Week 3, Things 5, 6, & 7

I have changed my font size as I am quite aware that I may be causing eye strain with the tiny print. Sorry about that.

Anyway, I've embarked on this, the second week of the Maryland 23 Things. I visited Flickr, created an account, learned that mashups have nothing to do with potatoes, and even researched the iPhone in order to blog about technology. I wasn't even this productive when I was in school, but then again, my school never offered me a Wii.

As far as Flickr goes, ennnnghhh. I have used another photo hosting site, Photobucket (http://www.photobucket.com), which, in my opinion, is vastly superior to Flickr.

First of all, Flickr is complicated. On the top of the page are several drop-down menus comprised of even more options. There is "Home." Simple enough. But then they start calling me out: the next one is labeled "You." Uh oh. ME? Your Photos. Your Sets. Your Archives. Your Tags. Your Maps (I make maps now?) Your Favorites. And then: Recent Activity. Thanks for monitoring me, Flickr. creeps. The menu then goes on to tell me to Organize, Contact, Group, and Explore.

Photobucket does no such thing. After the brain melt that is Flickr, I feel like calling up Photobucket just to tell them how much I love them. I have a lot of experience with computers, being young and growing up with one in the house, and in my opinion, Flickr is a pretty complicated interface for people who don't have that same amount of experience. I think Photobucket is a much simpler site.

That being said, Flickr won't let me upload pictures from their site to an outside blog, instead insisting that I create my own Flickr blog. I call bull. If anyone knows if it's possible to use Flickr to post onto blogs, please tell me. I could not locate the URL of any of my images or even get them to let me blog on a site other than their own (greeeeeedy.)

I now present one of the pictures that are currently hanging out on my Flickr account:


Moving on to mashups aka Thing 6. I don't use mashups or believe that I will have any use for them. I don't like to play around with my pictures, so mashups don't interest me. Mappr is the best one out of the three mentioned (the other two, Montagr and Flickr Colr Pickr were okay). I think Mappr has the most potential to make me waste an entire afternoon playing around with pictures. But what alarms me about these mashups is that they keep in with the misspelling of Flickr. It's no surprise that spelling in this country today is in a deplorable state (or that I once got asked by a patron how many letters there are in the alphabet).

And last but not least, Thing 7: Anything technology related. I will therefore commence my critique of the iPhone.

Look, Steve Jobs, I realize you hit it big with the iPod, the iHome, the iBook, and whatever else you have cooking in your cerebral iCortex. But the fact of the matter is, the iPhone is iUseless. If anyone wanted the internet, email, instant messaging, games, a picture of a clownfish, a built-in camera, touch screen, and the perpetual time of 9:41, then they could really get any one of the similar gadgets that came before. (Blackberry, Blackjack from Cingular, etc etc). I know this is a big step in media convergence, but it just doesn't seem practical to have everything in one place. What if you drop your iPhone in the iToilet? That's the end of all your personal data. Not to mention it's $599 retail price, which is bordering on insanity. AND you have to pay for service.

Verdict: Not worth it. The iPhone is complicated (can you tell I don't like complication?) and expensive.

That's all until Week 4, with RSS feeds. hooray!