Twitter users in U.K. lose some SMS features

I think this issue has far more potential to be a Twitter-killer than downtime problems. One of Twitter’s distinctive features is its SMS capabilities. If those start going away, then what is the draw of the service?

European users of Twitter can no longer receive text message updates on their cell phones, in a temporary move designed to keep the start-up's telecom bills down.

Twitterers can still use its U.K. number, +44 762 480 1423, to send updates to the site. But that number will no longer deliver text-message updates back to users, and recommends that they use the Twitter mobile site or a third-party client like TwitterBerry, Twitterrific, TwitterMail, or Cellity.

Google’s market for Android

Clay Spinuzzi has posted an interesting analysis of Google’s positioning of Android, its mobile phone software. Spinuzzi argues that Google is targeting the product between the business (Blackberry) and consumer (iPhone) markets, looking instead to tap the small enterprise market.

Google is going to use Android to facilitate latent connections among emergent organizations and organizational forms, such as federations and coworking. It’s not focusing on a tightly controlled consumer experience, like the iPhone, or a tightly controlled corporate infrastructure, like the Blackberry or WinMobile devices. It’s going to focus on the many small businesses that have to do B2B collaboration, the professionals who have to be increasingly mobile while facilitating face-to-face meetings, the loose collaboration that is increasingly characterizing knowledge work.

The intriguing question here is: How long will Google be satisfied with this market before it begins to expand to the others?

Mobile gaming in the classroom

Sarah Perez at ReadWrite Web has posted a short introduction to mobile gaming centered on Eric Klopfer’s book Augmented Learning: Research and Design of Mobile Educational Games. Perez does a good job outlining some of the difficulties that face instructors who want to use mobile phones in the classroom. Although the students she discusses appear to be K–12, the same issues apply for the college classroom.

Even as children get older, there are still the issues of various mobile plans and the cost of data use—details that the students may not be aware of, racking up charges that parents won’t be happy about all because the child’s teacher told them to break out their phones for today’s lesson.

Finally, the digital divide between the ”haves” and “have-nots” would become more apparent in a classroom if students had to provide their own phones. Imagine the privileged kids pullinig out their iPhones, others pulling out ancient clamshells, and still others having to raise their hands because they are without.

Twitter everything, nothing at all

The back story:

UC Berkeley graduate journalism student James Karl Buck was arrested on April 10 without any charges in Egypt for photographing a demonstration.

He used his mobile phone to twitter the message “Arrested” to his 48 followers, who contacted UC Berkeley, the US Embassy and a number of press organizations on his behalf.

The TechCrunch story by Michael Arrington is titled “Twitter Saves Man From Egyptian Justice.” Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider disagrees:

We’re glad James is out of jail, but it seems that Twitter probably didn't spring him—being an American, with access to a cell phone, was probably more important.

So, did Twitter free Buck, or is the hype around the story merely hype? I think the reality is somewhere in between. While I agree with Kafka that the key here is that Buck is an American, it certainly helped him out a lot that he had a cellphone and was able to quickly notify his friends about his situation. He could have done this a number of ways, but he chose to use Twitter. It isn’t clear why he made this choice—maybe a call wasn’t possible?—but he did.

So what role did Twitter actually play in this situation? First, it broadcast the message of his predicament to a number of people at once, making it possible for all of them to agitate for his release and contact others—UC Berkley—who could also agitate for him.

Second, and I think perhaps crucially, Twitter made a permalink of Buck’s cry for help. As they passed on his story to larger organizations, Buck’s friends could point them to the archived version of his post, a fact which I imagine would have made their pleas for help on his behalf more convincing (of course, I have no proof this happened).

Although Buck clearly benefitted from his American citizenship, if Twitter helped him at all, I imagine it was in these two ways.

Review: Holland, ed. Remote Relationships in a Small World (2007)

I ran across Remote Relationships in a Small World a month or so ago in a publisher’s catalog, and I thought it looked pretty promising, seeing as my work is gravitating towards studies of social networks and mobile communication. The collection of essays are intended, according to editor Samantha Holland, to provide new research on social relationships conducted online. This, I assume, is the source of the title, which suggests that the digital age has both made the world smaller by allowing for instant communication across time and space, but at the same time that time and space is real and has a real effect on the relationships conducted online.

The three chapters that jumped out at me were Holland’s chapter (with Julie Harpin) on the use of MySpace by British teenagers, Janet Finlay and Lynette Willoughby’s study of the use of WebCT forums and blogs in online learning, and Simeon J. Yates and Eleanor Lockley’s study of male and female cell phone use. (The complete TOC can be found here.)

Holland and Harpin presented the results of a pilot study of teenage British MySpace users, following the usage habits of 12 teenagers. Their results seemed to confirm the work of boyd and Ellision (2007) in that the teenagers they studied tended to use MySpace to communicate with people they already knew socially. Additionally, the authors found that, unlike the typical stereotype of the digital loner, the social network was a “hive of sociability.”

