Life, Fatherhood and Online Texting
Dec0
Three seemingly unrelated topics - life, fatherhood and online texting -have never been far from my thoughts this week; in fact dealing with life and fatherhood just reminded me of the incident that got me interested in creative applicatons for online texting (like www.looknothumbs.com) in the first place.
Not many Februaries ago, five men in their late thirties to early forties got together in the Horseshoe Bar in Glasgow, Scotland for a quiet drink. This group grew up together not far from here, and some 18 years ago a gathering like this would have been an unremarkable, often twice-weekly occurrence. But life took its course, fatherhood consumed all our time for a while, people moved and regular meetings became impractical.
Such was this group’s dynamic that although we had all changed in appearance and had all been both treated and bitten by life’s experiences, this reunion was easy, natural, comfortable and thoroughly enjoyable – almost as if only weeks, not decades, had passed.
And so the witty banter and gentle teasing began after a few sips from the first pint, as it always will among male friends in Glasgow.
One of our group had stayed local, been extremely successful at work, and only thinning and receding hair qualified for comment among the other four. One had lived overseas and acclimatised to another lifestyle in various ways, including an expanded waistline – so the others claimed anyway – and loss of his Glasgow accent. But it was the oldest of the group who took the brunt of the fabled Glasgow ‘slagging’ that evening.
Here was a guy in his mid forties, with teenage children, who was completely phobic about sending mobile text messages. His children were texting constantly, including texts to him (he beamed as he proudly related this part). But he still protested that he didn’t see the point of texting because he could always phone someone.
I mulled this over for a while. My friend wasn’t the first person I’d come across who loves to receive a text message but refuses to send one. Fear of technology and specifically of ‘doing it wrong’ seems to crippling vast numbers of people over 40. (Scary – that includes me!) What is it about texting that makes people who are quite comfortable with email lash out against text messaging?
It dawned on me that what makes texting different, and unappealing, is that the method of entering a message requires special skill, with a steep learning curve to acquire it and constant practice to maintain it. What’s truly demoralising is that your learning investment investment is thrown away almost annually with every phone upgrade.
More than a decade into the text revolution, there is no universal set of instructions to cover every phone’s menus, multi-tap sequences and predictive text methods.
Is physically entering messages the only reason some people don’t like to text? Of course not, but it does seem to be the main one. Fortunately, with an online texting solution like www.looknothumbs.com, textphobia is a highly treatable condition.
LookNoThumbs (www.looknothumbs.com) is an easy to use website for business and personal online texting. It’s designed to compliment - not replace - your mobile phone and it makea texting MUCH easier. How? Simple – first, they replace the unfamiliar (mobile phone keypad and text entry systems) with the familiar – your computer’s keyboard and an email-like interface. Next, they present you with simple, flat-rate prepaid texts that can be shared with others and don’t expire. Finally, they’ve loaded the site with useful messaging features for all users that you’d normally expect to see only on a business or premium service.
LookNoThumbs is currently in Pilot as of December 2007, with registration by invitation only. But do register your interest to be sure of getting in early, because they’re currently sending out invitations every day. Check it out: www.looknothumbs.com
You’re probably wondering about my friend with the teenagers. Has he dropped the grudge against texting now? I honestly don’t know for sure, and I haven’t received a text from him yet. But being a true friend, I’ll be sending him an online texting voucher for www.looknothumbs.com this Christmas! Ho, Ho, Ho (LoL).
Happy Christmas!