Posts Tagged “Technology”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/fashion/02voicemail.html?pagewanted=1

This article reminded me to check the messages that I’ve been putting off since the beginning of April.
While I do agree that voicemail is annoying and I would rather not have to listen to it, there is a specific reason most of the time when I put off listening to my messages. There is one specific person who always leaves voicemails that make me cry. Once there’s a message from this person, I will put off listening until another one that could have content comes in. In April, this person left a message, and the next two messages were left by my grandparents. I called my family back and told them that I hadn’t listened to the messages yet, but what did they need?
Just now, I finally checked the messages. It turns out the message I had been avoiding listening to was just a couple seconds of silence, and then a click. How was I to know?
After listening to the messages from my family, I went back and listened to all the messages I had saved. There was a comical one from a friend, many cute ones from my significant other, and birthday wishes from both friends and family. There was even an adorable message from my two-year-old sister, where I could hear my mom in the background saying things for her to repear. These saved messages remind me why I used to love getting voicemails.
In the article listed above, mention is made of products designed to transform voice messages into text. For messages that are simply about the transferral of information, this would be a lovely innovation. My emails go to my phone already, so I would be able to easily address the problems at hand. However, reading a message from my mother’s cell phone that says “Hi Re, Love you Re, Bye Re” would not have nearly the same effect as hearing my baby sister’s voice. There’s a reason I have these messages saved, and that’s to listen to the voices of people I care about when I’m feeling down. For the past two months I’ve been unable to do this because I was afraid of that one message. I actually forgot about all the wonderful messages I had saved.
So, while voice-to-text services would be great in some situations, the majority of the voicemails I receive are these fun ones. I like the idea, but am unsure of practicality. 

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I have two twitter accounts. With one of them, I follow upward of 700 people and use the account to share information and learn about the internet world. I don't check it everyday, and I certainly don't read every tweet.

On my other account, I follow my friends and other people who I actually want to keep in touch with and talk to on a regular basis, as well as organzations I care about or want to get constant updates from. I only have about 70 people that I follow from this account, and I read every single tweet as it comes to my phone.

One of my friends (@bigsamthompson) recommended a few people to follow because they have interesting updates, including @iamsh4wn and the musician @johncmayer. I followed these from my more personal account, since I wanted to actually get and enjoy their tweets.

While I do enjoy John Mayer's music, it's not my favorite. His music is not why I follow him. I follow him because his tweets are fun to read, and they make my day a little brighter/thoughtful/something. However, since he is a "famous musician," smaller bands piggyback off of his fame. I've had a few bands/singers/songwriters that I've never heard of start following me, and I'm not sure what to do about it. I've followed them back for now, and a couple of them have interesting things to say. However, they also mention their music a bit more than I'd like. Also, since I've followed a couple of them, even more have decided to add me. I'm not really sure how I feel about musicians on twitter trying to get more people interested in their work. I feel as though twitter should be a place to connect with your existing fanbase, or even people who don't really care about your music but think you're an interesting person.

Does anyone else have opinions on this matter?

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