By David Chartier | Published: December 30, 2008 – 11:40AM CT

Ubiquitous microblogging service Twitter is once again making political news today with the announcement that the Consulate General of Israel in New York will hold a “Citizen’s Press Conference” today. David Saranga, Consul of Media and Public Affairs, will be taking questions about the situation in Israel and Gaza via Twitter, and anything that requires more than Twitter’s 140 SMS-friendly characters will be posted to the Israel Consulate’s blog.The conference is set to run from 1-3pm EST, but the consulate’s Twitter account, twitter.com/IsraelConsulate, is already active and responding to questions.

If you aren’t familiar with how this “tweet and reply” system works, here’s a quick primer: On Twitter, users can direct public “tweets” (basic Twitter posts that are 140 characters or less) to other users by prefixing the message with an @ symbol and a username.

For example, if you want to ask the Israel Consulate a question for today’s conference, either log in or sign up and type a message like “@IsraelConsulate Can bombs really root out Hamas?” This will allow the people running the Consulate’s account to see your question and, ideally, reply back to you with a public message that (barring any custom preferences) all other users can see.

A screenshot of the Israel Consulate’s Twitter page with tweets and replies. Click for a larger view

Twitter can be used with a desktop browser, mobile applications, or even via SMS, allowing virtually anyone with some kind of an Internet-connect device to participate and as questions at this “Citizen Press Conference.”

A few drawbacks to this approach, however, could cause trouble for the Israel Consulate and Twitter’s participants. Opening the doors this wide to a global audience could very well overwhelm the Consulate’s team with question, many of which will undoubtedly be duplicates. Twitter’s focus on absolute simplicity may also make some Q&A conversations difficult to follow, as one of the most useful tools that could visualize threaded conversations, Quotably, has closed up shop; Twitter offers no comparable alternative.

Plus, Twitter offers a preference to only display replies to users that you follow, which will effectively hide any replies that @IsraelConsulate sends to most participants. Depending on the Twitter circle that you choose to follow, disabling this preference could result in a flood of @replies that drown out the Consulate’s conference.

Still, the adoption of Twitter for larger social and political exchanges will only be a boon for the service, even if this latest experiment encounters some turbulence. Other, more ambitious experiments, such as the dual-party presidential debate conducted over Twitter, may have had more trouble, but we have seen everything from C-SPAN, CNN, Shaquille O’Neill, school classrooms, Comcast, JetBlue, and even law enforcement agencies adopt the service to communicate in more personal, professional, and accessible ways with audiences.

by Robin Wauters on October 31, 2008

We don’t see it in our Gmail settings (yet), but Webmonkey reports that Gmail Labs has added a very useful opt-in feature for sending text / SMS messages to mobile phones using the built-in Chat functionality.

Turning the option on in your Gmail account settings apparently enables you to send an SMS as soon as you start typing a phone number into Chat’s search box. When you enter new phone numbers, it will save the digits in your contact entries as well. This means that when contacts go offline, the chat window will give you the option to switch to SMS.

Our invitation for a live demo was lost in the mail, but Webmonkey has been given a demonstration of the experimental feature by Gmail product manager Keith Coleman and adds:

The first time you send a text message, it will appear on the person’s phone as coming from a number in the 406 area code. Google has made several thousands of these numbers available for Gmail users, and once a number is associated with your account, all of the text messages you send through Gmail will come from that number.

The 406 number works both ways, so your friend can reply to you via text message. Also, your friend can save that number in their phone as belonging to you, and they can even use it to initiate new chats with you.

We haven’t been able to try this out ourselves yet, but Google does list the text messaging feature on its ‘What’s new in Gmail Labs‘ page (only for US phones, for now).

This is probably one of the first results we’re seeing from Google’s acquisition of GrandCentral (dating back to June 2007 already).

No official word yet on the Gmail blog (the GrandCentral blog has been silent since last April), but we suspect an announcement and general roll-out to follow soon.

(Image credit: monkey_bites)

By Jacqui Cheng | Published: October 20, 2008 – 01:14PM CT

It turns out that the typical American family is also the most networked, according to a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. In addition to having 1.34 children, a dog, and a white picket fence, the American nuclear family is more likely to have cell phones, computers, and a broadband connection compared to other households.

Pew, which surveyed 2,252 adults in the US between December and January of this year, found that over 90 percent of married-with-children households have at least one cell phone, in addition to one computer. This is compared to only 84 percent of all adults owning one cell phone, and 77 percent owning one computer. 58 percent of these nuclear families have two or more desktop or laptop computers, in fact, and 89 percent own multiple cell phones (47 percent own three or more).

Pew noted that while some fear that technology is ruining families, the survey found that “couples use their phones to connect and coordinate their lives, especially if they have children at home.” Spouses, parents, and kids all manage to stay connected by cell phones and the ‘Net during the day when they are separated, and are more likely to share moments with other family members online. (@daughter: OMG school was so lame today!) At least a quarter of survey respondents said that their families today feel closer than their families when they were growing up, thanks to the Internet and cell phones. 60 percent said that new technology has not affected family closeness.

At the same time, there are some elements of the “traditional” American family that appear to be falling by the wayside—due, in part, to technology. Pew said that households with the most technology are more likely to be dual-income households, which also means that they work longer hours and use the Internet more. “Those with multiple communication devices are somewhat less likely to eat dinner with other household members and somewhat less likely to report high levels of satisfaction with their family and leisure time than are families with lower levels of technology ownership,” wrote Pew.

