How much of your communication is absolutely public? How much of what you say is meant for the benefit of everyone around you? I suspect that the last truly honest thing we actually say to the world, is your crying / screaming / cooing as a baby.
Think about it. As a baby, your communications are pretty simple. Not only in meaning (mostly "I'm upset about something", and expecting your mother or other caretaker to solve the puzzle of what upset you by inspection). As a non-sapient little mammal, you're basically screaming in order to irritate the other mammals around you. This should have the effect of making them solve your problem for you.
Now how does this apply to social networking sites?
Frankly I find it creepy to see how much some people share on Facebook. I really do NOT need to know what you did last summer and, frankly, group photos of yourself in a state of deshabille and drunkenness is only funny once... posting 239 photos of the same event (or even worse, different events!) just guarantees all the more that absolutely nobody is going to click through all of them. Not even if you were also there, and especially not if you're the one doing the embarrassing thing in the photo.
Unfortunately, I wish I was right in this case. There are people who will browse through all the pictures again and again, and laugh at how much of an ass they were. Every time, too.
Do I just have a low boredom threshold? To be sure, there are people who listen to kak Afrikaanse backtrack "music" (I use the term loosely).
If I had a point, I lost it while looking at the photos of other people's drunken Facebook party pics.
Okay, it's new-technology review day. (Mostly because I can't think of anything meaningful, and if I'm going to have my own cathartic, angst-ridden blog then I reserve the right to bore my hypothetical readers to tears.)
The gadget which I feel is truly going to affect my technology experience in the near future, is a device called DAVE. It's developed by Seagate, and the acronym stands for Digital Audio Video Experience.
Essentially, it's a little portable hard drive. What makes it interesting is that it's a completely self-contained battery-powered device which uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for connectivity, in a cellphone-sized package. Imagine just grabbing your DAVE on your way out the door, throwing it into your handbag or backpack, and having an extra 10-20 gigabytes' worth of music to listen to on your phone, directly off the pre-paired Bluetooth hard drive.
Luckily, the possibilities do not end there, or this would be a very poor gadget.
Imagine this device, not just in your pocket, but in everyone's. Imagine pre-arranged pairing keys and the rise of Personal Area Network filesharing. A simple Bittorrent client on your phone, a Python-on-Symbian script constantly checking for a pre-defined list of media that you're interested in, and a couple of DAVEs in your backpack... I'm all in favour of doing this filesharing legitimately, by the way. Add a unique identifying code to each piece of media, and arrange a micro-payment system that makes a deduction off your phone's account for each successful download of, say, your favourite TV series.
What does all this add up to? A totally legal filesharing system, with all the convenience of today's illegal peer-to-peer networks.
Why would people choose to go the legal route than the illegal one? The same reason that people are more than happy to pay US$1.29 for a DRM-free track on Apple's iTunes, rather than US$0.99 for a DRM-encumbered track. If I could download quality media from my peers and pay for it directly from my phone's (prepaid or credit) balance, I would rather do that than download the same media illegally. Many media consumers are teens, or do not have a credit or other charge card with which to buy digital copies of there media... But many people have cellphones. It's safe to assume that, if they've got the wherewithal to afford a DAVE, they can afford a prepaid airtime voucher with which to make a micro-payment contribution towards the cost of the media which they are consuming.
Or maybe I'm an idealist. Time will tell.
Walking home down Main Road, we saw this old car. It's apparently the corporate vehicle of a traditional barbershop in the V & A Waterfront in Cape Town.
The photo above, and this blog entry, was respectively photographed and is being edited on my new mobile phone, a Nokia N73. It's a phone that's been described as "a camera with a smartphone attached". This is a very good summary of this phone... It performs both functions, and performs them well. The camera is really good, a 3.2 megapixel model with Carl Zeiss optics. On the camera software side, a nice touch is that you can upload your photos to Flickr directly from the camera interface.
The Symbian Series 60 Version 3 operating system performs well on this phone; very little of the lack of responsiveness of previous S60 phones is evident. The only time I've really succeeded in crashing it, was while using the Gallery program, and even then it's infrequent enough to be excused.
Just about the only factor that seriously detracts from my N73 experience, is the relative scarcity of S60v3 applications at the moment. Just to give one example: I have not been able to find a free music player for Ogg Vorbis files. As a member in good standing of the Open Source and anti-Digital Rights Management movements, I have converted much of my music into Ogg format. Sure, it's not difficult to convert those same files to mp3, but it would have been heart-warming to see Nokia supporting open formats. I mean, it's not as if it would cost them money in terms of licensing rights... I shudder to think what Nokia pays to Fraunhofer for use of the mp3 codec, not to mention to Real for their video player. Open formats cost less, offer improved performance and stability, and frankly... Open source is very chic and politically correct right now. The perfectly mercenary thing to do would have been to include a few open formats out of the box, theirs to be had for a token "voluntary" contribution to the open source project in question.
A very nice Web 2.0-ish touch is the program I'm using to write this blog. It's called Vox Mobile, and it was developed for mobile integration with your vox.com account. It is very well written, and pays attention to the little details: I was surprised to find a pop-up dialog in my camera interface asking me whether I wanted to add my newly-taken photograph to Vox. Upon entering Vox at a later stage, you're then shown a little thumbnail of the photo, which opens the blog-entry editing page at which I am currently looking. You can save your entry and continue at any time, only publishing the entry when you're good and ready. The same functionality as with the photos, apparently applies for video and sound recordings, although I haven't tested this yet. More on this later.
