Tim Connors <tconnors@rather.puzzling.org> wrote:
I have a smartphone. It's new and shiny, and I have no idea what to do with it.
Presumably you had applications in mind when you acquired it that justified more than a basic phone could provide... I can think of a couple of good reasons to obtain a smartphone, but none of them is compelling at this stage, so I won't enter the market for one until I have a real need to be served by it.
What problem is it trying to solve?
That depends on the user. Think of the smartphone as a highly portable, somewhat constrained, general-purpose computer that happens to have a GSM radio included. It probably also has Wifi, GPS and Bluetooth connectivity. Thus any application that benefits from the hardware features of the smartphone would be ideal - take your choice from among thousands of possibilities according to your needs.
I also don't get twitter. Is twitter still limited to 140chars despite everyone having smartphones that really really ought not be limited by silly SMS constraints, because it's too bloody difficult to type into those silly little onscreen keyboards?
I don't know whether Twitter still has that limit. Identi.ca does, and it's really annoying. It also lacks filtering: if you subscribe to somebody's posts, you receive all of them. The designers of Usenet news readers understood the fundamental importance of providing tools to help you limit what you read to what is of most interest. Regrettably, the developers of recent social networking Web sites didn't. Welcome to the fire hydrant; let's hope you can withstand the pressure. The subscription and messaging model is of course different from IRC or XMPP. Like XMPP, subscriptions are asymmetric, but messages are sent by default to everyone who is subscribed to your posts. I think there's a valid place for that, combined with the convenience of having everything posted to a Web site that anyone can access with any browser. However, it won't scale well without filtering options (for each user, that is, depending on the load that they can handle in the time available for reading such material).