Similarly, Finlay and Willoughby’s chatper didn’t break any new ground. They found that a minority of the (mostly male) students using their course forum and individual blogs would post offensive messages, and that this behavior tended to alienate other users. After their mostly textual case study, the authors concluded that for an online learning space to be a real community of practice there needed to be scaffolded interactions with the community so that users could become socialized to it, a feat which was not possible in their 12-week course.

Finally, Yates and Lockley examined the use of cell phones by men and women in a number of different contexts: at home, on the train, and in other public places like restaurants and coffee shops. They found that the men in their study tended to send shorter messages than the women, and that the longest messages were sent in conversations between two women. Like Holland and Harpin, the authors found that the participants in their study tended to not use their phones to contact or converse with strangers, but rather to keep in touch with people who were close to them, both physically (neighbors) and emotionally (friends and relatives).

I found this collection to be a bit of a mixed bag. While the studies I mentioned here were interesting, and had interesting conclusions, I found myself wishing they were a bit more rigorous. This was particularly the case with the Holland and Harpin and Finlay and Wiloughby chapters. While each was interesting, neither broke new ground, and both seemed to merely share the overall theme of the online texts they collected. Admittedly the Holland and Harpin study was a preliminary one, but, that being the case, I wonder why it was included in this collection.

The Yates and Lockley chapter suffered from the opposite problem. The authors used a large number of measures—surveys, observation, diary studies, focus groups—but the analysis and discussion of these measures seemed abrupt to me. I would have liked to have seen them choose some of the data to focus on with more depth and detail, rather than have them present this cornucopia of data.

That said, I found the book to be useful, not the least for the support, however tentative, that the studies included in it lend to the thesis that social communication is used more to keep in contact with people in existing social networks, rather than create new contacts. Somewhat ironically, these studies seem to suggest that our online relationships aren’t so “remote” after all.

NY Times on cellphone novels

Norimitsu Onishi of the New York Times has written an article on the popularity of cellphone novels in Japan. While the phenomenon has been around for almost a decade (Onishi dates it back to 2000), it was reported at the end of 2007 that half of Japan’s top ten novels of the year were written on cellphones. The article provides some interesting background to the phenomenon.

The cellphone novel was born in 2000 after a home-page-making Web site, Maho no i-rando, realized that many users were writing novels on their blogs; it tinkered with its software to allow users to upload works in progress and readers to comment, creating the serialized cellphone novel. But the number of users uploading novels began booming only two to three years ago, and the number of novels listed on the site reached one million last month, according to Maho no i-rando.

The boom appeared to have been fueled by a development having nothing to do with culture or novels but by cellphone companies’ decision to offer unlimited transmission of packet data, like text-messaging, as part of flat monthly rates. The largest provider, Docomo, began offering this service in mid-2004.

This kind of trend makes literary-types upset. One worry is that few of the current crop of cellphone novelists have ever written before. According to the article, cellphone authors aren’t being compelled to write for traditional literary reasons.

“It’s not that they had a desire to write and that the cellphone happened to be there,” said Chiaki Ishihara, an expert in Japanese literature at Waseda University who has studied cellphone novels. “Instead, in the course of exchanging e-mail, this tool called the cellphone instilled in them a desire to write.”

Interestingly, one author of a cellphone novel, Rin, acknowledges the literacy divide between the writers/readers of cellphone novels and other kinds of novel reading. Here she explains why the readers of her novel aren’t interested in traditional novels.

“They don’t read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them,” she said. “On other hand, I understand how older Japanese don’t want to recognize these as novels. The paragraphs and the sentences are too simple, the stories are too predictable. But I’d like cellphone novels to be recognized as a genre.”

Related: Personal publishing and micro-fiction

Personal publishing and micro-fiction

Cameron Reilly of The Podcast Network has created a new site, Twittories, for crowdsourced stories composed in Twitter (via TechCrunch).

My wife and I were putting our kids to bed and we were doing something we have done with them since they were about two years of age. One of us starts a new story by telling a few lines and then the next person picks up where they left off and so on. I thought “gee, this is like a Twitter conversation” and started to wonder what it would be like to have a bunch of folks on twitter collaborate on a short story—140 characters at a time.

Apparently, a similar phenomenon has already demonstrated that it has legs: in Japan, novels are currently written and consumed on cellphones.



In a related post on Read/Write Web, Alex Iskold responds to a post by Fred Wilson on microblogging (Wilson drew the graph above), expanding on Wilson’s claim that microblogging fits a niche in personal publishing not met by chat, social networking, or blogging. Iskold concludes his piece this way:

The personal publishing market evolved from cumbersome web sites to online diaries called blogs to social networks and more recently to microblogs. Each form of personal publishing is different and each has its niche and audience. While social networks have been the most wide spread, the content creation there feels different from publishing. Because traditional blogging platforms are powerful and still require technical know-how, microblogging has evolved as an intermediate form of self-publishing. Microblogging has a shot of spreading blogging further into the mainstream as well as swaying some professional bloggers to start personal blogs.

