Random Thoughts and Links: May 25th, 2005
This stuff isn't enough for my full-on blog post treatment, but I kinda wanted to get get the links and thoughts out there. Besides, "A-List" bloggers don't bother with analysis, only short posts and lots of 'em is the way. I could use some more traffic, so away I go... God bless our low-attention-span society.
First, check out Paul's post about Email vs. SMS. It's a very interesting analysis, and this quote is the one that really reached out and grabbed me:
Email is like placing a letter in someone's in-tray, whereas texting is like tapping them on the shoulder and saying look at this, whilst placing a message on a slip of paper in their hand. With email, a great deal of emotional emphasis is placed on sending. With texting, the emphasis is on the receiving.
Wow. I had never looked at it like that before. That's got such a visceral truth to it and really allows you to see a bit deeper into both the texting and "crackberry" phenomenons.
Okay, next, check out Matt's review of Yahoo Music Unlimited. It's an interesting review (and links to me - sorry about the reciprocal link love) but the most amazing thing, that I'm not sure if anyone else appreciated besides myself is that the client he used to review the service with was a mobile phone. Sadly, it's a Windows Mobile phone, but that's besides the point. Matthew just matter of factly signed up for a music service and downloaded new music to listen to on his smart phone. The future is definitely here.
Finally, after seeing the Morse Coders beat the Texters, Jason asked me when the first mobile phones will support Morse to Texting. That's not a bad idea, actually. It couldn't be very hard to whip up a Java prototype, no? Check out this Wikipedia entry on Morse Code and it'll tell you all you need - if the phone supports the messaging APIs, then you can basically bring up the J2ME app, tap in your message using morse, and then send it on it's way via SMS.
Last random thought: Anyone who thought that Apple was *really* serious about moving to Intel based chips, isn't paying attention to real news from last week. All the new gaming machines are using PowerPC based CPUs. Though I do bitch about how slow my PowerBook is compared to a laptop with a spanky new Pentium 4 2Ghz, it'd be insane for Apple to move to Intel at this time. We're *obviously* at an inflection point when it comes to processor power and capabilities and Apple's experience with PPC makes it uniquely qualified to take advantage of it. Moving to Intel now would be a step backwards, as non-intuitive as that may seem.
-Russ