Tim also adds:

"I think that ATT has been offering this for a few months. According to their web page, I am able to send messages to other carrier phones just by using the 10 digit number. The ATT back end routes it as an email message to the users phone."

Thanks for the heads-up on this, Tim. FYI to everyone else, I'm adding Tim's book Bringing Children and the Internet Together to the Shifted Reading List. Have you noticed how the section of books I want to read keeps growing but the section of titles I've read hasn't? Sigh.

Check out Tim's blog, too, as there are lots of interesting links on it.

I wanted to make sure everyone saw Russell's comment on yesterday's post about 30 billion text messages sent each month in Europe:

"When I first arrived here in Madrid, Spain a couple years ago I was surprised that the first thing my coworker did was take me out to buy a mobile phone. Every man woman and child here has one so it's pretty much a necessity. In 10 minutes I had my simple Nokia phone and number for $60 with no contract (I can recharge it once I use my pre-pay minutes at almost any ATM machine) and he had SMSed me a bunch of phone numbers from the office and I was ready to go.

Then he taught me how to send messages myself... I was bewildered at first... Why? But then I started receiving my first messages and the answer was clear. What 30 billion messages a month mean in real terms is this: it's an integrated part of every person's life here. Any small question that you may want to ask someone while not in the same room gets sent via SMS. "Where's lunch today?" "I'll be late" "What's the address again?" etc. I send 2 or 3 a day at a minimum. You see people sending messages constantly - in the Metro, in restaurants, in meetings, on the street... wherever.

Because the phones are so cheap to buy and maintain, every kid has one. And the kids have their own abbreviations for common words so they don't have to type as much... it's their own language (that has been, of course, picked up by the phone companies for their marketing campaigns...). I think it'll be interesting to see what happens in the U.S. now that we'll have true SMS too. I wonder if anyone's come up with a SMS->Weblog interface yet. (Though at 160 character maximum the posts might be a bit short...)"

You didn't believe me, did you? I also wanted to let Russell know that some folks are indeed using SMS to post to their blogs. Al has been experimenting with this using his i-mode phone, and there's another blog using SMS for posting but I can't find it at the moment. And someone just posted the links yesterday. Drat. Bad brain, bad. Anyone know which one it is or know of others? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

I like Masukomi's new design, too. [via Scripting News] Hopefully I'll get around to designing my own Radio template in another month or so. This particular post caught my eye:

"Almost 1/4 of US workers telecommute, says study [MacCentral]

Personally I find it hard to believe that that number is even remotely accurate. I don't know a single person who telecommutes. I know they exist, but I never encounter them and every time I have been offered a contract position i have had to work on the premisis even though doing so walk almost always a waste of time, gas, and effeciance. Sure there are some freelance coders and designers out there... but 24%? No way do 1 in 4 people out there telecommute. If they did we woudln't have these massive traffic jams every morning at 8 in every american city with one person in each car heading to work."

I find this difficult to believe, too. Not in the future, but in the now. I talk a lot about how libraries need to become more portable in order to serve the Net Gens in their world, but this is another group of people we need to keep in mind as we design our remote services. Just because they're working at home doesn't mean they can drop whatever they're doing and take a drive over to the library to use our resources. In fact, these are the folks who embrace instant messaging because they can just dash off a note or a question to anyone around the world. Except their local library. Hopefully that will change.