Text messaging is huge! Almost everyone with a cell phone is texting more often these days. Why? I guess it’s the cool thing to do. Not to mention, it is sweet, short, and simple. So many companies and services are taking advantage of text messaging and I could spend a couple of days going through each one, but I’m not going to bore you. Just the other day, I text-messaged my order to Papa Johns and my pizza was here in no time!

One technology that I find rather neat is fighting crime with text messaging. Just like callers to a crime hot line, text tipsters can collect rewards for significant information. It is done with the cooperation of banks that hand over the cash — no questions asked — to people who present a code issued by police.

Most of us can agree that it is sometimes easier and less time-consuming to text rather than call, especially if you don’t feel like talking, so Police hope the idea helps recruit teens and 20-somethings who would not normally dial a Crime Stoppers hot line to share information with authorities. For instance, if your son/daughter overhears someone threatening to blow up their teacher’s car with explosives, then they can text that in. I hope they would!

“It’s obvious that the future of communication is texting,” said Officer Michael Charbonnier, commander of the Boston Police Department’s Crime Stoppers unit. I would agree with him. Texting is not going away soon and will only be used more often if not favored more than talking in the future. Personally, I can never see myself favoring text messaging over talking, but as time goes by, and children are born with cell phones in hand, talking is likely to be the least thing on the younger crowds minds. Especially at schools where text messaging soars.

I think the idea is awesome. It sure is a sneaky way to rat out another person. I just hope it does not get abused. Another problem that may arise is this text messaging language that has surfaced. Not everyone knows “lol” (laugh out loud) or “ttyl” (talk to you later). God knows what might be texted to police and misinterpreted. I can see a list now of “commonly used text messaging abbreviations” being distributed on desks in police departments. 

Zoji is an online, social networking community that offers helpful tools, simple searching and invitations with a twist. Below, I have put ten good reasons to try it out:

Familiarity: Zoji has aspects that are similar to Craigslist, wherein your main screen can be tailored to your hometown since everything you see, places you go, events you attend and parties you throw are all in the same city.

Hip Invites: Zoji allows you to create pretty awesome invites and send them out to your friends. Your friends can accept your invitation without signing up – which is great! After the event is over, all of your friends can share pictures and post comments on how much fun they had.

Here’s a snippet of my party on Happy Street!

Calendar of Memories: Zoji has a built in calendar that keeps all of your invites and party pictures on the date the event occurred. The calendar gives you an overall view of your adventurous year.

Customization: It wouldn’t be a complete social networking site if you couldn’t customize your profile, and therefore Zoji offers Profile pages VERY similar to Myspace. This should make people happy, right?

Stay “In the Know”: If you are planning to travel to an area or just looking for places close to home, Zoji allows you to search for tasty restaurants, upbeat clubs, and bars within miles of a zip code. Once you find a restaurant that interests you there is an option to “plan an event” right on the restaurant page, which then instantly directs you to the invitation creation station.

Give Props: If you consider yourself well-versed in your city and you know the best dish to eat at the “hole-in-the-wall” diner, you can write a review. You can bring in more business for your favorite place.

Rock On: Who doesn’t love music? You can search “bandz” in your city and see who is playing in your area. You can organize friends to go check out a band, and with a click you can become a fan. Most Zoji promoted bandz have an instant-listen mp3.

Easy Instant Messaging: Zoji has built-in instant messaging. You can see when friends are online and IM them for a quick chat. The best part about this is that there is NO DOWNLOAD!

No Limits: My favorite aspect about Zoji is that you can upload pictures for friends and family to view. Contrary to other social networking sites, Zoji lets you upload full-sized original pictures so recipients can have high quality prints developed, putting an end to tiny, fuzzy, pixelated photos.

Friends: Zoji brings people together and keeps them busy with its various event planning tools. Zoji seems to be pretty cool.

Zoji is a combination of a couple different popular sites, and I think it can work in their best interests.

Check out Zoji.

As a dedicated Trillian user for several years now I was hesitant to give another client a shot, but I gritted my teeth and did it anyhow. Instantbird is a new multi-protocol, cross platform, open source instant messenging client that makes use of Mozilla and Pidgin technologies to connect you to fourteen different IM protocols.

