Mobile Social Networking / iPhone
Posted by Chris Leckness on 10/14/07 in The Internet, iPhone
Ok, so I am a busy person and have ignored, forced myself to “not” look, and basicly shunned social networking for the past year. Lately I have had a touch of free time so I have looked at Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook (Mobilitysite on Facebook). I had dozens of cold invites to both and some of my good friends were using them so I decided to take the plunge.
Here are my observations.
- Twitter - A time waster. Decreases ones productivity for what? To be able to let followers (friends) know what you are doing? Some use it to ask questions, to say I posted this on my blog, to get group opinions… I use MSM Messenger to do all that. I tried it, it’s cool, you can use your phone via SMS, but I just don’t see any value in using it.
- Linkedin - I haven’t really jumped in full tilt with this one yet. I have people adding me, I’m adding others, but I don’t need a job. Like classmates.com, they want more money to do more things, so I am not too sure about getting into it more, especially since I don’t need a job.
- Facebook - A cleaner, more mature myspace. It’s really quite interesting. A lot of my peers are using it and it’s kind of addicting. You can communicate, compete, see how friends match you in opinions on sports, movies, etc. You can play a game against others. Show you blog feeds. Just about anything. I think it’s really cool now. One thing that is quite neat is messages I receive on Facebook can me redirected and even replied to via SMS on my phone. I have decided to give it some attention and be more social online.
iPhone - One problem with AT&T’s iPhone Data package is that the Visual Voicemail does not work on my Windows Mobile Phones (ie. Palm Treo 750), so I can’t check my voicemail. I tried to get AT&T to remove Visual Voicemail from my service, but they can’t unbundle it from the $20 package. I could just change my package, but I am not ready to do that. So, I have been popping the simm card out of the Treo and back into the iPhone every so often to make sure I didn’t miss anything real important. (if it was important, I am sure they’d call back. Not to mention I normally answer all calls anyhow)
Well, last weekend, I did this and never got around to going back to the Treo 750. I have been using the iPhone again for the past week. Besides the speaker phone volume and the exchange server email thing, I have been satisfied with it. I don’t plan to continue much longer since I need to be able to do email, but I thought I would give it a 2nd try and as a phone, it’s not bad. The browser is still among the best Internet experiences on a phone and the SMS application is nice too. Other than that… it’s just a phone to me.











