A List Apart: Past Issues: 91-current
A List Apart: Past Issues: 91-current is a great place to start checking out what i love most about coding for the web.
Thanks to my friend
Ted Billups for referring this one. I'll have to come back and go over this site with a fine tooth fork.
Chicago Tribune | Cell phone number a keeper
A great article in the
Chicago Tribune | Cell phone number a keeper is a recent update to the issue of number portability in the Chicagoland market.
This is what I want to believe. That things are advancing, that people know what they want, and that businesses respond to those wants and are rewarded by that awareness by consumers putting their dollars where they belong - with the company of merit.
But this is not the world we live in, and certainly not any universe where cellular service providers exist. These companies get us hooked on basic service of ever-decreasing quality, locked into expensive contracts, and then further cajoled to NOT churn by resisting market demands like number portability.
Infuriating at the least.
Number portability progress report, Spotlight on Chicago, metro area
Then you see things like this
report, with it's alleged
Spotlight on Chicago, metro area, and you have to second guess everything you believe to be true coming out of the cellular trades. Hence the description of
Mobile Tracker, I guess.
History repeats itself.
TheFeature :: Social Currency
Social Currency, huh?
This is good; "...baseball cards are stickier ... than bubblegum." So now content is a false king and people are really more interested in connecting with each other than connecting with information. Hmm. I'm gonna have to ponder that. Of course, I wasn't there per se when the internet was taking off, but I don't remember a whole lot of "community" going on outside of newsgroups and IRC, and even today, those realms are the domain of uber-geeks more competent at the command line than at the
check-out line.
The article gives us a good analogy for it's argument, but I gotta say that while a baseball card is a form of currency in and of itself, it's also content. Duh. I'm all for moving right into developing the "community" aspect of the mobile internet.
But elaborately produced content - like prepackaged video shorts, inscrutable weather maps, and football game TV replays - are not only inappropriate for a two-inch screen, they are inappropriate as social currency. Sorry, but people won't use their cell phones to buy content any more than they used their Internet connections to buy content - unless that content is something that gives them a reason to call someone else.
Come on! Don't you need to have content to comprise the currency? I'm guessing that I'm simply too utilitarian for this argument to work on me. And what's this about buying content? I never got the impression that I bought anything when I visited Weather.com, other than eyeballs on some ads.
And what's this about having sex with phones? That's just gross. These people!
Tibia Micro Edition - the first mobile online roleplaying game
My good man over at
MMS Memo has the 411 on the new
Tibia Micro Edition - the first mobile online roleplaying game.
Now I've been internally predicting the arrival of this type of product for years now, but i've never done any market research to see if it was already in someone's pipe.
It'll be damn interesting to see how this does. Are the Germans that into MMORPGs?
Global Rich List
Global Rich List:
BlogChalking
BlogChalking: "This is my new blogchalk:
United States, Illinois, Huntley, English, Brian, Male, 26-30. :)"