There are several other programs like this out there already, but I’ve yet to come across one that supports fourteen different networks. With social networking and communication via the web on the rise as it is, limiting choices to only the top few most popular services is no longer a good idea. Those looking for the ability to customize one’s many accounts, however, will have to wait a while longer or do it themselves. As it is only in version 0.1, Instantbird doesn’t really have any extensions or themes available yet. But as it is open source, anyone with the time and know how is free to give it a go. Right now, Instantbird is lean and basic in appearance, and the default sound effects are the least annoying I’ve encountered thus far.

Instantbird was developed by Florian Quèze and Quentin Castier; it currently supports the following protocols: AIM, Gadu-Gadu, GroupWise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo, netsoul. So far, it’s not giving me anything Trillian can’t, but if you do a ton of textual talking online give it a try at instantbird.com.

I’ll admit it–my memory sucks. And I know I’m not the only one. I write notes on my hand only to find they’ve washed off when I check for them later; I leave reminders in notepad, email, or my task list and forget them once I’m away from a computer; I send myself a Wakerupper reminder, but the reminder doesn’t tell me what I’m supposed to be remembering; I ask someone to remind me to do what I know I’ll forget to do and they end up forgetting too. It goes on and on. But with Jott, hopefully it won’t go on any longer.

Jott is mobile note-taking service and, ironically, you don’t have to jot down a thing to use it. After signing up for the service, you can start Jotting by calling a toll free number, saying who it is you want to send a Jott to, and leaving a voice message of up to thirty seconds long. Jott transcribes the voice to text and emails and/or text messages whoever you want the Jott to go to. To ensure that you remember the really important things, you can create reminders and prioritize certain Jotts. Jott can also be used to post to blogs and sites such as Twitter. It’s important to speak clearly when leaving a Jott for it to be adequately transcribed. Low confidence Jotts will only post as voice recordings.

When it comes to usefulness, I’d say Jott is a step up from services like Wakerupper and Twitter. In addition to creating text messages from voice recordings, Jott also makes the recording available to listen to. You can Jott to yourself, someone else, a group of people, to a folder, or to a link. And if you are at your computer, you can choose to Jott from the website rather than your phone. As far as mobile blogging goes, despite the fact that it doesn’t transcribe voice to text I would still go with Utterz since it doesn’t limit you to thirty seconds and allows you to post video and photos. Plus, it can take a while for the voice to be transcribed to text.

Overall, Jott is worth a shot, but I’m not sure if it’s something I would use regularly. Try it out for yourself at jott.com.

Watch this video to get a better idea on how to use Jott.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILwbr3hXNCQ[/youtube]

So something really cool happens and you absolutely can’t wait to see everyone and tell them. Well with a mobile phone and Twitter, you won’t have to. Wait; if you have a cell phone you can probably just call them. Or text them. Or send out a mass email. Not to mention, if it’s that awesome it’ll probably be a lot cooler to tell them in person.

Excuse my sarcasm, but Twitter just does not wow me (plus, it logs me out every five minutes). With Twitter you basically keep people updated on what you’re doing. You can keep tabs on and reply to your followers and followees in real time or take a look at what everyone else is up to by checking the Public Timeline. And get this–you can take Twitter with you by setting up your phone or instant messenger to post to it. I’m not really sure why you need to post what are basically instant messages in a public place, especially when posts are limited to 140 characters. But obviously there are enough people who obsess enough over constantly knowing what other people are doing to make use of Twitter.

When all Twitter can do is send short messages, I would definitely not be choosing it to make posts on the go when I could be using Utterz (which allows text, audio, video, and photo posts that can be made from PC or mobile device). What does make Twitter more than just an instant messenger is the fact that you can use widgets to ensure that your updates appear where you want them. One thing that is really cool about it is that people from all around the world are using it–you’ll usually find at least three different languages being used on the Public Timeline.

Twitter was founded by Obvious in 2006 and is free to use (not including possible charges from your phone service provider). Try it out at twitter.com

Do you twitter and why?