Andre

Doing a recap of the past week regarding my Twitter experience, I've concluded that this service could be a great travel reporting tool if you keep using the same phone but it totally fails when you don't do so.

• The first half of the week I spent in China, so I registered my other mobile card with Twitter before going there. It worked just fine.
• Returning to Hong Kong, I initially forgot to update Twitter about my mobile card changes so I couldn't post updates. Lucky me, there's always either a coffee shop with Internet access or a wireless network around so I switched from there.
• Two days later, I went to Macau and again totally forgot to update my Twitter records when switching mobile cards so I lost a great opportunity to comment on many things I encountered during my trip.

Twittering from a mobile phone is a great tool to keep track of one's adventures and publish it in real-time to the world but if I can't remember to update my Twitter settings, it's useless. It's often necessary to switch mobile cards: some cards won't do roaming, the fees might be too high so a local rechargeable card would be better...

Trendy Web sites come and go, in most cases similar to seasonal fashion filling stores only to be replaced a short time later. In a same way as some people dare to wear clothes beyond the original season, some Web sites make it through while others just disappear; some users just keep using them because they like it.

Another kind of Web sites started out with much hype through word of mouth (in the online world, that would be instant messaging and annoying emails) and thus attract many subscriptions in the early stage. However, such sites usually are less than well performing at first, be it cumbersome handling methods, lack of services and features, etc...

A reason not to become a nudist is the Internet. Browsing around for natural beaches easily leads to web sites making their living from photos displaying naked people enjoying a day at the beach, nude. I doubt they all agreed on being part of the Web; in particular the parents with their children.

I'm not discussing any legality issues here, afterall anyone can go to a nudist beach and see for him-/herself and people do take their souvenir snapshots. It's just a reason not to become a nudist if one doesn't want to end up involuntary on the Web.

With the ever-growing list of online social networks, invitations to join the latest "coolest" network flood my inbox daily. I'm not a fan of such sites, at least not the "friends" part of it. It's a different matter with the "business" networks. Too much hype and wrong or plain fake importance is given to sites like MySpace. People were aware of and met other people before such sites existed and with all personal information users put online about themselves and others, such sites recently began to become rather a problem than a source of opportunities for some.

The ever-growing list of new sites requires a huge amount of time just to keep own profile pages updated and track friends' activities. With new features added to every site nearly weekly, the risk is high to miss out on the latest extension and thus become "lame" in the view of others.

What bothers me most is the stream of invitations by total strangers to add them to my own friends' list despite me not even having a common language with some of them. What's the use? Many users are "friend hunting", basically just artificially boosting their friends' list into the hundreds to show off what cool, handsome, exotic, strange, foreign... people they "know".

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I know it's kinda late to announce something supposed to be today but for those timezones not yet going to sleep soon, here it is: today is "Blog Action Day". If it wouldn't have been for other blogs writing about it, I wouldn't have known there is such a thing.

The purpose of this action is to get attention to a certain topic; to be achieved when thousands of blogs publish posts about and discuss the same issue on the same day.