Jules Says

Wiffiti: your phone and my computer can make beautiful text

In my recent post about Reactee, I mentioned that I enjoy playing with new applications of technology that may seem silly or even useless at first. Wiffiti is another one of those.

With Wiffiti, you have a screen. You can show that screen on the Wiffiti site, full screen on your computer, or embedded in any web page. You have a name - people text @name to your SMS address (a five-digit number) and their message gets broadcast to the screen. Several messages show at a time, floating around the screen, getting smaller as they age.

Try it here - send an SMS message to 25622. Start the message with @jules, then type your message. It'll show up right here :) This screen is live. [update: odd... publishing this post cut off a whole chunk of text after the embedded screen. More of the review & a bunch of screenshots showing usability problems are after the jump.][update 2: if you're looking at this post in a feed reader, you may not see the screen - click through to the actual blog to see it.]

That’s one ugly shirt

You gotta admit, I ended up with one ugly shirt.

Don't get me wrong. I love this idea. I love new ideas that use technology in some interesting way, even if starts out as something silly or useless. Reactee is one of those cool ideas. There's a lot of potential here, but in this incarnation it needs some more work.

I'm pretty sure I first read about these shirts on Gizmodo. I immediately wondered if I should reserve the namespace for any of my various ventures (I like to make sure my potential businesses have properly named accounts on google, twitter, typepad, yahoo, etc.) After all, you just never know which of these new applications will stick.

Rather than impulsively buying a bunch of shirts, it seemed wise to test one first. I decided to go with my version of the LOLCats meme (my second choice shirt was "I can has 2 many cheezeburgers").

When you buy a shirt, your chosen word goes live. Tori got one too, and of course we immediately started texting each other's shirts. Sadly, once you get the reply from someone's shirt, there's nowhere to go. You can't reply again - you haven't opened a thread. All those folks who got shirts saying things like "Want to date me?" will be awfully disappointed.

On the other hand, I suppose a coffee shop, for example, could have all their employees wear "need a buzz?" shirts and respond with something different each day. Parents could have their little kids wear a shirt with "text my mom if I'm lost" on their shirts.

What else should be textable? Pet collars, physical mailboxes, your car ("the left lane is for passing, dude")?

Did You Know?

Well, I've probably forwarded this video to a dozen people now, so I should probably just post it. It's all text, all statistics. They get more mind-blowing as the video progresses.

A few excerpts:

• The 25% of the population in China with the highest IQs is greater than the total population of North America. In India, it's the top 28%. Translation for teachers: they have more honors kids than we have kids.
• The number of text messages sent and received every day is greater than the population of the planet.
• It is estimated that a weeks worth of New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.

It's 6 minutes and 5 seconds well spent, I promise.

Days of Future Past

I thoroughly enjoyed Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future. I just love seeing what people imagined our todays would look like. So I was thrilled to stumble upon Paleo-Future: a look into the future that never was. Is that a great name for a blog or what? My introduction to the blog was this post, which highlights a lovely collection of 100-year-old postcards depicting the year 2000. There is, of course, the obligatory personal flying machine. The "Summer at the North Pole" and "Police X-Ray Surveillance Machine" cards are almost disturbing in their innocence. Shown: The Roofed City. I wonder what's providing all that light... Be sure to read some of the comments to this post - some quite clever.

I can't wait to waste some serious time on this site. And I see there's a Paleo-Future Google Group, too. Great! I need more distractions!

Map My Name: Earth as social network

The Map My Name project aims to find out how many people are using the web, one person at a time. I freaked at first after I mapped my name and looked at the closeup map view - I thought the little dart was pointing directly to my address. But no, it's just the Austin dart.

How long do you think it will be before they're acquired by Google? I say 4 months.

DRIVE director commentary via Twitter

Last night's Twitter experiment was interesting. Drive is a new Fox show made by Tim Minear, the same guy who made Firefly. It stars Nathan Fillion, the same lead actor. Fox decided to offer director commentary during the premiere of the show Sunday night.

Sadly, the show itself was pretty lame. I'm sure there are some very disappointed Firefly fans out there. It definitely didn't hold my attention well, so you'd think I could have easily kept up with the tweets. It didn't really work that way, though. Twitter is very fast, but it's not real time. Doing standard DVD-style commentary and saying "we wanted to do x here..." doesn't work. By the time the tweet is delivered, "here" has passed. I'm sure sometimes it was the 140 character limit keeping any more descriptive info from being included. If that's so, then perhaps this isn't the right medium (or 140 characters isn't the right cutoff point) for real time commentary.

That said, I think this was a clever experiment. I'm sure we'll figure out better ways to do this sort of thing. We'll look back on this first attempt and why some things weren't more obvious to us. I still think advertisers have to love this sort of thing. They're all scrambling to find ways to deliver ads to people with DVRs. Well, here's one way. Normally I'd record the show so I could watch it later and fast forward through the commercials. Instead I watched it in real time so I could get the commentary, which means the advertisers got my partial attention.

I'm sticking with Twitter. I still believe it (or something very similar) is going to become an important tool.

The screen shot is obviously not the Twitter web site - it's a sweet little Mac desktop widget called Twitterrific.

Previous posts about Twitter

1950: future won't change for women

Excerpt from Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future. The original is from a 1950 issue of Popular Mechanics.

I don't mind the lack of drain in my living room, but I'm really ready for my personal jetpack.

Did You Know?

Did You Know? is a thought-provoking video that points out some alarming statistics and comparisons about globalization and information overload.

A sampling:

• The number of text messages sent and received each day exceeds the population of the planet.
• More than 3,000 books are published *
• It's estimated that a week's worth of New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.
• It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes (1.5 x 1018) of unique information will be generated worldwide this year. That's estimated to be more than in the previous 5,000 years.

* daily