Practical Technology

On Sept. 11, the first thing I did after staring at a jetliner taking out the second tower of the World Trade Center on CNN was pray. The second thing I did was to try to reach my friends and family who live in lower Manhattan: Me and about a million other people. The phone [...]

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As I watched Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg yammer on and on yesterday about Facebook’s new messaging service, which he claimed really and truly wasn’t e-mail, I kept thinking: “Yawn. It’s e-mail, and it’s bad e-mail at that.” Oh sure, it includes SMS and IM as well, but so what? Other Web-based e-mail systems, like my [...]

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I was one of those lucky people given early admission to Google Wave. There was only one problem. Once we had Google Wave, we couldn’t figure out what to do with it. And if we, a bunch of techno-geeks and technology journalists, couldn’t come up with a good use for Wave, what chance did anyone [...]

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M (Instant Messaging) clients have become invisible. We use them all the time to ‘talk’ with co-workers, chat with friends, and ‘text’ with family members on their phone. That is, I do, anyway because my IM client Pidgin, works with every almost every IM client in creation and it makes chatting with anyone, anywhere mindlessly [...]

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