Better Technology, More Facts, Better Politics

TUAW writes:

The iPhone transforms people like me from insufferable know-it-alls to insufferable know-it-alls with the entire Internet in our pants. (Or fashionable handbag.) (Or manziere.) (BRO!) Google and Wikipedia don't equate to wisdom and understanding, but they provide inexhaustible streams of on-the-spot factoids. End those "Who's right?" arguments fast.

Most phones today are using GPRS for data, which is painfully slow. GPRS still does miracles when you are on the go and don't have any other option, but it is not "Internet at your fingertips". Because of this, you still rarely see people, and even geeks, take out their phone to check a fact during a discussion.

All this of course will change with 3G, faster processors, and cheaper phones. We can now be confident that a few years from now we'll all have a phone in our pocket or purse that will enable us to very comfortably access the Internet.

Will this change the nature of face-to-face conversations? Will the phone succeed in becoming a tool that enhances our face-to-face experience?

Text from Your Computer with Joopz

That must be a generation thing: I am not a big user of text messages (SMS). But every time I get to do a trip in Europe, I come back with a renewed interest in text messaging.

Here comes Joopz, that I discovered through Russ. Russ says he loves the service. Love is a big word, so I had to give it a spin. The premise is that Joopz lets you send and receive text messages from their web site. It is free up to 50 messages sent per month, and $3/month after that (unlimited).

It sounds good. But this is not a service I will be using. When I sent a message to you with Joopz, you get from a weird number; in my test, this was: (010) 10-0001. Then the message reads: FRM: 14085555555-kjfj@joopz.com MSG: My message here. This is bad for 2 reasons:

1. This is not user friendly for the recipient of the message: you have to decode the content of the message, figure that 4085555555 must be the phone number of the sender, and go find who that person is. This just doesn't look like a regular text message.
2. This looks like a message sent through an email to SMS gateway. That is: a message the sender didn't pay to send. But the recipient is paying to receive the message. And then paying again to respond. To me that reads as I want to talk to you and I don't want to pay, but you will pay to get my messages and to respond. That doesn't send a good message ;).
   

I would love to be able to send text messages from my computer (and it's even better if I can save some money in the process). For now at least Joopz just isn't the service that will allow me to do so.