nonsmokingarea.com

so, after all the buzz during past weeks, I finally signed-up for a Twitter-account (in case you’re of the hype-resistant type, Twitter is basically free, public group-SMS + Web 2.0-features, a mixture between blog & IM). turns out it is one of few SMS-based services from the United States that actually works on European (or at least Austrian) networks/contracts. plus its really fun to use… subscribe to (or “follow”) some of the heavy-users and your phone won’t be quiet anymore but seriously, this is a great tool for marketing your blog/event/party/product/website/ego to hardcore-followers, with a biiig potential for annoyance

interested? follow me on Twitter!

update: posting to your Twitter-account from Austria requires SMSing to a german phone-number, which - depending on your contract - might be (slightly) more expensive than national SMS.

btw, don’t follow Twitter’s in other timezones and forget to turn off your mobile at night!

according to Reuters, Comverse Technology is going to demo a java-based Second Life-client for mobile-phones at the upcoming 3GSM conference in Barcelona. given CPU-power & memory on mobile platforms is scarce, Comverse’ solution relies on a proxy-PC bridging the mobile client with the SL-servers. during a demonstration, a mobile-connected avatar was able to move around the virtual world and use SL’s chat-features. Comverse is also plannung to use the same technology to connect IPTV-appliances with Second Life.

endless.com - Amazon’s speciality shopping site for handbags and shoes is the eCommerce giant’s answer to niche-site like.com - though it lacks adavanced features like visual search.

two years ago, Technorati was one of the first sites to introduce the concept of tagging (aka ‘folksonomy’, a term relating to taxonomy). a good time for an update of their tag-pages…

earlier than probably expected by most, Linden Labs released the source-code of their SecondLife client under GPLv2 today. while this move already earned a lot of praise among the community, the biggest steps towards an open virtual world - i.e. opening up backend-services and grid-servers - is yet to be done. on the downside, it remains to be seen how this affects the already shattered stability of SecondLife in the short term.

rumours of Yahoo! aquiring MyBlogLog seem to get a second rehash…bloggers seem to remain more skeptical this time

more news from Yahoo! at Read/WriteWeb: Yahoo! Go 2.0 is the company’s answer to Google’s latest mobile efforts like their mobile Gmail-app. the java-based mobile client integrates various Yahoo!-services like search, maps, mail, photos (flickr) and news.

norwegian-based Opera Software has released version 3.0 of their free, java-based mobile browser Opera Mini. while preceding versions already outperformed most phones’ preinstalled browser-applications by using server-side compression-proxies and optimizing html not intended for mobile rendering, version 3.0 goes even further with several new features:

• content-folding collapses overly long item-lists, which makes scrolling through long pages much more convenient.
• Opera Mini finally supports secure connections over https - a must-have for sensitive applications (though I doubt many homebanking-services will work on the browser at all ).
• Opera has integrated a basic RSS-reader. while this is a nice idea, it’s not really an alternative to using a single (online-) RSS-reader both mobile and on your workstation - mainly because such practice accomodates great advantages by synching read items (products like Bloglines & Google Reader work really well on Opera, btw)
• Opera Mini now supports photo-blogging to Opera Community-accounts. again, this is nice but most users probably will prefer staying with their flickr-accounts - dedicated photo-apps like Shozu are also more convenient to use.

while features like photo-blogging and RSS-reader might be not really interesting to the poweruser, the addition of content-folding & https-support alone makes version 3.0 a worthy upgrade. to install Opera Mini 3.0, just navigate to www.operamini.com on your phone or PC.

few days ago, flickr announced three major improvements on their official blog. while the Camera Finder (a very smart way of utilizing metadata generated by millions of users, paving flickr’s way becoming a vertical shopping-authority for cameras) got all the coverage a company could hope for, I’m more excited about the other two features:

• ‘Guest Pass’ allows users to share private photo-sets with persons not holding a flickr-account by generating ’secret’ (hashed) links - essential for photo-sharing with less tech-savvy folks (heck, even the nerds appreciate not having to register for another service).
• even better, m.flickr.com seems to be a serious attempt in bringing flickr to mobile devices. the stripped down site offers direct links to ‘recent activity since last login’, ‘comments you’ve made’, ‘photos from contacts’ and ‘your recent photos’ (screenshot below) - allowing quick access even on pre-UTMS devices. although Opera Mini seems to have minor problems with the CSS, it’s definitely a great addition to my regular visited mobile websites.

