Mobile Social Networking / iPhone

**Chris Leckness** · 10-14-07, 01:12 PM

Ok, so I am a busy person and have ignored, forced myself to "not" look, and basicly shunned social networking for the past year. Lately I have had a touch of free time so I have looked at Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook (Mobilitysite on Facebook). I had dozens of cold invites to both and some of my good friends were using them so I decided to take the plunge.

Here are my observations.

Twitter - A time waster. Decreases ones productivity for what? To be able to let followers (friends) know what you are doing? Some use it to ask questions, to say I posted this on my blog, to get group opinions... I use MSM Messenger to do all that. I tried it, it's cool, you can use your phone via SMS, but I just don't see any value in using it.
Linkedin - I haven't really jumped in full tilt with this one yet. I have people adding me, I'm adding others, but I don't need a job. Like classmates.com, they want more money to do more things, so I am not too sure about getting into it more, especially since I don't need a job.
Facebook - A cleaner, more mature myspace. It's really quite interesting. A lot of my peers are using it and it's kind of addicting. You can communicate, compete, see how friends match you in opinions on sports, movies, etc. You can play a game against others. Show you blog feeds. Just about anything. I think it's really cool now. One thing that is quite neat is messages I receive on Facebook can me redirected and even replied to via SMS on my phone. I have decided to give it some attention and be more social online.

iPhone - One problem with AT&T's iPhone Data package is that the Visual Voicemail does not work on my Windows Mobile Phones (ie. Palm Treo 750), so I can't check my voicemail. I tried to get AT&T to remove Visual Voicemail from my service, but they can't unbundle it from the $20 package. I could just change my package, but I am not ready to do that. So, I have been popping the simm card out of the Treo and back into the iPhone every so often to make sure I didn't miss anything real important. (if it was important, I am sure they'd call back. Not to mention I normally answer all calls anyhow)

Well, last weekend, I did this and never got around to going back to the Treo 750. I have been using the iPhone again for the past week. Besides the speaker phone volume and the exchange server email thing, I have been satisfied with it. I don't plan to continue much longer since I need to be able to do email, but I thought I would give it a 2nd try and as a phone, it's not bad. The browser is still among the best Internet experiences on a phone and the SMS application is nice too. Other than that... it's just a phone to me.

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Julie · 10-14-07, 02:21 PM

I've been playing around with Twitter and I like it, although I don't see myself using it as a social networking tool. What I like about it is it provides the ability to broadcast a message or announcement out to a wide audience. I've set up several different Twitter accounts and use them primarily as a means to post regular announcements to several websites I own. With Twitter, you can copy some HTML code and use this code to place a widget (is that the right term?) on a website to display messages. For instance, I set up Twitter accounts that I use with my 2 course websites. Now I can post updated announcements to these websites without having to modify and republish these websites every time. This is quite a time saver for me.

One of the classes I teach is at 7:30 in the morning and I am always concerned about running into an accident and being late to class and having no way to let my students know what is going on. With Twitter, I can now send a text message (or use Jott to send a verbal message) to my class and that announcement is posted to my course website within seconds.

I signed up for LinkedIn recently and made the same observation you did about classmates.com. The only reason I signed up for it was because I found an old friend there who I had lost contact with and wanted to regain contact with them. LinkedIn may be useful for some, but I thought it somewhat gimmicky and so I don't see myself doing much with it.

I haven't tried out Facebook, but that one sounds like a big time waster for me. I think I'd spend way too much time there....:)

**Chris Leckness** · 10-14-07, 02:41 PM

Good idea on twitter with the posting to your websites. I had set up some things with chris.leckness.com, but really can't find where it would help me personally. I took in to consideration what you said about twitter helping the staff at Mobilitysite, but I am unsure that it would work (and to get everyone to use it would be impossible)