My Other Other Blog

So I've gone a couple weeks back into the grind after my mini vacation earlier this month. The weather started to get warm and then right when spring hit, back to winter. That's okay though, warm weather will prevail and my struggle against the yard will continue again.

In my free time though, I have been focusing some of my attention to a new gig. I decided a long time ago that putting Android stuff in my blog is great, but making it a regular habit makes this less a journal and more of some kind of semi tech blog that's not a tech blog. So to keep things cohesive, I'm starting to write now at a small blog called Android Activist. I'm writing with a great bunch of writers and pundits. I just hope I can keep up. I feel this will help get me out of several ruts and I can go back to being creative.

Android Activist was started by an evangelist to the platform, Scott Brown, host at the Radio Android network that he started. I feel I can fit into place with his blog by writing an app review and an opinion piece a week about my favorite mobile platform.So now my endless ramblings about my phone will be there, and not here. So come here, but also go there.

Here I can go back to my real joy and passion, baby otters!

Gotten Away

No, nothing has gotten away from me. Janine and I decided to get away ourselves for a couple days. We loaded up the Mom car (my Ford Escape), and we headed to Virginia Beach to listen to the ocean for a couple days. There's something about that sound alone that can really recharge me.

I'm 37 now for those trying to keep count. I figure it's time for me to stop trying to count and rely on the kindness of strangers to do the math for me. I feel great though. Going to the gym and being motivated have made me very content overall. Now for pictures:

Making a run for the Mom Car on Tuesday afternoon

Immediately kicked my feet up

Soaked in the view. I love this time of year at the beach. No people!

Did I mention I got a Nook? Thanks, Janine! I've also already hacked it.

Twitter Apps?

I'm reading through my timeline the other day and I thought of an interesting course of action Twitter could take to grant them more of a foothold in people's digital lives.

Google has brilliantly created an apps platform to keep their users within their environment. I can start a typical day loading Gmail, then Maps, Docs, Voice, Reader, and so on. I can do all of this on their cloud based operating system or I can do this on  my desktop. There's so much rich integration, I'm hard pressed to go outside of that space because so much of my cloud life lives at Google.

In Twitter now there are events, location check ins, photo/video sharing, and so on. People don't just post what they're watching or eating anymore. But those tweets just kind of float into my timeline for a second and then they're gone. It's not just a space where people banter on endlessly anymore (unless you're Charlie Sheen). I would have to star every other tweet of importance or time sensitive information to prevent anything from vanishing into thin air with the passage of time.

This is where Twitter can take a page from Google's play book. One can go into Twitter, as we do now, read their friends posts, and be on their way. Then again, we could also go over to Twitter Calendar and check certain users or starred items that are happening locally or open Twitter mail to handle direct messaging. They can then use Twitter Maps to find those locations and even check in.

I can see a local venue benefiting from this for example. If I'm subscribed to a local club's calendar, or I see a band is coming to town, I can star that tweet and it's on my calender. Twitter can then feed this information to Google, Microsoft's, or Facebook's environment allowing them to push out these items to mobiles/smart phones and not require extra development.

I know the purpose of Twitter is to be a simple platform where people post messages and friends share in conversation, but since people have expanded the practicality of the service by turning it into a conversation destination or platform for political reform, it would benefit this powerful new start up to continue to expand and become even more of a destination.

Despite the numbers, that destination won't just be Facebook forever. I'm already starting to see the MySpace cycle beginning to happen with them as well. This is Twitter's time to take that valuable real estate. I can really see them change the digital word, 140 characters at a time.