Source: Start-ups cue up for mobile video-sharing – USATODAY.com.
Texting is so old school according to the latest trends. Video is where it is at today. Here is a quote from the referenced article:
The meteoric rise of camera-equipped smartphones has popularized personal videos. And several new companies are rushing to develop mobile apps to help consumers capture, edit and share those videos across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Think of it as serving the YouTube 2.0 generation. Not only are many users now capturing video over mobile, they are transmitting over mobile and adding the social-media aspect, too…
I know my new iPhone has enough memory to record several minutes of high quality video if I choose to (which I won’t likely choose to :) ). So video is tomorrow’s new thing and texting is now for us senior citizens I guess. I must admit that I am not a big user of Facebook and very seldom use Twitter or YouTube so I guess I am getting left behind like many other seniors. One of the reasons is that video captioning is usually the last thing to be added and without that I am stuck in the “silent movie” mode. It took ten years after closed captioning became available before it was widely available and even that took some legislation to accomplish. So, I expect it will be years before captioning is common on video sharing devices.
If you watch the news much lately you have probably discovered that there is not much that goes on today that is not captured on video by someone. No one can seem to get away this the stuff they used to and not get caught on a video. That is a good thing with this latest technology. In 1970 I worked on developing the first “picture phone”. It took about $15,000 worth of equipment and the equivalent of 300 long distance calls over copper wires to accomplish. And even at that the quality of the video was very crude compared to those from common cell phones today. As is the case with almost all technology things we have come a long way since then.
All you seniors out there had better get on board with video sharing before it too is replaced with the next “killer app”. That should occur sometime next year or so I imagine ;)
RJ's Corner 
I don’t know…at what point do we hit technology overload? The industry will keep cranking out new “must have” stuff but how much do we need? For myself, I will pick and choose what I spend my hard earned retirement money on and skip the rest. I worry about our growing addiction for this stuff. Fun and intriguing as it is, there are downsides like wasted time, less and less human contact, constant distraction from other activities, and a lot of money purchasing equipment and monthly plans to run them. I know you can list all the benefits of each and every innovation, but I just think we need to be prudent in our choices. I prefer to think that I am being “wise” and not necessarily behind the times if I choose to resist “some” of these temptations. But, maybe that’s just me.
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Thanks for the comments Jane. Yes, you are right it is up to each consumer as to pick and choose what to spend their dollars on. That is the way it should be. What is of value to one person may not be to the next.
Unfortunately, for the kids today these things are becoming status issues. If you don’t have the latest smartphone, music player, you name it, you are not “with” it (or whatever word they use now). I guess that is no different than kids having to have $100 tennis shoes in previous generations. As I have mentioned in the past I went to a very small rural high school in the early 1960s and I can’t remember anything standing out as a status issue except maybe the jocks who played basketball or the girls who were cheerleaders. Techie stuff just didn’t exist much back then. The calculator wasn’t even invented until I was almost out of college!!
But as you also say there are good things about much of this stuff. One is that much of these things reduce the carbon footprint of their users. If you are a book nerd it will no longer be required to cut down a forest to provide you with reading things. If you are into music no more piles of plastic that will end up in landfills. If you are deaf you are now able to stay in contact with your loved ones via texting when you are away from the house. That was a major step forward for me.
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I am finally used to texting instead of actually speaking to most people, but I draw the line at video “texting.” I’ll leave that for the kids whose whole world is visual. Give technology another few decades or so and there will be no need for libraries. Those of us who can read the printed word will be gone.
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Yeah Bob, you and me are in the same boat. Of course I exclusively use texting for communication when away from home (no voice calling). Given that I couldn’t even text ten years ago I very much appreciate it now. But I think you are getting pretty optimistic when you think libraries will be around for another twenty years (ha). Given that they are publicly funded I wouldn’t give them more than one decade to be totally replaced by virtual libraries.
The biggest problem right now is that only about 80% of the U.S. households have internet connections. If that number were, like it is in Europe and elsewhere, much higher their demise would come even sooner.
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