Although Iskold doesn’t mention micro-fiction like Twittories in his post, it will be interesting to see how this kind of writing fits into the microblogging niche.

Ubiquitous audio: “a heads-up display for your ears”

In a recent article, Peter Drescher argues that stereo cellphone headsets will make possible interactive communication experiences on the go.

I’m looking at wireless stereo headsets, and thinking that as they become more comfortable, more useful, more powerful, more commonplace, and more stylish, there will be fewer and fewer reasons to ever take them off. Eventually, you’ll just stick them in your ears and forget about ‘em. They will become like acoustic contact lenses, or a heads-up display for your ears. They’ll let you access and control a virtual audio reality that streams in from wireless networks all around you and is mixed with voice data from your phone and from everybody’s phone. And although the ubiquitous audio network I’m describing does not yet exist, you can actually listen to what it might sound like today.

It’s completely analogous to being in a recording studio, isolated by big headphones, auditioning multiple tracks, and talking to the control room via live mic. I remember my first time in a real studio: I put on the cans and was astounded by the sense of space, the detailed audio field, and the sound of my own voice—in my head, through the mixing board. Now imagine that feeling as a mobile experience, but instead of talking to the engineer on the other side of the glass, you’re walking down Broadway, talking to someone on the other side of the world.

In response, Tim O’Reilly points out that stereo headsets will be the first components of mainstream wearable computing.

I’m sure that at first, when only a few people are living in the mobile “heads up” auditory network, they will be quite “annoying” in public spaces, but eventually, I imagine we'll figure out how to deal with that. There's a lot that's compelling in this vision. I've always imagined heads-up visual displays being one of the harbingers of the era of wearable computing, but Peter makes a pretty compelling case that it’s in audio that we’re going to see the first signs of ubiquitous wearable computing.

“God” box

Jon Oltsik at the CNET News Blog posted a blog entry this week on the “god box,” a single device “packed with ridiculous amounts of functionality.”

Think of an all-in-one television, cable box, TiVo, and home entertainment speaker system and you get the idea. One “god box” always replaces numerous more pedestrian systems.

According to Oltsik, new developments in processors, hardware commodification, and software are going to make these god boxes a reality.

My problem with this idea, though, is that I’m not sure who would want this kind of functionality in a single box. One caveat: though he doesn’t come out and say this, I think Oltsik’s post might be directed at the business networking crowd. I can see why a business IT department might want to distribute god boxes as terminals. However, since he brought up the home entertainment example, I don’t see how a god box would be desirable in that context. I think consumers have made it clear that they don’t want certain kinds of hybrid devices: computers that connect to the television have never caught on, for example. Rather, what people want is ease of connectivity, a “god network,” if you will. They want to watch TV on their TVs and compute on their computers; but, when they are away from those devices, they want to access their music, documents, TiVo programs, or live TV on their MP3 players or phones.

I think it is far more likely that the technological innovations Oltsik describes are going to turn the phone into a god device. It won’t be one where the majority of users will choose to do all of their specialized tasks—that is, the phone is not going to replace computers, televisions, home stereos and the like. Rather, it will be one that can access the functionality of those other devices on the go.

(Of course, cellphones are replacing all of these devices in Japan, so I could be completely wrong about the above.)

The New York Times on microblogging, GPS, and privacy

Two new pieces in The New York Times by Ivar Ekman and Laura M. Holson discuss the looming possibility of our cellphones being used to track our every move. In the first, Ekman reports how Google’s recent purchase of Jaiku could set up the search giant to acquire vast amounts of information about users. Here’s a quote from the article describing what Jaiku does:

Petteri Koponen, one of the two founders of Jaiku, described the service as a “holistic view of a person’s life,” rather than just short posts. “We extract a lot of information automatically, especially from mobile phones,” Mr. Koponen said from Mountain View, Calif., where the company is being integrated into Google. “This kind of information paints a picture of what a person is thinking or doing.”

Ekman points out that it is this automation—and its connection to “what a person is thinking or doing”—in the hands of Google that worries some people.

In the second article, Holson describes one instantiation of this mobile data-collection: GPS tracking with cellphones. A number of cellphone carriers now offer a service where their subscribers can show their location to other users and see those users’ locations as well. Typically, the services allow users to add and block other individuals from seeing their location on a person-by-person basis. Holson points out that the ethics of this practice are only emerging slowly—there are some people who users wouldn’t want to know their location, like bosses or spouses, but others, like close friends, who users would never think of blocking from the service.