Three Wise Men

Can Twitter replace SMS on cell phones?

Past few days I have noticed that being connected to my home WiFi access point with Nokia E71 cell phone does not drain the batteries as expected. In fact, with normal usage of the phone I managed to stay connected for about 48 hours. I was really amazed. On top of that I was also running twitter client – Gravity set to retrieve new twits and @replies every 15 minutes and retrieving of Direct Messages happened every two minutes.

The problem with Gravity is that it does not close the connection after an update and if you are not near your wireless access point it will use 3G (or whatever you are using) connection. An active 3G connection will drain the battery in four to five hours if you have a good battery, in most cases even sooner.

Twitter pretty much replaced my short message service¹. Now, here is an idea: a push service for Twitter that would be even friendlier on the battery life. Some smart phones already support push services and writing an application for that should be trivial and it was probably already done, right? The whole concept is useful in the situations where people cannot receive your text messages. Either because there is no roaming contract between two operators or receiver has to pay a ridiculous amount of money for outgoing messages and in some cases receiver is charged even for incoming messages².

Properly written mobile twitter client with push support could in fact replace texting completely for all twitter users and in global it would be cheaper for all the foreign communications. In the end it all depends on your subscription plan. For me, there is no flat rate for data transfer but 2GB of data will cost me 12€ per moth and this means around three million messages³. On the other hand with my subscription plan I can send one thousand messages for free and receiving is also free, no matter who the sender is.

Increasing the connectivity and the range of communication between people has been a goal of humankind every since the first proto-language evolved. Today we carry around Star Trek communicators and we are reachable almost everywhere on the planet in a matter of seconds. For instant communication we are missing only one thing – a better battery.

1. SMS, texting. [↩]
2. So much about North American subscription plans … [↩]
3. If the overhead for sending/receiving one message is five times of the maximum message size which is 140 characters. [↩]

Experimenting With Social Networks: Facebook Results

A few days ago I decided to start a little experiment with social networks. I was planning to add 100 friends to my Facebook account. In the end it turned out that I was half successful. I managed to send a friend request to 50 people then Facebook started telling me that I am doing something very bad and they will suspend my account if I continue to do so. So I stopped, 50 is still better than nothing, right?

I was choosing people pseudo randomly from various facebook groups and fan pages. After I added only one quarter of planned people, 25, the responses started to pour in. I don’t have any idea if accounts I added were active or not and when they were last time used. I was merely guessing.

Results are somewhat surprising.

READ MORE

Experimenting with Social Networks

Image via Wikipedia

Every now and then some random person starts following me on Twitter and every now and then some random person adds me to their friends list on Facebook.

“Watson, a clue!”

I’ll start with an experiment. I will be adding one hundred people on my friends list on Facebook and I’ll follow ome hundred different people on Twitter. What’s the situation right now? Being a moderate user of both services this is what I have:

Facebook: 165 Friends, Twitter: 45 Following, 84 Followers

People I pick will be pseudo-random. I will check if they are active and they don’t appear as a spam bot on Twitter. On Facebook I’ll start with friends of my friends and people from various groups and invitations to all sorts of events. I will try to keep people as different as possible adding males and females of all ages and interest groups. I’ll be posting follow-ups on twitter #twmkd so you can keep track of the progress.

It starts now!

Related articles by Zemanta

• 5 Ways to Share Images on Twitter (mashable.com)
• Flock embraces Twitter and Facebook (en.onsoftware.com)
• BuddyFuse, Connecting The Social (liveside.net)