Text-based girl, livin' in a text-based world

Glad you're enjoying it.

I like texts for arranging conversations and meetings, but not for imparting detailed or non-essential information. It's actually terrible for that.

Cycloptichorn

I started with texts because this incident reminded me, but really what I'm happy about is how text-based communication has become, general -- texts but also email, Facebook, Twitter, forums.... a whole lot of typing/ reading going on.

Often times, I'm able to articulate myself a little more precisely when writing, /c you can take the time to get it right; spoken conversation forces quick decisions over word choice, and when you place a lot of emphasis on the specific quality of your words and their meaning (like I do), that's a constraint.

Cycloptichorn

And that somewhat fits with my present signature, by David Foster Wallace - not entirely sure what he meant, but I think it was about the noise protecting us from our own thinking by ourselves, from the boredom that can bring play and inventiveness as a recourse.. or maybe he meant that it distracts us from our depression.

Interesting...

And speaking of mags' thread and not wanting to derail, I looked around a bit at TextFree and while I didn't sign up, I think what happens is that it functions through your email inbox. New texts show up as email, and then you reply to that email to send a text back.

Thanks!

I haven't looked yet since I know a2k is going to have a change the servers stop, and then I'll go through typical a2k deprivation status, so I'm making the most of it while it's still cooking.

soooo....doesn't that make it.....email?

Pretty much, but email that goes to the recipient's cell phone.

In mags' thread we were talking about how the under-30 generation likes to text and nothing but text (even email is so passe).

So this is win-win -- looks like email to osso, looks like texting to her niece.

And I assume I'll be limited for the number of letters (spaces) I get to type. This will be hard for ms. motor fingers.

Not necessarily -- check with her about whether she's charged for incoming texts. If not, then there shouldn't be a problem -- they should just be automatically split up. (As in if there is a 200-character limit and your message is 600 characters long, it should automatically split into three texts.)

I'm speculating though, need to try it to see.

If you want a text number to practice on lemme know and I'll PM you my number.

Been thinking about this and you for a while now (basically ever since I put youtube in bbcode and realized the accessibility implications). The internet and mobile are going to get less "texty" but until the input/output paradigms completely change (e.g. if people start talking to their computers more instead of using keyboards) I think tech will still be dominated by text.

Google's gotten scary-good at speech recognition etc, and video and photos are surging (think apps like Facetime, or how video chat will be a cornerstone of Google's coming social network) but text is gonna be very hard to overthrow in the tech world as long as computers remain poor at collecting non-textual input (and the way Google solves this is a way that can't be done easily client-side).

I like the text world too. I'm glad technology for video and audio is improving but almost always get frustrated at gratuitous use of it. For example a Google employee, Matt Cutts, likes doing video answers instead of text answers. He says it's because it's faster and I can see that (though I think there's a wee bit of narcissism in that usually humble guy too) but I invariably find it annoying that I have to listen to the answers by audio instead of consume them in text. It's much, much faster to consume by text. It'd probably take 10 seconds to read what he says in a minute or more and he's not have to interrupt my music (woe is he who gets between me and my NIGHTBIRD).

Apple is gonna launch an iOS-wide (and apparently iOS-specific, unfortunately) mobile messaging service in the fall. It will be like blackberry messenger, if you are familiar with that, and if you are texting people on iOS it will be very similar to those sms replacements or IM programs (but with key advantages like starting up with the device and consistently running in the background).

Thanks, Soz. Go ahead and pm; I'll pm you if I'm going to try it on your number first.

Cool. I'm pretty happy with all current messaging/ texting programs I use, if things will improve further, awesome.

PM'ed! No need to warn me though, just go ahead and try and say in the message that it's from you (since you're not in my address book it will appear to be from a phone number that I won't recognize).

Google Voice will take a voicemail, transcribe it to text, and send the texts to your phone.

About three texts per voicemail, I've found.

Are you aware of that translating to a program that can be used by someone on a computer to get it to type from dictation?


(Haven't been able to afford Dragon yet...and wondering if there is something better.)

I like texting (now that I can DO it....never really could before my iPhone!)

I have an odd reason though...apart from convenience, which is a bit limited for me as numbers of my friends don't/won't use it....it's because work has made me phone phobic! The sound of a phone ringing just seems to be connected straight to my alarm system now...like Pavlov's dogs, only different.....(I don't salivate, I recoil in dread).

I find a number of colleagues are similar....too many years of too much demand.

Email is getting a bit the same way....since emails are now used whenever they can't get you by phone.

Work only ever texted me about oodna-whoop-whoop , and I am not going there any more.


I also like that texts can be viewed when someone has time, unless you're in the middle of a flurry of them (they were very useful whern Thomas and Tsar and I were trying to find each other near Moma!!!)

They are also great when overseas...you can keep in easy contact with people in remote time zones without waking them.


I can remember how useful it was when Helen's mum got ill....I was able to text the friend who was minding her house to open Helen's emails so that we could communicate with her cheaply. Vive l'iPad on that occasion!

What's an iOS?