I’ve been thinking lately about what it would be like to start from birth with these technologies available. How would it alter one’s view of the world?

I already depend on computers and the Internet for pretty much everything. Between wifi, my laptop, and my phone I am always connected and can have any question answered at any time. However, I missed out on this for almost the first half of my life. This gap greats a learning curve. Older adults often have difficulties understanding the concepts and logic of using a computer. Do I have similar deficiencies because I didn’t start from birth?

While all of these questions were swirling in my head, I came across this video.

It boggles my mind that a child that young could be so competent using the iPad. Admittedly she apparently has experience using an iPhone, but a 2.5 year old cognitively barely has any grasp on language and only has poorly defined concepts. At this age we are extremely limited in our mental abilities and don’t really even realize we can influence humans through communication, let alone computers. Obviously the logic of computer interaction has somehow been absorbed into her just as language and physical limitations of the world are. This is clearly something I missed out on with my late introduction to computers. It’s a first language for her and a second language for me. I’m sure the touch screen of the iPad would come much more easily to a child than a mouse and keyboard, but she definitely has an early start to using computers.

Aside from an early introduction to computers, I am also curious how the Internet shapes the lives and social interactions of slightly older children. Do 7 or 8 year olds have email? Do they ever instant message? What about facebook accounts? I’m sure these answers are obvious to parents, but as a college student I’m a bit cut off from that age group. I know my nephews had a cell phone to share when they were around 7 and 10. If they had cell phones why not Internet lives to match? I’ll have to ask next time I see them.

The first time was about a year ago with AOL mail after tweeting about it’s obsolescence when I saw someone in my class using it. They responded in a hurt tone asking why I disliked it and what was wrong with it. I had never considered the possibility that the fine employees of AOL mail could actually be out there listening. Lesson #1 in not underestimating twitter? So obviously I had to go try it for myself. I was proven wrong. It is definitely a modern email app with all the features you could expect like AIM integration and calendar functions. So we tweeted back and forth a few times and they gained my respect. I might not be a user, but I’ll still defend the app to anyone. Sounds like a good strategy on their end too. In my mind the fact that as a huge company, they reached out to a small user builds their humanity and really impressed me.

Occurrence number two was a few weeks ago and was really cool, but bordering on creepy. A friend of mine tweeted to asking if another friend and I wanted to go to a sushi restaurant (Sushi Rock). I waited a while to reply, but before I did, I noticed a mention from the restaurant itself encouraging us to “say ‘yes’” to the invitation. I always forget about the search streams available in some twitter clients, so I was pretty confused for a while. It was definitely cool for the restaurant to reach out like that and basically invite us itself. It’s never something that could happen in email or facebook, so that opportunity to interact is really one of twitter‘s strong suits.

I spent some of my day yesterday exploring Daily Booth. It’s an interesting idea and I really liked watching the live stream to see how different people use it: photo stream, blog, and crowd interaction. The one problem I ran into was that I had no way to discover the people I know on the site without individually searching all of them. Impossible. Lately twitter and facebook integration have been really great ways to solve this problem and connect users with the people they know. I tweeted that I just joined and was wishing for integration, so I could find my friends. It was more in the hope that people following me on twitter would tell me if they had an account than any expectation to hear from Daily Booth. But once again, never underestimate twitter. Later that night I got a reply from someone at Daily Booth saying that those features were in the works. What better way to keep me checking back than the news that my wish may soon be granted?

The more I think about it, these interactions with users/costumers are relatively painless for companies, but gain our trust through personal interaction and a human face for the company. In all three of these instances, my interest in the companies was raised and my loyalty increased. A few minutes to gain months or years of loyalty really shouldn’t be underestimated.

If I want to post a picture to the Internet, I can post it to Daily Booth, flickr, twitpic, or facebook. The options for images are still slightly limited. However, if I want to post a textual message instead, then my options are almost endless: tons of blogging services (Blogger, tumblr, Posterous, WordPress), more socially oriented options (facebook & myspace), and more limited options (twitter) just to name a few.

Some of these choices are obvious. Facebook, at least for me, is less professional and more friend oriented. Flickr is better suited for galleries and groups of photos as opposed to single images. If I have a lot to say I might use this blog, but otherwise twitter is quicker and easier.

As a potential social Internet user, I am now getting caught up in the overload of service options. It’s no longer just the intimidation of putting my ideas out there or writers block of coming up with interesting content, I may actually be limited by the choice of which funnels to pour my content into. APIs offer some help with this dilemma since we can now repost our message across many of these services just by clicking a few checkboxes. On the other hand, I personally get peeved when I see identical content replicated across sites in what I sometimes feel is a waste of my time and “stream” space.

Time will tell and a solution will probably sort itself  out in the next few years. I guess in the mean time, I’ll just feel guilty for underusing some services and misusing others.

After comparing the features offered to blogspot blogs and FTP blogs, I discovered that as an FTP blog owner I was missing out on many of the newer features of Blogger such as widgets, AJAX publishing, and paged posts. After this frustrating realization, I started to explore my other options. The two most obvious candidates were WordPress and Movable Type. After googling up a few reviews and comparisons of the two, it seemed that they were fairly equal in terms of features and any lacking features could be supplemented with plugins. In the end I decided on WordPress because it is open source and promised a quick, simple installation.

My main problem with the installation was my insistance on using the terminal FTP program and ignorance on how to upload directory structures. This meant that I ended up creating directories by hand, which seriously extended the upload time. However, I suspect that if I had used a GUI drag ‘n’ drop FTP program, it would have taken the promised 5 minute installation time because apart from the upload, everything was very easy.

So there I was with a brand new WordPress installation with a nice stock layout. I still had half of my winter break left, so I decided to attempt to trick out my new site. Inspiration was my main problem at this point because there are plently of good resources out there on the template structure and tags for WordPress. After discovering many amazing blogs that I could never compete with, I finally came up with this idea. My search for ideas introduced me to new design ideas like XHTML compliance, modularized design, and table-less layouts.

Although this is my first post using WordPress, at this point I am very happy with my decision in reaching this point and look forward to many future posts in this new environment.