Pleasure and Pain

Measuring the impact of new technology on human experience

Pleasure and Pain: photos by Whitney G. Hess

Social Feed Aggregators

May 30th, 2008 · 8 comments so far

There are hundreds, probably thousands, of powerful social networking platforms out there, with new ones launching every week. Send 140-character messages with Twitter. Save links with del.icio.us. Promote content with Digg. Share music with Last.fm. It’s endless.
Lifestreaming — recording your daily activities through text, links, photos, music and video — is quickly becoming the [...]

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Group Video Chat: A Usability Evaluation

May 23rd, 2008 · 2 comments so far

Back in January when I started this whole “getting to know the community” thing, I met a couple guys named @matto and @snook, a.k.a. Matthew Oliphant and Jonathan Snook respectively. Matthew had been following me based on David Armano’s recommendation, and I had followed him back because, well, I basically didn’t know anybody on Twitter. [...]

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Text message your order to Amazon

April 2nd, 2008 · 7 comments so far

Amazon launched a new service yesterday called TextBuyIt in which you can look up and compare product info via SMS and purchase with your pre-existing account.

I tried it out this morning by texting “Purple cow” to short code 262966 (”Amazon” on the keypad). A moment later I got a response that read:
Reply w/1 or 2 [...]

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WordPress 2.5 is released

March 20th, 2008 · 2 comments so far

Two days ago WordPress released a sneak peek of their latest version, 2.5. Redesigned from the ground up by the team at Happy Cog Studios, the WordPress Admin area now has improved navigation, organization and integration. The visual design looks pretty sleek, too.
The folks at WordPress included a lot of screenshots in their post to [...]

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My BlackBerry Wishlist

March 17th, 2008 · 2 comments so far

RIM, Mike Lazaridis, if you’re out there, listen up. Here are my recommendations for improving the BlackBerry user experience:
1- Provide the ability to “Add To Existing Contact.” I don’t want to have to copy a new phone number or e-mail address from a message and paste it into the entry in my address book. That’s [...]

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