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Less texts, more contact with friends

Friday May 16, 2008

Yesterday I received the item I have wanted since January 2007: the iPhone. No, it's not an official one, as we still are waiting for the release in Belgium. But I decided I waited long enough and bought an unlocked iPhone on the Internet. But this post is not about telling you how fantastic this device is, which it is btw :-)

What I discovered is that when the iPhone is connected over EDGE or GPRS you do not get your SMS, or text, messages anymore. It's similar to the old days when your US Robotics 28.8 modem was using the phone line. At first I was not pleased with this, but then I started thinking a bit more, and came to a conclusion that I had not thought about until yesterday.

How I stay in contact with my friends has changed quite significantly the last 6 months, and I can pinpoint the moment to when Facebook hit the mainstream, and my friends list grew from let's say 5 to over 100 (and counting). So before Facebook we used to rely on SMS to organise and set up a bar night, or just to say hi. But nowadays Facebook, and increasingly Twitter, is becoming the preferred way of contacting each other. And I seem to be "talking" to my friends a lot more than before as well.

And this leads to less texting to friends. I wonder whether the mobile operators are seeing the same trend, that's maybe why they are so keen to develop mobile social networking applications.

Anyway, to finish this post with a question: "How do you stay in touch with your friends these days?" I am interested to hear from you.

Have a great weekend all !!!

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Posted at 04:45PM May 16, 2008 by Marc Dierens in Community
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I agree with you on the fact that social networking services like Twitter are taking over the traditional ways of keeping up with friends. I use twitter all the time, for various reasons ranging from getting to know what the world is upto (which is the de-facto reason to use it), using it as an RSS reader for blogs.sun.com (my favorite use), making new friends and last but the most useful use -> project collaboration with distant team-mates and tweeting all project status updates at a common account. But, from what I've experienced recently, A) You seem to get over-communicative and it hampers your productivity a lot B) It furthers the information over-load problem that we're already facing head over heels. Just my 2 cents.