Young Cell Users Rack Up Debt, One Dime Message at a Time

“Chaz Albert, a freshman at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., is a passionate ‘texter,’ someone who loves to send and receive pithy text messages via cellphone. He does it at home, at school and at work. He often prefers texting over talking on his cellphone.

Last month, though, Mr. Albert's habit caught up with him. Only $80 of his $400 cellphone charges were his father's, and most of his own, he said, were for text-messaging….

Karina Gonzalez, a sophomore at Newtown High School in Queens and a regular sender of instant messages by computer, had her phone confiscated by her mother after her text messages resulted in a $150 phone bill, triple the usual amount. ‘I cried,’ she said. ‘I felt like I lost a piece of me. You can send a million instant messages a day, and it won't cost you anything. If you send one text message, it can cost you like a phone call.’

Her friend Denise Lucero, 15, who has never owned a cellphone, surreptitiously used her father's phone for a while, she said, to text-message her friends. One month, those messages pushed his bill to $300.

Then her father started to hide his phone: on top of the refrigerator, under the sofa, behind the television set, in his pillow.

Both girls said their inability to text message made them feel left out of the action. ‘It's about feeling part of a little group with cellphones,’ Denise said. ‘You want to learn what is going on.’…

Teenagers are clearly driving the trend. ‘Younger people do text messaging a lot more than older folks,’ said Mr. Nogee of Instat. ‘They're more used to it from instant messaging on the computer, from growing up with it. Older people would rather call up and talk.’…

Verizon Wireless, with 42 million customers, reported a fivefold increase in the number of text messages sent and received monthly, to almost one billion in the fall from 200 million in early 2003. A Verizon spokesman, Howard Waterman, said that people aged 16 to 24 represented the "’eading customer segment.’ ” [New York Times]

Emphasis above is mine, because I really wonder how well are we serving these kids. If they’re going to spend the money on text messages because it’s their preferred method of communicaiton, shouldn’t libraries communicate that way, too?

New Gender Roles in Digital World

“In a couple of cases, women are embracing new technologies faster than men.

‘The good news is that women are closing the gap,’ said Genevive Bell, a cultural anthropologist who works for chipmaker Intel. Overall, women are using technology nearly as often as men, Bell said, but they are using it differently.

In a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by Intel, women were more enthusiastic about Wi-Fi than men, and they said they planned to use it in different ways….

Women and men want wireless access in airports, but more women than men said they want wireless Internet access in their doctors' offices and at salons….

Bell said women tend to use technology in ways that make busy days more manageable, which is why cell phones, laptops and wireless Internet access are popular, she said….

‘Women tend to have more interest in communicating, so it makes sense that they would tend to be heavier users of mobile communications features such as text messaging,’ Enpocket President Mike Baker said.” [SignOnSanDiego, via textually.org]

These findings aren’t really new; rather, they’re just confirmation of an ongoing trend. Women also use libraries more than men do, so you have to ask yourself if we’re doing enough to help them use library “technology in ways that make busy days more manageable.” My answer is no, we’re not, and we need to change this. Provide Wi-Fi for these women when they are in the library, educate them about RSS to help make their information flow more manageable, send them text alerts from the catalog and the reference desk, provide better virtual reference services so we’re wherever they are when they need us. There’s so much more we could do.

On the Scalability of Feeds & Aggregators

“The increase in the number of feeds will leave many users frustrated, as there is a limit to the number feeds one can scan and read. Current numbers suggest that readers can handle  150-200 feeds without too much stress.  But users will want to read more and more as new interesting feeds become available and they run into the limitations of the metaphor of  current aggregator applications. The current central abstract of aggregators is that of a feed, and there is a limit to how many individual feeds one can actually handle. Aggregators will need to find ways in which the users can be subscribed to a select set of feeds because they want to read everything that comes from these feeds, but also subscribe to a much larger set of publishers for which the feed abstraction may not be the right metaphor. Aggregation, fusion and selection at the information item level instead of at the feed level seems to be a first abstractions to investigation. ” [All Things Distributed, via del.icio.us/rss]

I’m seeing this myself, as I’m starting to hit a wall at around 250 feeds. The second generation of aggregators (that should also include more advanced authentication) can’t come fast enough.

I look forward to reading Werner Vogel’s full analysis on this issue, which of course means I have to add his feed to my aggregator. Wait a minute….

Best. Story. About. Copyright. Ever. No public, no domain. [ via Boing Boing]