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New Media News Every Morning

Blackberry users pounding keyboard again

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BlackBerry users are back to pounding their small keyboards again as service was restored this morning. An overnight outage left millions of users without mobile access to their e-mail.

Research in Motion Ltd., the Canadian company that provides the devices and e-mail service, said the service interruption began Tuesday night, affecting users in North America (Editor’s note: including me for which my wife and kids were very happy)

“Root cause is currently under review, but service for most customers was restored overnight and RIM is closely monitoring systems in order to maintain normal service levels,” a statement from RIM said. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the problems affected all cellular carriers that offer BlackBerry service. In the meantime, while my Blackberry service was offline last night, I was shown this video by my kids… naughty kids… [Read more…]

Interesting Uses Of Twitter

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twitter.jpgSmart Mobs has a collection of recent posts reflecting upon Twitter: Global distribution of Twitter users, Twittering churches, and Who really benefits from broadcasting via Twitter?.

The most tweets are apparently coming from Tokyo, then New York and San Francisco. This is based on the first 300,000 tweets collected by Twitterment via the Twitter public timeline API. Other countries that have a top ten city are Canada, Singapore, and Spain.

Twitter has many alternate uses, and has the potential to become an extremely valuable messaging service, but it’s lacking in social networking features. One proposed use of Twitter is to send out short prayers or nice thoughts. The congregation could subscribe by SMS text messaging on their cell phones.

While this could be an interesting idea and would no doubt draw subscribers to the feed, doubling or tripling the 140 character limit would make a difference. I think 140 characters is too restrictive, even with the conversion of long URLs to tinyURL forms. Maybe even have the ability to include a graphic – though of course that may lie danger.

If someone does put together a Prayer Twitter feed, I can’t help thinking that there might be a nice tie in to GodTube or a similar service. No reason there can’t be a multi-faith Twitter-like service, except maybe religious politics.

Mobile web community now in Spanish language

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Spanish speaking mobile web users all over the world have a new place to meet wherever as the mobile web community itsmy.com launches its Spanish language site. Members of itsmy.com can create their own personal mobile homepage, blog, chat, and a host of other features.

“This is very exciting for Spanish native speakers: a sophisticated mobile web site to indulge their passion, communication, and this not only with words, but also with their latest pictures and videos directly uploaded from their mobile phone!”, says Juan José Mejías, Content Manager for Hispano-America at itsmy.com.