Cubicgarden.com
Valentine’s day is always good for me, even without any sweets or cards because I can officially upgrade my mobile phone on my Orange contract. However Orange have such a poor selection of handsets available and coming up, that i’m forced to sit it out and wait for something decent to show up. The only phone I would consider is the HTC Hero Graphite but to be honest, with my HTC HD1 almost supporting Android 2.0.1. Theres very little reason to switch to a lesser capable phone model. I’m tempted with the Nexus One but even thats not a massive upgrade on the Touch HD.
Ideally I’m looking for the HTC HD2, a Motorola droid or one of the new Samsung’s with Android on board. Maybe I was slightly spoiled by having the HD1 over a year ago, and its certainly still an amazing phone, specially since Android kind of works on it.
Evan Prodromou who I finally met at FOSDEM recently, has been running a poll to find out whats the best character limit for microblogging.
For our flagship site, Identi.ca, which runs on the status.net cloud service and uses the 0.9.0 beta, we’d like to open up the discussion of what an appropriate character limit should be. Setting a site-wide limit is a community decision we’d like to leave in the community’s hands. In a conversation on Identi.ca we’ve solicited some candidate character limits that we’d like people to decide on.
- 140 is compatible with Twitter; in many languages a notice with 140 characters fits into a single SMS message*
- 280 can fit into two Twitter or SMS messages
- 300 is a fan favorite
- 420 is Facebook’s status limit and 3 Twitter tweets or SMS messages
- 500 is a little bigger
- 1000 is bigger than that
- Unlimited
- Other
So personally I think 300 is enough. 300 will hold a very long URI with room for query string values. Also having it about the size of two text messages seems about right. If you stick to ANSI only characters you usually get about 306 characters to text with (160+160 with overhead) on most phones. Unicode drops it down to 280 characters which still seems fairly close to 300. I’m also thinking 300 characters keeps things micro readable still.
The idea of a more structured microblogging with URIs as metadata in interesting but I think metadata should be inline and in plain view. Its one of the neat things about Microblogging, which would be a shame to remove. Also got to say anything more complex than the current microblogging setup would maybe cause too many problems with backwards compatible. Literate results are good, if you want metadata use blogging instead.
When I was a young boy I tried to create a roller coaster system from technical lego by turning the points upside down and slowly changing the angles of the pieces over a long piece of track. Its not obvious how it works but don’t worry it didn’t work so its not actually worth going into more detail about. So I was suprised to see K’nex launched a range of roller coasters tracks. I can’t express how cool I think this is, if I had the time and money, I would certainly get some and get it setup in a room. Instead I get to watch the endless youtube videos and wish instead.
