I always loved the Apple G3 Powerbook for it's design. It has the silhouette of womens hips and is a piece of simplistic beauty. Also loved the two shades of spy-black they used for the body :-)
Here in germany I have never seen anyone using the audio feature of their instant messenger until I moved to Berlin. I now see people in the subway using WhatsApp to just send voice messages back and fourth, all the time.
So as a vim-user-kind-of-guy, I don't get it - but there seems to be a demand for this kind of communication.
Oh, right - and there is snapchat. Also don't get it. Maybe I'm just getting old...
So my girlfriend uses this quite often (she's German). She says she likes it because you can reasonably quickly "make your statement" and then wait for a reply, without the usual niceties that make a conversation longer (but you feel like you have to do). If she calls someone, she has to spend at least 10 minutes chatting. If she uses the WhatsApp voice message feature, she can send a one-minute message and be in control of her time.
Unfortunately the other person has to spend exactly one minute listening. Compare that to using the voice-to-text button of the keyboard (any Android phone AFAIK, probably iOS too). One minute to dictate, maybe another one to fix mistakes (maybe not) and 15 seconds to read. It is being polite to the recipient.
Luckily no friends of mine are using voice messages in 1-1 chats with me. I never listen to those messages in group chats.
I won't use a voice only or video only social network exactly for the same reason. Text and pictures are ok because they are quick to skim through.
Or you might be one of those who has realized the meaning behind the famous quote "What is written without effort, is read without pleasure".
Apply it in the context of social interaction, and you can immediately see that social networks are making people more antisocial. But don't worry, someone here will come and give you numerous studies citing why that isn't the case.
Anecdotally, though, you know this is true. You probably know of that old autistic person who was never diagnosed and somehow managed to live a higher quality life than the current diagnosed generation. You probably know of elders who actually had a much higher quality of life after they lost mobility because, you know, people actually stopped by to talk to them occasionally. You probably know of a cheery, older handicapped person who seemed to have had nothing going for them other than people who just genuinely cared about them - probably because the time others spent with them was not optimized for self-actualization.
There's a cultural component as well. In Japan, for instance, it's considered rude to speak too loudly in public places. So the behavior there is to send text messages to each other instead of make phone calls. This may be the same for other cultures too.
One of the original things for me is the combination of "low barrier to entry" (time between having the idea/story and getting it out there) vs. "value of entry"
These days, text based content is very low on "value" (thus why we scroll past many text heavy things on current social media) but video is very high on "barrier to entry" as most people have to record quite a few times, make sure they look good, etc.
My goal was to use audio to make it quick to get ideas/stories up there, but that people would see them as higher value (for example, I can hear the southern twang from some of my old college friends)
So I'd personally fight the word "novelty" but I might be a bit biased ;)
Skimmable. That could be really important given attention spans. Funny thing is reading your comment made me think back to radio. It was possibly second thing to be skimmable. You just keep changing channels listening a few seconds until you hit something interesting. Many people do the same thing with current stations in their car for discovery of interesting & popular content. It would seem an audio, social network could similarly be skimmable if people could tune across channels like that with ease. Would have to be fast with no wait time just like a knob.
I don't know if this does it or the author has looked into the concept. Just jumped out at me when I read your comment as I almost never listen to radio but was skimming it past, two days just to see what caught my attention.
Yep - I do this all the time, where polite (not on the bus, for example). I'm often having serious conversations over text and don't want to break the cadence, but also walking briskly downtown where typing 120 words would significantly slow me down. The glitches in voice-to-text are tolerable and worth the speed gain.
As a counterpoint of sorts: I have no idea how hard it is to type stuff in Asian languages but voice chat messages seem to be very popular in many parts of Asia (specifically China with WeChat).
Voice messages are massive everywhere in Asia though, even in places where they mostly use latin alphabets or English like Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines ...
Typing Chinese is about as easy as typing English. Voice messages are extremely popular in China, are they not as popular in the US in your experience?
most terminals support "rectangle copy" - just keep ctrl pressed and you can select a rectangle from whatever top-left starting point - easy way to copy only content without deactivating line numbering.