with todays release of a java-based client for Gmail, Google gives recognition to the uprising market of web-access via mobile- or smartphone. and while the stripped down html-version of Gmail (http://m.gmail.com) has been doing quite a good job for some time, this dedicated app will surely make mobile email more efficient. from the press-release:

• Up to five times faster access and use, thanks to automatic pre-fetching of messages
• Drastically reduced clicks and scrolling to access email
• Fewer keystrokes for reading, composing, or searching mail
• Attachments, including files and photos, viewable and automatically resized to fit the user’s phone

the java-client, which should work on most modern phones, can be downloaded by visiting gmail.com/app (unfortunately, the actual download of the package currently doesn’t work for my Nokia 6630 :().

update: the download finally worked today! Gmail has a very low footprint (the jar-package is only 112 kbytes), therefor loading quickly into memory. messages are opened with almost no delay, thanks to smart pre-fetching. another highlight are the keyboard-shortcuts for searching (’1′) and composing (’2′) new mails - simple, but a real timesafer. on the downside, the java-client currently doesn’t allow logins with accounts from Google Apps for Domains (Google’s product allowing Gmail to be used as mail-service for your personal internet domain), at least it didn’t work with mine. still, the mobile client is highly recommended and might even be a reason to switch from your current email-solution to Gmail.

while Dave Winer’s rivers of news deservedly have gathered most interest of the mobile community over the last month (see TechCrunch, OM Daily), online feed-reader Bloglines offers a mobile version of its service since quite a while. the interface is almost as stripped down (and therefor fast) as Dave’s mobile rivers, with the big advantage of not being restricted to several feeds, but rather synching with whatever sources users have syndicated in their Bloglines-account. this basically means that users dont’ have to double-read posts when using desktop- and mobile platforms, which is a great feature.

as announced yesterday, Bloglines recently integrated Skweezer into their mobile reader. Skweezer is a proxy-service for shrinking websites to fit on small screens of handhelds and mobile phones. this is a great feature, as it allows blog-readers to follow links to normal web-pages without the usual hassle. besides optimizing html, Skweezer downscales images (or disables them at all) and translates text to 13 languages. the screenshots below were taken on Opera Mini on a Nokia 6630 and show Bloglines’ startscreen (left), feedlist (middle) and a version of this blog rendered by Skweezer (right).

Om Malik’s GigaOM blog-network just launched Web Worker Daily - probably not coincidentally on yesterdays Labour Day. featuring hammer&sickle-inspired graphical design, the new blog is dedicated to nowadays’ mobile information-workforce: geographically uprooted from office-space, always-connected through wifi- and mobile broadband connections, laptop-hauling, latte-sipping cyber-beduins ;)… WWD aims to be a place for web-workers sharing their views & opinions among the decentralized business-world they are living in.

last week, during my vacation in new york city, I was walking uptown 7th avenue, when I noticed a huge landrover-billboard. having been working for austrias major outdoor-advertisment-company for a few years, I still have an eye for exceptional billboards like this, which had 3dimensional structure and the cars headlights were actually working (you can only guess that on this low-res cellphone-picture).

ok, the billboard alone wouldn’t have left me impressed ;), but after walking along, my cellphone suddenly started to rumble, indicating an incoming bluetooth-message, containing this advertorial video-clip from landrover:

besides the underlying idea of navigating a plane by a GPS-equipped-car in it’s trunk being utterly stupid funny, this is really a great example of mixing classical marketing-instruments like the billboard with modern, mobile marketing. I’m not about to buy a car in the near future, and I most probably wouldn’t by an SUV anyway. but this campaign left me with the impression of landrover being a company aware of the technological possibilities of this century. check the new york-campaign at http://www.landroverusa.com/nyc, where you can also see the hi-res video.

opera.com released version 2.0 of it’s portable mini-browser today… as a happy user of opera mini 1.x I couldn’t resist trying the new version. unfortunately, the installation-process via cellphone is not as convenient as it could be. I failed in trying to download the new 2.0-package with opera 1.x from http://mini.opera.com - the old app wasn’t able to download and execute/unpack the new .jar/.jad files (opera is a java application). as a backdoor I used the built-in nokia-browser, which worked ok.

• ability to download images, mp3’s and other media directly to the phone
• skinable themes
• advanced search functions against multiple search engines
• “speed dial” - quick bookmark access
• quick & smooth panning while browsing

although written in java, opera seems to render pages as fast as the native browser of my nokia 6630. web-pages are generally rendered quite good, however, frame-based designs, advanced css, javascript and flash are not supported.