speed up the game by paying to win, but the flaw in this approach is that you can spend thousands and never be satisfied. That’s how Clash of Clans made a fortune.
What I like about this is that if you want you can play for 30 seconds, once an hour or less, so you don’t accidentally lose hours a day on the game.
Clash of Clans is another game that I played with passion for years, but eventually stopped playing. The problem with these games is that they are good, when you have a few minutes free at regular intervals, for example when you’re commuting, or stuck in an office waiting for a file to render, or some other task. If you have no moments of waiting then these games are less relevant.
I have played Hay Day for years but on and off. I used to play a lot but eventually it became more complex and took more time to achieve anything so I stopped playing.
Asphalt 8 is a game that I played for hours at a time for weeks or even months. I logged plenty of hours in the game and it expanded as I progressed. Eventually I played tiles, but it’s still a great game. Cars are intuitive to control and with time and practice you do make progress.
Rise of Kingdoms is an acceptable game that you can play throughout the day when you have some free time. It is a game that requires an investment of weeks or months to progress and although they encourage you to pay to speed things up you don’t need to.
I installed it, played a few times, but never engaged fully.
This game is crap. It’s built off of Ingress, but re-skinned for a different set of users. It’s crap because when you throw poke balls it fails more often than succeeds, so you end up frustrated. Worse than that, it encourages you to spend money because the code was written in a flawed manner.
I started by really enjoying this game, until I got to a certain level, and then the game stopped being fun. It stopped being fun because levels require you to use diamonds to get extra time, or to get cooking aids. This wouldn’t be so bad, if not for the fact that after a certain amount of playing those are earned by completing levels, or paying. They say that games are pay to win. This one becomes pay to play. At one point you get blocked and you can no longer progress, without spending 3 CHF, more than once.
It’s when I saw that I had to pay more than once that I removed the game. I come from the time when we payed to own, not to play.
I like mobile phone games that can be played in short bursts. I don’t like mobile phone games that are pay to win. I play games when I am in between two activities, rather than all the time. I can go for months without playing much. It depends on how free I am to get on with things. I expect that I will forget about mobile phones games now, for a while.
There is a copy and paste culture on the web and I don’t like it. When you go to Digg, to Youtube, to myspace and other websites what you find are short comments. They’re contributing nothing to the debate, in fact they make the online experience online less enjoyable.
There has been quite a vocal outcry from certain people about the HD DVD codec and how forcing articles to be pulled down and deleting user accounts was going against their user rights. In fact, there is nothing of the sort.
It was nice to see that these users would be held accountable for the content they link to and provide.
Adding fuel to the fire Kevin Rose said something in his blog to the effect that since so many people feel so strongly about this issue he would not pull down any more links. I don’t agree with this.
There’s a level of mob rule which I think is counterproductive. There’s all this talk about user-generated content and networking. Ok. Where’s the original and innovative content. Simply digging a story and putting a few remarks is not enough.
Do some journalism, do some research, learn the topic inside out and then post an informed opinion. I’m not going to be part of sites where accountability is irrelevant. It’s irresponsible for them to publish such information.
It’s also given a massive PR boost to Digg.
Just look at how they’ve shot up according to blogpulse’s trend analysis tool.
It’s a nice screen, it’s a laptop replacement similar to the phone I’ve had for two or three months but the hard drive is much better.
He advertised all these features as new yet I’ve got most of those capabilities already so I’m laughing slightly. I was just two months ahead of that particular market.
I’m wondering about wifi access. How easy is it to connect to password-protected networks and how strong is the antenna?. Would it work only on open networks?
I like the screen but where’s the keyboard for fast texting? How easily will it scratch?
I know at least one person that’s going to be looking forward to the PVR with integrated wifi although I don’t find it interesting because the hard drive is too small at the moment. The fact you can stream from five computers at once is nice.
Whilst reading an article about the music and book industry I was surprised by what was written. They say that the music industry and the record shops were expected to survive the digital revolution whilst the bookshop was expected to die with the advent of sites like amazon.
There is one possible reason for this. The nature of the medium. A song is a work that takes five minutes to listen to in it’s entirety and can use other supports to be consumed on. The book on the other hand is a medium that requires for people to sit down and thumb through various pages to assess the writing style before deciding on whether to purchase it. As a result they’re far more likely to go into a library and check that product than a cd shop.
At the same time myspace, among other websites is the new music shop. Go there, browse the categories and find various obscure acts, discover them and purchase what you enjoy.
It’s not quite that easy with books.
I’ve bought quite a few books and dvd in the past few months but no music in physical form.