41–50 of 155 posts
If I need to contact someone, even someone with Facebook on their smartphone, it takes hours to get a reply. If I use SMS I'm acknowledged near instantly.
Tenth graders are customers without credit cards. How are snapchat and all the free apps generating revenue? ads?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Must be the data consumption part. AT&T starter package is 300 MB a month.
Yep. The answer might be in someone who figures out how to optimize video chat for efficiency.
If software identified the user's face in live video and transmitted just that at high resolution, discarding or compressing the rest, how much efficiency could be gained?
I think he missed the point about FaceTime. Not /that/ many 10th graders have iPhones. 110.00 a month is too much, so the push the limits of their iPods. We don't need a new app so kids can do video chat, there's Skype and others for that. They like the ease if use. The problem is to tack in another data plan restriction removal to open FaceTime with AT&T and possibly others is the barrier. I have a 4gs and can't use…
Apple creating an API wouldn't accomplish much, since Apple still wouldn't have access to the SMS message streams. The mobile carriers would have to route SMS traffic to Apple's gateway, and they're not likely to agree to that, since SMS is a huge cash cow for them.
One possibility would be to cut SMS out entirely, by convincing the senders of these messages (banks, etc.) to connect directly to Apple's API instead of sending SMS. But the problem is that Apple's service is proprietary, and all the people on Android phones will be on competing services with different APIs. So banks would have to figure out how to talk to all these different APIs. This isn't a compelling issue for banks to be spending their efforts on, since any customer who wants to receive their banking alerts without using SMS already can: these alerts are also available via e-mail, which is an open, universal and standardized protocol.
An alternate approach would be for Apple to create an e-mail to iMessage gateway that would give each user a dedicated e-mail address that would forward to their iMessage stream (similar to the many e-mail to SMS gateways that currently exist). Users could then subscribe that e-mail address to their banking alerts. Another advantage of avoiding SMS entirely is that it's an unreliable protocol, in which 1-5% of messages are lost[1]. So if your alert is actually important, you may not want to entrust it to SMS in the first place.
I don't think the Facebook issue has anything to do with their brand. I think the attitude that Facebook is addicting actually has more to do with people becoming bored with the service and noticing how much time they actually spend on it. Edit: >> "... my friends and I used Myspace in middle school, and we too abandoned it (for Facebook) once we reached high school" The conclusion drawn here might be incorrect. I'm…
This is still something Facebook should solve. Facebook, despite its public groups and pages, still fosters incredibly insular communities, and those can get tedious very quickly. The reason Tumblr and Twitter have any popularity is that they encourage finding and following new, interesting people. They have a lot more novel content and it's easy to explore and find more of it. If Facebook gets seen as the boring, traditional social network (which to some degree it has), then that seriously damages its credibility.
What you use and how you use it has a lot of factors besides age. It has to do with your friends, their friends, where you live, what school you go to or what job you have, etc etc.
I'd like to share an anecdote about umwelt. A few days ago, I walked into a coffee shop. I sat in that coffee shop for two hours.[0] When I first walked in my jaw hit the floor as I scanned the room. Everyone had tablets, young, old, there was no common pattern. There was one person I could see reading a physical book, and two graphic designers in the back with Macbooks. My first thought was "Either I'm living in a bubble, or coffee shops are a bubble.".
I figured that if this is what it looks like in suburbia, then it must be even crazier elsewhere. That's when it hit me. If silicon valley developers do their work in coffee shops, and all they ever see there is mobile devices, then they'll naturally develop for mobile devices. But then mobile is new, hot, and growing all the time. IIRC mobile sales have already outdone consumer desktop and laptop sales.
Are developers choosing mobile because it's new and big, or because they see it in coffee shops all the time? Probably both. They're not exactly mutually exclusive. Just like how you have to ask if consumers are switching to tablets because laptops are too bulky, or because they're more usable, or because that's where the focus of every up and coming developer is right now? Probably a combination of all three and more.
All of that might have seemed pretty obvious to you. Well it wasn't to me, heres why:
1. In my circle of friends, everyone still uses desktops or laptops. Having only a laptop seems to be a result of financial concerns, not a lack of demand for a desktop.
2. At my school a handful of people have tablets. Me being one of them. A group of kids asked me what kind of cellphone it was when I first used it in class.
3. Among my friends Facebook seems to be the dominant communication medium, alongside telephone services. I only use the latter.
4. My school has uncommon demographics, The vast vast majority could be described as one or more of the following: Nerd, Hipster, Extreme anime and manga fan, Gamer. So I guess I myself sort of live in a bubble. I don't even own a cellphone.
I live on the west coast of the US. Not exactly a remote location.
[0]: This was the first time I've ever actually sat down in a coffee shop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The value of the article is not in its statistical likelihood, but rather, in recognizing how his assumptions blinded him. And actually listening to people.
How is he to know if he was "blind?" The fact that one girl exhibited preferences counter to his assumptions does not mean that those assumption are incorrect.
"This may have..." or "I believe" or "this seems" all suggest he isn't stating fact and is instead thinking out loud about the possible implications of his experience.
In other words: it's obvious the author knows he is reflecting on anecdotes.
But it turns out email, even if used infrequently, is still important. It's easy to have multiple accounts sit there indefinitely. Not controlled by one fatcat pulling privacy strings and strategizing your online activity.
Meanwhile another million blue 'f' logos are printed, each destined for a shopfront window, cash register, door. Beckoning the registration and sign up and sign over of your stuff. In return, FB tells a few advertisers about you and your stuff. And FB also reserves the right to build the mechanics of your social communications, private and public, the particulars of which will be in accordance with Facebook's sole decision and strategy in an advertiser-hungry world... And other things without notice and so on.