Tonight was a fun night of experimenting with web stuff.

I'm in London this week, and this morning I got an email from the office that they changed my mobile plan so I could use mobile internet abroad for a flat fee per day, and since I have a fancy phone now it was playtime tonight!

I turned on my iPod, left the hotel and set out to do some sightseeing. Took the tube to the Embankment station and took a cliche picture of the Big Ben. Using the 'upload to flickr' feature of my phone, I uploaded it to my flickr stream.

Roughly 7 minutes later the upload finished and I was able to twitter about my accomplishment. The reason it took 7 minutes was that my phone had switched from HSDPA to GPRS, which is pretty sluggish, and the fact that my phone's cam is 5MP.

I got hungry, and used Google Mobile Maps to find the Hard Rock Cafe (always a nice place to dine when you're not with company), and the way to get there.

By the time I passed the large Pepsi Thingee at Trocadero, I had found out that my phone can scale down the image before posting to flickr, so my picture of the Pepsi Thingee uploaded a lot faster.

At trocadero I used an underpass to cross a road, at which point my phone not only disconnected, but completely crashed. I had to take out the battery to reset it.

Anyway, on to the Hard Rock Cafe.

I arrived at the spot where the Hard Rock Cafe was supposed to be according to Google, but there was only a really small street and I didn't see anything resembling an HRC. But a closer look revealed a small door with a Hard Rock Cafe logo in the back of a sort of alcove. 'Wow', I thought, 'must be the smallest HRC ever. Without Google Maps I would never have found this'.

So I went in and about 2 steps inside I encountered a guy, sitting on a staircase eating fries. Hmm, this must be the weirdest HRC I've encountered so far.

He looked as stunned at me as I looked at him, and after an awkward silence I said:

"Are they closed or what?"
"Closed? You want to eat?"
"Eh, duh!"
"Sure we're open. but USE THE FRONT DOOR!"
"Ah, eh, hmm..." (quick! think of an excuse that doesn't make you look foolish!) "Google Maps sent me here!"
"Well, Sir, then Google Maps IS WRONG."

I walked around the block, had a lovely dinner, twittered some more, checked up on my email and eventually used Google Maps to find my way back to the hotel.

So it was a nice mobile-assisted night.

And now I'm here in my hotel room, typing this post in a local textfile because internet at the hotel doesn't work and the building seems to block my cellphone signal.

Some drawbacks: The battery of my phone, which was full when I left, was nearly empty by the time I got back. And on my laptop I noticed that the pictures I took were way more blurry than I could tell on the mobile phone screen.

But all-in-all, I think the mobile web is fun. In particular the popular web 2.0 sites do a decent job of providing a proper mobile version of their services.

A few people on twitter advised me some alternative mobile software (mobypicture) that should make it even easier, so I'm going to try that out on my next sightseeing-with-phone tour. I'll try to use some more websites next time as well, such as a website that can plot my route using google maps, and try uploading to youtube from the phone. It would be nice if there was a site that combines google maps, twitter, youtube and flickr. Ideas anyone?

On friday night I created a twitter account. I didn't 'get' twitter, and I've read that it's 'hard to explain' and people 'only get it once they've used it'. So when I saw that even Cal Evans is using it, I had to finally try.

At first I thought it was a form of instant messaging. And while it has some of its characteristics, it's different. I think it can best be described as 'broadcasting your current status'. To people who want to see it. Like the status field you have in applications like MSN and Skype. Elizabeth described it to me as 'more like IRC', and she has a point. It's like IRC, without channels. The '/me' command on IRC is very twitterish even.

Messages are never more than 140 characters, which helps keeping them to the point.

People don't just post their status: it's used a lot for 'look at this' type messages, usually some url that someone has just read and wants to share.

What I like about twitter so far:

• It's simple; it broadcasts a message to people who want to receive it, and that's about it.

• It's open; it has API's which have led to a lot of tools and devices supporting twitter. I have Twitterrific to read messages, and can easily send them through Quicksilver. My tweets are displayed on the right of my blog using a simple wordpress plugin.
• It's addicitive. It gives you a feeling of connectedness, more even than instant messengers.

What I don't like about twitter so far:

• Twittering via SMS is too intrusive; twitter with my mobile phone's browser is decent, but requires me to login each time (but maybe that's a problem with my phone, not twitter).

• There's the danger of information overload. Some people twitter so much that they easily dominate the twitter screen (example: going to the zoo, coming back from the zoo, looking at the pictures from the zoo, discovering there are a lot of pictures from the zoo, filtering the pictures from the zoo, uploading the pictures from the zoo, announcing the pictures of the zoo on flickr and all the tea-drinking that happened in between; hi Skoop! ;-)). I can see this becoming overwhelming as I follow more people.
• Direct messages are inconvenient, I can't see my outgoing stuff; but then again, that's not what it's for.
• I miss a way to channel messages; some things are only relevant to my friends from the PHP community, some only for my coworkers, etc. But with twitter you only have individual messages and messages to all.

In any case, it's interesting so far. Let's see how I feel about it in a week or two.