IT Trends :: Thursday, April 13, 2006

Opinion

MySpace Is, In Fact, Addictive

By Terry Calhoun

Beware. What little free time you might have could easily get sucked up inside of MySpace. What else is new? Well, this is a first-hand report.

On February 14, 2006, I bit the bullet and subscribed to MySpace. I now have eleven friends! No, make that twelve. Even cooler, one of them has been dead since 2002. Really, I spoke with him in a hotel restaurant the night before he had his fatal stroke, yet he lives on in MySpace.

MySpace needs to grow up a little in order to be user friendly for Boomers. It’s understandable that much of its content and structure is aimed at younger people, but there is potential there for all ages. It needs, for example, to permit me to not display my Zodiac sign – it d'es this automatically when I give it my birth date, which is required. I sure wish I could toggle that nonsense off.

My dead MySpace friend is “Steady” Ed Headrick, the inventor of the modern Frisbeeā„¢ and the grandfather of the most popular little-known sport, disc golf. You might have seen the episode of Believe It Or Not where Ed’s widow poured his ashes into molten plastic so that they could be molded into a series of expensive flying discs. I own two. One is a putter with which I made 500 putts with no misses and then retired. The other is a driver, which has been on the wall in my office since I got it. “Steady” Ed has 467 MySpace friends...

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New Technology

PayPal to Allow Text Message Payments

No, not payments for the outrageous fees your service might be charging you, but payments to purchase things like DVDs and other items online through a code text-messaged to PayPal...

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Now Starring on the Internet: YouTube.com

How can something so outrageous, and that violates copyright so frequently, be considered by big-money movie studies to be a 'good corporate citizen?' If you thought MySpace was startling, YouTube will really get you!...

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Macalester's Own Version of iTunes?

Macalester College considered signing up for iTunes U. However, some say a small liberal arts school is not the right place for such a technological teaching tool. Apple Corporation has offered Macalester the chance to pilot its new file-sharing program…

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Headphones Go USB

Hamilton Electronics’ USB-compliant line of headphones eliminates the need for a sound card or any additional software…

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Campus Technology 2006
in Boston, July 31-August 3, 2006

TDWI World Conference
in Chicago, May 14-19, 2006

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