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.

To Twitter Or Not

There's plenty of chatter going on about whether or not Twitter has any real value. Twitter is sometimes called a microblog. It's basically group SMS with a web interface and social networking features. Sign up, and you have a 140 character limit per post. You can post as often as you want - in theory you post throughout the day: heading to work, at Foo's for lunch, blogging, going to bed. Then you add friends to your network, and you can keep up with who's doing what when. You can see updates via the web, or receive them via SMS or IM. I signed up for a SXSW Twitter group (flock? conflagration? murder?) just for fun. When I sent a Twitter to the group number, it was broadcast on several plasma screens sprinkled throughout the convention center. I assumed I'd also see twitters on my phone from the rest of the group, but I only saw those of the developers and others in my twitter network, which was only Tori. Not too useful. Did I need to know that Jack was in line at Magnolia Cafe at 3am? No. No I did not.

After SXSW, Tori was none too happy. She emailed me:

I’m really aggravated at Twitter. Not at the technology, but at the sheer gall of the Twitter guys who evidently think I want to be on the end of a one-sided conversation. I’m completely convinced that’s what has happened. You sign up, and you get grouped with them, and no one else (unless you go to the effort of adding friends, like we did). Did you ever, once, see one of them respond to anything you had typed?

No. Why?

Because they aren’t listening. I’d even venture to guess they had some flag set so that they see only messages to one another. Meanwhile, I have to listen to their banter, and am bound to a group where there’s no chance of me have any sort of interaction with anyone new, or even participating. Gee thanks, that’s awesome technology, guys.

Put that in your blog and smoke it.

That said, now that I know how to use it, I can see how it could be useful.

• In a workgroup - making that final multi-day push to launch, get the whole group keeping each other up on their project status
• At a conference - keep up with who's going to which panel, where they're meeting for lunch
• Travel of any kind with a group - again, who's where?

Feel free to check out my Twitter page, and sign up to follow or as a friend. You can see that it's not getting a whole lot of use right now, but it's still kind of fun to play around with it.