The firm’s findings come just a few weeks after AT&T released survey results saying that families are using SMS to communicate with each other more than ever before. 76 percent of parents felt that their children were more likely to keep them abreast of their activities through text messaging, while 73 percent of parents said that their kids were more likely to respond to a text compared to other communication methods. Spouses and romantic partners were also found to be texting more, with 68 percent using SMS to send love notes to each other.

One thing is clear from both of these surveys. Technology may be keeping us busier than ever, but you can’t beat picking up the phone or sending a quick e-mail to your loved ones just to say “hi.”

By Jacqui Cheng | Published: October 09, 2008 – 05:05PM CT

Hate on the kiddies and their SMS speak all you want, but text messaging is taking off among the masses. AT&T has released data from two studies it recently commissioned, showing that both families and romantic partners are using SMS more and more to communicate. Parents think texting with their kids makes them cool, while lovestruck texters are finding themselves using SMS to flirt and send romantic notes.

We’ll start with the families. AT&T conducted 1,048 online interviews with parents and 1,022 online interviews with children and young adults to get a feel for their usage patterns. They found that 76 percent of parents feel that their children are more likely to keep them abreast of their activities through text messaging than other methods. 73 percent said that their kids were more likely to respond to a text message than other methods of communication, and a full half of parents feel that texting with their kids makes them “cool.”

Kids, of course, love text messaging. Large majorities feel that it’s easier to communicate with friends this way and keep their parents up-to-date on their activities (84 percent and 82 percent, respectively). 48 percent of kids said that texting was a better use of their time than calling. I’ll be honest: I wish my parents would text me too.

“Texting is sometimes the easiest way to keep track of my kids,” stated mother Janet Sturley. “They’re so much more likely to respond quickly to a text message, and it’s the most convenient and inexpensive way to keep tabs on them. I’ve become extremely fluent in the language of text.”

The same apparently applies when it comes to relationships. AT&T surveyed a thousand adults between the ages of 18 and 55 and found that 68 percent had sent a “love note” via text message. Another 67 percent used SMS to flirt, while 52 percent said that “thinking of you” was the most common text message to receive from a spouse. The very early stages of dating benefited from text messaging too, with just over a quarter of respondents saying that they’d be more willing to accept a first date if they exchanged texts first, and over half of the group had shown a text from a suitor to someone else in order to get their interpretation of the message. That’s apparently not a bad move, since 84 percent said that text messages could be misunderstood by a date or suitor.

Of course, AT&T has a commercial motive to publish these results, since the company peddles text messaging plans with all of its cellular voice packages. However, with an increasing number of services using SMS, it’s no surprise that people are texting more, including to the ones they love.

Further reading:

• Found via mocoNews: Text Messages Increasingly Used By Families And By Those Who Date: Report

In the fourth quarter of 2007, American cellphone subscribers for the first time sent text messages more than they phoned, according to Nielsen Mobile. Since then, the average subscriber’s volume of text messages has shot upward by 64 percent, while the average number of calls has dropped slightly.

Nicholas Covey, director of insights for Nielsen Mobile, attributed the spike in messaging to the spread of QWERTY-style keypads, whose users send 54 percent more text messages than those with ordinary keypads. He also said that phone companies had encouraged users to text by offering large or unlimited text-messaging bundles.

Teenagers ages 13 to 17 are by far the most prolific texters, sending or receiving 1,742 messages a month, according to Nielsen Mobile. By contrast, 18-to-24-year-olds average 790 messages. A separate study of teenagers with cellphones by Harris Interactive found that 42 percent of them claim that they can write text messages while blindfolded.

Twitter: it’s an extremely simple and social microblogging tool where users can post 140 characters at a time about what’s going on or in reply to someone else. While that might not sound ridiculous on its face, the service is sometimes written off as nothing more than a silly hobby or fad—narcissism masquerading as a “what I had for lunch today” diary.

But people also use Twitter for much more interesting things, and we’d like to be your tour guide through the less-explored portions of the Twittersphere (yep, another “sphere” for you to be aware of). Welcome to Twitter’s more interesting, more useful, and more innovative side.

read more…

Twitter: it’s an extremely simple and social microblogging tool where users can post 140 characters at a time about what’s going on or in reply to someone else. While that might not sound ridiculous on its face, the service is sometimes written off as nothing more than a silly hobby or fad—narcissism masquerading as a “what I had for lunch today” diary.

But people also use Twitter for much more interesting things, and we’d like to be your tour guide through the less-explored portions of the Twittersphere (yep, another “sphere” for you to be aware of). Welcome to Twitter’s more interesting, more useful, and more innovative side.

read more…

DENVER — The musician will.i.am, who produced the hit video “Yes We Can” about Senator Barack Obama, calls the Democratic gathering here the first “batonical” convention.

That’s not botanical, as in gardens, but batonical, as in baton and the passing of. The Democratic National Convention is relying heavily on new media to pass on enormous amounts of information about Mr. Obama to friends inside the hall and out, who will in turn pass it to more friends, mostly by way of YouTube, the superhighway’s video conveyor belt, which did not exist during the 2004 conventions….

…This convention was ushered in with a text message last weekend to millions of supporters telling them that Mr. Obama had picked Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. as his running mate. It is to close with another giant texting session Thursday night at Invesco Field, in which the 75,000 people in the stands will be asked to send text messages to friends and family about their experience. Plans for a large phone bank have been downsized, if not scrapped, because of fears it could crash the phone network; besides, some people are uncomfortable cold-calling strangers.

read more…