Tuesday, 13 April 2010

Breaking News?

Breaking NewsThe front page of 'Grazia' includes the following message:

Breaking News
Is Angelina pregnant?

Leaving aside the 'news' aspect of a 34-year-old woman in a stable relationship possibly having a child, I'm inclined to ask something else.

Can 'Breaking News' ever involve a question?

Monday, 5 April 2010

A very mobile wedding

Well, as I mentioned on 3rd April, I got married. Well done me. And, as I also mentioned, I was attempting to use a variety of different online social-type services from my mobile phone. So... how did it go?

I started the day by sending a text message update to Twitter. (It wasn't quite the 'Twitter wedding' that some people have achieved - but I didn't want to be too distracted during the important bits).

Then, when I picked up the flowers, I sent a MMS picture message to photo-sharing site Flickr. This wasn't perfect - I didn't use all of Flickr's mobile options so I needed to 'tweak' the file name and description later. I also updated this blog by visiting Blogger.com from my phone's browser. (I'd wanted to use ShoZu to upload a photo to Blogger at the same time but I’d written the blog post in a separate document and couldn’t cut and paste it into ShoZu).

Later that day I uploaded a photo and a short note using the Facebook application on my phone. (It’s an HTC phone running Windows Mobile). In fact, all of the day’s updates showed up on Facebook, thanks to FriendFeed, which takes information from other social networking sites and adds them to Facebook as well.

Google Latitude on Windows Mobile smartphoneI updated my location on Foursquare, which was a little bit messy on Windows Mobile because you’ve got to tell it where you are. (Unlike the iPhone app, for example, which can automatically use GPS to narrow things down). I also used Google Latitude to keep a small circle of friends up-to-date with where I was. (If I'd wanted to share a one-off location update, I'd have chosen Glympse instead).

I left a short phone blog - a phlog - using ipadio. Not only does ipadio put your voice blog online, it also uses SpinVox to convert your words to text. It's all as simple as making a phone call. And I recorded a short video clip using Qik. Rather like a video version of ipadio, Qik doesn’t just record but also streams live, which means people could watch or listen online in real time.

Reasonably pleasing, I'd say. Anyway, I'll be talking more about my technology - and the services I used - in this week's edition of The Fonecast on Wednesday.

Saturday, 3 April 2010

Wedding day

Today I've set myself the challenge of using my mobile phone to update as many different types of social-enabled web sites as possible. It's the type of thing that's been done before, I know, but not by me... and not on the day I get married.

Most of my updates should end up on Twitter (twitter.com/markbridge) and FriendFeed, in case you're interested in following them.

Right. I'm just going to upload this to Blogger.com on my Vodafone-branded HTC TyTn II.