Tag: .uk
OPINION: Why I'm not going back to using Twitter with SMS
I’m quite proud to say that I’m old-skool when it comes to Twitter – I’ve been signed up since April 2007. My first tweet? “Watching TV, waiting for my roommate to finish dinner, and then going out drinking.”
Back then I used the SMS system with Twitter. I’d SMS my updates to a central number, and the service would send them back to me by text. When you’re only following a few people, that’s fine. You don’t end up abusing your free text allowance.
But then Twitter, citing financial reasons, withdrew the SMS service in August 2008. Overnight, the gentle buzz from my phone getting Tweets two or three times a day just stopped. I stopped having a reminder to Tweet. As a result, I got a bit lazy and there’d be weeks between my Tweets.
But then something changed. I managed to slip over the tipping point of following enough people saying enough things that it was worth checking it daily, so it found its way onto my bookmarks bar of my browser and that got me back off the edge and tweeting again.
Nowadays I’m following 350-odd people, and I get about three or four updates a minute. That’s fine at my PC – running Twhirl means I can just let those conversations quietly purr away in the background. I’ve also got a client for my S60 phone – Twibble – which sorts me out on the go.
A company called Twe2 launched this week that lets European users get alerts on their phone, in exchange for an ad at the end of the Tweet. Yay! I can get my SMS Tweets back! But I don’t want it.
The idea of having three to four texts coming in to my phone every minute seems ludicrous. The way I use Twitter now – it’s there when I need it, and I can ignore it when I want – is perfect. I get any @replies and DMs emailed to me, and I check my email a billion times a day so I don’t miss them. I just don’t need SMS.
Do you agree? Or are you gagging to get SMS tweets back? Share your opinion in the comments.
O2 sells 1 million iPhones in the UK
O2 has just released a statement on its Digital News Centre announcing that more than a million iPhones have now been sold in the UK. I can attest to that personally, I was in a pub the other day, and the three other table inhabitants ALL had iPhones. I would have felt left out if I didn’t love my N95 so much.
The company’s also announced that it’s signed up 1.1 million new customers over the last year, with 390,000 of those joining O2 between Oct and Dec 08. That’s a lot. Good work, O2.
UK set to overtake Japan as the CENTRE of the gaming UNIVERSE this year
Poor old Japan is about to fall behind the UK in the global video game charts, with us lot finally spending more of our remaining cash on gaming than the Japanese – making the UK second only to the USA in how much cash we blow on various Halos and Mario Karts.
Figures released by UK sales-counter Chart-Track show that for the first five weeks of 2009 sales of games were up 37% in the UK, as kids spent their Christmas money on novelty Wii games like never before…
iTunes UK gets a high definition boost: new TV shows arrive
iTunes stores outside the US have always lagged behind when it comes to new features, but Apple has gradually been adding new video content to the UK store.
Last week’s moderately big news was that high definition episodes of Lost series 5 have made it into the iTunes store. Now, eagle-eyed fans have discovered a range of other titles that have “suddenly hit” the store…
The UK's identity card scheme has one fatal flaw – no one's bought any card READERS yet
EDITOR’S NOTE: Please read this update while playing the theme tune from Benny Hill in the background.
The UK government may well be pushing ahead with its scheme to start rolling out ID cards to airport staff and other key workers in the security sector, but there’s one rather sizeable problem – the card readers. There aren’t any.
The government apparently failed to budget for the thousands upon thousands of card readers that…
Woolworths could live on… online
Break out the cheap party poppers and raise a “Worth It” champagne glass to the news that Woolworths may resurrect itself online.
While its recent demise has seen the shop space sold off, the Shop Direct Group has taken on the company and could be about to turn it into an online retailer.
The old Woolworths already offered online purchasing, but the new scheme would see it more able to compete with the likes of Amazon which sells goods exclusively online…
Sky offers Sky+HD box for under fifty quid as satellite giant pushes high definition
Sky has decided that it’s time to get really aggressive when it comes to high definition in the UK, and to that end has slashed the price of its Sky+HD box to just £49. That’s a third of the price it was early last year (£150) and is the satellite broadcaster’s hope of getting many more subscribers hooked on pay-for-HD.
In fact, thanks to a lot of enticing marketing and the lure of a variety of sports, films and other content in high definition, Sky has just had its best quarter — in the three months to the end of December, 188,000 people signed up for high-def services, taking the total number of subscribers to nearly 800,000…
Internet comes of age – social networks more popular than porn sites in the UK
Times were, back in the old days when the internet was mainly for “hobbyists,” easy access to vast reserves of pornography was the big seller of PCs and, you might argue, was instrumental in the uptake of broadband. It was in my house, at least. But not any more.
Web traffic counter Hitwise reckons traffic to social networking sites out-stripped that of porn providers for the first time in the UK late last year. Hitwise says it’s all women’s fault, with 55% of social net traffic coming from lady browsers uploading photos of cats to Facebook, and, as a result, they’re spending…
Virgin's P2P music service scrapped amidst labels' anti-piracy concerns
A new legal peer-to-peer music sharing service due to be launched by Virgin Media within the next couple of months has been put on hold indefinitely due to last minute whining by a few well-known record labels, according to a report in The Register.
“Virgin Music Unlimited” would have allowed Virgin Media’s broadband subscribers to share music and keep tracks while the company aimed to make money from these P2P users and presumably pass some of that revenue back to the record labels…
That 'friend' of yours who never buys music is safe – UK will not disconnect web access of music pirates
Hooray! The tedious and long-running saga of the UK possibly adopting the ‘three strikes’ system for disconnecting the internet access of music pirates has been dumped, with David Lammy, the Intellectual Property Minister, today saying there are “no plans” to introduce such a scheme.
Last year, everyone thought the French Technique of ordering ISPs to disconnect the harder-core of music pirates was the way to go, with the UK apparently considering adopting the idea.
However, Lammy has just told The Times that the government..
