the darkerside to rants

48 hours ago I decided to get an iPod Touch, mainly thanks due to the stupid plans that Ted Rogers has devised to get as much money out of suckers as possible so that he can spend more money on building his empire before the banks tell him to stop. Okay, that’s not quite true, my “conquest” has started around nine months ago, and the current “model” I am evaluating (and that is all that it is right now) is the iPod Touch.

What I am looking for.

I am not really in the need for a new audio player. I do have an iPod Classic with 160GB and it works perfectly, but what I am currently lacking is a small, portable device that can bridge the gap between a piece of paper and a notebook. There are several devices out there right now that try to address this, so called UMPCs. The problem with these is that they are also all in a price region that rivals some full blown desktops while only offering a tiny fraction of the performance.

My first look at a device was the (now famous) eeePC from ASUS. The eeePC is borderline in as far as it is neither a UMPC nor a full blown Notebook, it falls somewhere in between, though the price of roughly $400 for the Linux version is definitely in the right corner of the market segment. Unfortunately after playing around with it for a while one thing became glaring obvious to me: The keys just suck.If my hands would be a bit smaller it would work well, but I am just borderling fat fingered that typing on that thing in any reasonable speed is almost impossible, the large bezel is also a bit off putting as it limits the screen real estate. The latter one is about to be addressed in the next generation eeePC, which will also make it $100 more expensive, but as I can’t really type on it in any meaningful way it’s not an option for me.

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I removed myself from the Internet last week…. Well, mostly. I shitcanned most of the social networking sites I have been dragged into over the last few months and years, because it seems everybody is on a different site. This can easily turn into a full time job just to keep up, not to mention that a site like Facebook[*] is designed designed for people to waste as much time as possible on there.

What puzzles me about this whole thing is just how much time I know people are spending on there, re-loading, looking what their “friends” are doing (yes, I wrote this as “friends” because it seems most of the interaction with your 300+ “friends” is on the site, my definition of friendship is a bit different). So I canned it. I wiped (most) of the profile, left some basic contact info and a “Bye, and thanks for all the fish” message up and moved on.

And it feels good.

Now where does that put twitter? Granted, I have spend way way way more time using twitter, but I even did that when I still had Facebook (I just piped the twitter output into my Facebook status).

The reason why I like twitter is the same why I (and many others) like Google: It’s clean and simple and easy. It has just one role to play: Post, in 160 or less characters, what you are doing. A mini blog so to speak.

It allows you to let the people who want to know, to know what you’re up to. It’s a perfect way for a brain dump when you have an “idea” or a “moment” and you think that is something you want to shout out (okay, that is in and on itself still pretty sad, ideally one should have someone in person to tell that to, but hey, who am I kidding).

That’s it. Nothing more. No “install this app and you will be so much cooler than your friends” etc. etc.

So: Twitter for the win! Go, add me if you want to.

[*] No link on purpose. I’ll be damned if I send anybody into their arms.