The iPhone now seems to have a million ways to communicate with other iPhones besides traditional SMS or calling. This is largely down to its 3G capabilities and of course, an abundance of great apps to choose from.
Blipr is a new one that has been thrown into the mix. Basically, it revolves around IM as well as sending sounds and icons to your friends. The app is completely free and here is how it works.
First, you download the app and send an invite to your friends asking them to do the same. You can do this via e-mail but you can also simply enter in your Twitter or Facebook username to send them a message that way. One your friends have the app and you’re all connected to one another you can have conversations in the form of text and sound effects. There is a vast library to choose from including musical instruments, barn yard animals and um… bodily functions.
You can also look back through your conversation history and play the attached sounds too.
This app runs in the background so you can start it up and every time you receive a Blip you’ll be notified without having to keep it running in full-mode. Check out Blipr here.
It’s no big secret that the Russian market has been a tough one to crack for major western companies. Nintendo wouldn’t even bother trying to sell the Wii there as they feel Russia just isn’t ready for social gaming and the internet seems to hold less cultural value when compared to other countries.
However, Google are trying desperately to get a firm foot-hold in the market and as such have made a bid of around the $200 million mark for the country’s most popular instant messaging service; ICQ. Skype are also rumoured to be interested in the deal.
AOL owns ICQ at the minute having bought it in 1998 for $400 million (they’ll be making a loss). It now has over 30 million users with in excess of eight million of them living in Russia. So getting such a huge chunk of the market instantly would be a huge help for Google. Or whatever Western company manages to close the deal for that matter.
Ever been on a buddy’s computer, at work or just in a very low-tech situation? Yet you still want to chat with your friends on your IM service of choice, or perhaps even chat with friends across all the popular IM services at the same time!? Well Meebo is a cool app that I found that will let you do just that.
It’s entirely web-based so it requires no download. All you have to do is go to the homepage and sign in. It will then detect your current friends on what ever service you decide to use and you can start chatting to them using the messaging window (which is basic but what do you expect?).
It supports several IM services such as MSN, GTalk, AIM and Yahoo IM. And it’s not only for instant messaging. Meebo also carries some of the popular social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace.
When you’re actually using it everything is simple and easy to use. It’s no problem at all to get to grips with – which is handy seeing as you’ll likely only use it a few times as a back-up. To summarise, a great web app that will come in handy for the power user but I fear a little outdated for most situations given the amount of mobile tech we have.
The iPhone now seems to have a million ways to communicate with other iPhones besides traditional SMS or calling. This is largely down to its 3G capabilities and of course, an abundance of great apps to choose from.
