Tweet or not Tweet

I have been observing the rise of the Tweet world both ib main stream media and in the online world. It is quite amazing how fast it has grown in the last one or two years. There are already concerns that they don't have a good business model to make money and they still rely on private funding to operate, but no one can deny that it has become as a recognizable name as Blogging and Facebook.

I do not understand the popularity it get at all, regardless whether they can make money. A blog like this one that I am writing is a way to share ideas. Even if my writing is complete junk to the rest of the world, at least it severs as a journal for myself. Tweet is so short (I don't remember the exact limit, but it is in the range of a text message, 160 or 250 characters), nothing of significance can be communicated with it. In one way it is a reversed text messaging, which receivers select the senders instead of senders select receivers. Maybe that is the appeal to businesses, because it removes the the worry that people get pissed off of getting non-illicited ads. The good thing about such an subscribed ad. service is that it is more organized. A typical newsletter requires the receiver to hunt down the sender's webpage or send some special command back to the mailing list, but Tweet is centralized and user and easily see all the subscriptions and remove the ones they don't want. Maybe that's the business model they should go after.

-- Wen from phone

Pigeon feather sound

A reseach about the different sounds that pigeons' feather make as they take off indicate if they are in danger. I think pigeons may learned to recognize the different sounds based on experience. Evolution may have allowed the birds that can produce different sounds have an advantage, because more of them can escape from danger. However, I don't think their is deliberate I also believe there are people who knew about this as a matter of survival skill. So, I think some of these reseaches are waste of money.

-- Wen from phone

WebOS 1.2

Still using my Pre. I heard about the leaked WebOS 1.2 update. Looks like a few most desired features are add, e.g. true cut and paste from any where. There are also a lot of small changes.

This is one thing I really like about Palm. They listen to what people wants and get these things done. This reminds me of the early days of Treo, when frequent updates are there.

Of course Apple also listened to their customers, but they are not as responsive as Palm. Another thing I really hate about how Apple worked is they shamelessly make addin small basic features as some kind of big improvement. Yes, I am talking about cut and paste. Palm is good at quietly fixing some small deficiencies and let people have them soom.

Right now, we do not have the final 1.2 version, but from what we can see, it is a pretty big change.

-- Wen from phone

More thoughts on Pre

Pre is a great phone and has a lot of features. However, it feels the less polished. A lot of people say that's because the phone is the first generation. I can understand this, but I don't think many users can. After all they don't follow the tech news as much, all they care about is a good phone.

Pre can get pretty slow at times due to a lot of programs are open. Some web pages suck a lot of resouces. Program start times is also pretty slow. However, this could be fixed by more optimized programs.

The other is the lack of apps. Apple has 30000 apps, even if just 10% of them of any good, that 3000 apps, which is 10 times the number in the official apps store.

The other part that I am worried about is the number of different smartphone brands can confuse the customers. Apple is the best in term of brand recognition, but Palm Andriod, Nokia really don't stand out from each other. Sprint just announced that they will carry a new model with Android. Then Nokia has the N900 that completely blows everyone await in terms is raw power and numer of features or capability.

-- Wen from phone

Google outage

I saw the news about Gmail outage today. It made me think about the pros and cons of the centralization or monopolization of online services. All a lot of people really like Google as a company, including me. I liked their web search all the free tools that provide. However, the more dependent we are on a single company, the more likely that a catastrophic failure of it would pull the whole nation down.

Today, we still have thousands of companies that owns their own servers. If the majority of they move to Google or any single provider, today's event could cause real economical damage. The reason why it is just an annoyance now is that most of the Gmail users use it for personal reasons, not for business.

This also lead me to think why the less government controls the business the better. For example, people could argue that having so many different systems supported separately is really inefficient and therefore the government should mandate the businesses to use the same services. However, such a centralized system would be an excelllent target for terrorists or other enemies of the country. Although the health care system is not the same as internet services, it could face other problems of its own, like financial problem.

-- Wen from phone

First post with Palm Pre

I finally got the Palm Pre. I have been looking at it for a long time. After my wife got her iPhone, I was wondering if should get iPhone 3Gs instead, because iPhone looks so good and it has excellent language support that Pre lacks. Pre can read Chinese, but cannot input Chinese. Finally, a post in precentral.net reminded of the low Sprint plan that I cannot live without.

So, here I am typing on Pre. So far it has been great. I have not run into all the issues people talked about on the web. But I only downloaded a few programs and have not tried the rooting or Homebrew apps.

The keyboard is great, because after I tried the iPhone on screen keyboard, it is clear it is not worrking well for me.

Multitasking is also as good as I expected. I never have to worry about saving the work for a quick check of things.

The biggest worry now is how well Pre will compete with iPhone. Palm can stay alive long enough, I clear see it ability of multitasking will win. However, the lack of Apps and some other problems associated with a new product has to be resolved quickly.

-- Wen (mobile)

Aircraft Carrier

I think one thing the US government can save some money on is to have more missile destroyers than aircraft carriers. And missile defence system is the most important in the future.

- Wen
Sent from mobile phone