Remember making new friends without the help of the Internet? Thanks to a new service called rmbrMe, you can convert those messy real life acquaintances into easily manageable social networking formats! rmbrMe lets you send a code via text message that will link people you just met to your profiles on Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, or whatever other networks you choose.
There is a bit of a missing link between having someone's phone number and having their URLs. Not everyone has an iPhone, so it's not always easy to send a hyperlink that won't have to be retyped into a browser later. RmbrMe is a clever concept, but it makes us wish for something even easier. Instead of going to a browser and typing in a five-digit code to get to a profile that aggregates all of your other profiles, it would be nice to see a service that generated friend requests straight from the text message.
For now, rmbrMe is a fairly elegant solution to the problem of helping people, well, remember you. The catch, and the reason we probably won't become frequent users of the service, is that it charges 49 cents a message, on top of whatever your carrier charges. Asking for an e-mail address might be a little bit dorkier, but it's also cheaper.
At first, it sounds like a texting nightmare from hell, but RSS via SMS has a place in our world through Web-Alerts, a small web experiment that may get lost in the vast internet desert that is web 2.0 failures. The service sends you a text message for every update to a chosen site's RSS feed.
The service is simple and easy to use. When you first visit the site, it'll ask your to enter a web address. If it finds an RSS feed for your chosen site, it'll ask you to enter your cell phone number. Should any updates happen to your chosen feed, a preview of the update will be forwarded to your phone. Removing a subscription is easy enough. "Just open the link in your text message and choose 'My Alerts' to remove any alert you are subscribed to." Furthermore, you can enter a keyword with your phone number so that you'll only be forwarded updates via SMS when they contain the keyword.
This could be extremely useful for someone closely watching a specific topic such as a stock broker. It could also become extremely annoying if you find yourself answering your phone every ten minutes to stop the latest SMS from incessantly vibrating in your pocket. Our advice: use wisely.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project just posted its findings on teens and the web, and it seems to have uncovered much of what we already know about the internet. Here's a bullet point summary of the major findings. With each point, we'll try to name site/service who's users would stereotypically match.
AIM: 93% of American teens (ages 12-17) use the web. Many of them use the web to interact with others.
YouTube: 64% of online teens create online content, up from 57% in 2004.
Livejournal (bad poetry): 39% of online teens share their artistic creations online.
MySpace: 27% of online teens keep a personal web page.
LOLcats?: 26% of online teens "remix" content they find online.
WoW: 49% of online teens play games online.
America: Teens are more likely to own desktop computers over any other type of "gadget." This one was almost surprising.
Facebook: Social network communicators are more "intense" communicators.
Facebook: Girls eclipse boys in photo posting.
Nintendo Wii: 31% of teens spend time time with friends outside of school every day.
High School: 34% of teens spend time with friends outside of school several times a week
To be honest, a lot of this is pretty obvious. We shouldn't need a study to find out chat rooms suck, teens tend to own computers, and girls are more likely than guys to post photos online. Regardless, there's a lot more information where that came from, so if you'd like to learn more about the online habits of today's teenagers, make sure to check out the full study.
Thirteen year old Morgan is a texting addict who's dedication and determination led her to a stack of green. This teen entered the recent LG National Texting contest with 200 other competitors and their cheering onlookers who gathered in Manhattan's Roseland Ballroom for their chance to be crowned texting champion.
The dream came true for Morgan. She typed in the winning word "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" from Mary Poppins in 15 seconds. The 8,000 text messages per month that she usually sends were great practice and netted her the crown along with a $25,000 cash prize to "buy lots of clothes".
Does 8,000 seem a little high to you? That's an average 266 messages a day! We only hope she's on an unlimited SMS plan or most of that $25k will end up in the hands of a mobile provider.
Smartphone users jealous of the slick SMS threading that Treos have can turn that frown upside down. TxtMan is a new donationware app that brings SMS threading to Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphones. It's a pretty customizable app, offering a plethora of message layout options and your choice in ringtones and vibration alerts. It can also be set to run at your phone's startup to make sure it catches all of your SMS messages, but therein lies one catch: I may be new to the Smartphone platform, but I've seen some 3rd party apps such as Agenda One that seem to work in tandem with the phone's default PIM databases, whereas TxtMan needs to take over your SMS duties. You either send, receive and store SMSes in TxtMan, or you do it in WinMo5's default Messaging app - it's one or the other. The last catch I've found so far is that it requires Microsoft's bulky .Net Compact Framework 2.0, though that can be installed on an external storage card (it needs a surprising ~5MB of space) if you're limited on phone storage space.
Still, after tinkering for a bit, I think I'm sold, and I donated to Ben Hirashima, TxtMan's developer. I prefer the threaded SMS view, and TxtMan is pretty zippy on my Samsung BlackJack.
Nimbuzz is a utility for your mobile phone to chat and send free text messages to contacts. The tool works with both MSN and Google Talk. There are no limits of characters for the texting feature of Nimbuzz, and messages can be sent to desktops as well with the Nimbuzz desktop application. The Nimbuzz chat feature enables users to chat mobile to mobile or mobile to PC with MSN or Google Talk contacts. In order for Chat and Text to work, both parties must have the Nimbuzz application installed on their mobile devices.
Remember making new friends without the help of the Internet? Thanks to a new service called rmbrMe, you can convert those messy real life acquaintances into easily manageable social networking formats! rmbrMe lets you send a code via text message that will link people you just met to your profiles on Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, or whatever other networks you choose. 
