I was with a very good friend of mine the other day at at T-Mobile retail store near I live. He had accidentally put his cell phone through the washing machine and needed a replacement (we’ve all done it, I think). I was trying like hell to get him to buy a new Cliq or a Blackberry Bold, but he ended up going with one of the feature phones that generally come free with any new contract. He and I use our phones very differently, so this was an easy decision for him.
“But”, I thought to myself, “if you get this crazy expensive phone, you can get onto Twitter! You can maintain a blog from your phone! Post pictures to the Internet! Have conversations with new and interesting people!” – that’s about when it hit me.
The phone he had just got for a fraction of what I’d paid for my phone would offer him all of these capabilities. He could use Twitter, Facebook, have a blog (albeit a simple one), send photos to Flickr, etc. His phone was just as capable of creating most types of content as mine was.
Granted, my phone is a great deal better at most of these things than his, but that’s not the point. The point is that just about every cell phone in every pocket walking around right now is fully equipped to create some awesome Internet shit. All it needs is somebody at the wheel who likes to create.
I’d love to hear about the cool stuff you folks are making. Share it with me in the comments (or anywhere else)!
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I've been dabbling a bit with things like <canvas> and <audio> – I'm particularly proud of my HTML5 drumkit (at http://www.randomthink.net/labs/html5drums/ – best in FF/Safari, not so hot in Chrome just yet because of audio issues and the fact that it doesn't support .WAV files, WTF Chrome), which has gotten me some publicity.
I basically built it and tossed it up on the 'net, and it's gotten fairly regular traffic since then.
I'm working on some life balance right now, and am hoping that soon I'll have more time for making cool internet shit, because I am in LOVE with JS and that's making for some really fun experiments.
See, that's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. It doesn't
necessarily matter if what you're building will be the next Twitter or if it
necessarily has saleability – as long as it scratches your creative itch,
it's worth doing. Very nice work, sir!