Jott Links Lets You Blog and Tweet From Your Phone

Here I am at 9:30pm, with a website to put up and two articles to write, and I’m playing with these new features from Jott.com. I’m pretty impressed though. For those that haven’t used it, Jott lets you call in and leave short messages for yourself or others on your contact list. Those messages are transcribed as text and kept in mp3 format. All your messages are stored on the Jott servers, but also emailed to you in both text and speech. I’ve been using it for awhile now, but not heavily.

With their new Jott Links feature, you can post a message to a blog, like I just did, or some other service like Twitter. Below is my text Jott. You can tell it’s not 100% accurate, but if you talk like up on stage instead of in your living room, it does a pretty good job.

So right now I got about a dozen other things that I should be doing right now but instead I’m testing out this new feature by Jott called Jott links and so far it’s pretty sweet. I can post short thought to my blog just by talking about them, so check it out Jott.com and I think this is actually gonna end up in my blog. If everything works right and all out. Cheers.

Click here to listen

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Is Facebook Leading the Informality Charge?

We went to dinner with some friends last night. It was one of those things where we knew the girl organizing the evening, and a few others, and were introduced to others we’d never met before. My wife and had been there a few minutes when another girl walked in the door. As soon as my wife looked up, everything in the room stopped momentarily in the wake of one of those it’s-a-small-world-after-all moments. Turns out that the two had played high school volleyball together, but hadn’t seen each other in years. These sorts of moments can turn ugly rather quickly, but this one did not. We all had an awesome evening together and these two had a great time catching up on life, the universe, and everything.

Being a geek, what I found most interesting about the exchange was totally different. My (wonderful) wife understands the whole web 2.0 thing. She’s not tech-shy by any means. However, it doesn’t make her shiver with excitement like it does me. The other girl, it turns out, is much the same. Yet, during the first conversation these two had in almost a decade, the discussion turned to Facebook! Has Facebook really become so pervasive in our daily lives?

Aside from the fact that I’m getting rather tired of the whole Facebook thing, I’m completely amazed at the speed at which Facebook. along with other microblogging services like Twitter, have become mainstream. How long was it before Google became a verb? Suddenly, we don’t think twice when someone says they’ll tweet and Facebook someone. The adoption rate here is pretty much unprecedented. Facebook has entered the common vocabulary in what has to be near record time, if not faster. So, what does that mean for us?

The trends are pretty clear. Shorter communicae and shorter attentions spans. I can guarantee that there are people who won’t read past the first three lines of this post before their minds begin to wander. Some of this is good. Word efficiency is a valuable skill. I love the idea of the five line email. On the other hand, and my wife and I have discussed this a good deal, there is a culture of informality forming around applications like Facebook, IM, and SMS messenging. What will happen when this culture of informality bleeds into the formal world, aka the “real” world? College recruiters are already seeing evidence of this in entrance essays. The business world is seeing changes in what people are wearing to their interviews. Even my wife has noticed changes in the way clients interact with her on the phone. You have to wonder, where will it all end? And, perhaps more importantly, where do we want it to end?

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Matt’s Daily Diigo Post 04/11/2007

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Microblogging with Twitter

I saw this on another blog and thought the idea was pretty neat. The guy uses his Twitter RSS feed to keep readers up on what he’s up to at the moment. It’s a workaround really. Evidently, none of the actual Twitter badges work on WordPress.com blogs. Not that any of you really need to know what I’m up to every moment of the day, but I’ve decided to copy his idea and use Twitter to microblog. I think we’ve all had the occasional thought throughout the day that we wanted to tell someone about, but let it go because it was too much work to open up an email or dial a phone number. (Well, maybe it’s just me…) I’m still not a convinced twitter-addict, but I can certainly see the value in sharing a thought with my audience with a simple text message. So, if you look in the upper corner of my left sidebar, you’ll see my Twitter feed. Be sure to check there for my most brilliant thoughts, the crispest news, or what I’ve just eaten for breakfast!