Finally, a voice mail which i feel comfortble leaving behind !! Until now I've never ever been comfortable leaving a voice message on an answering machine or a voicemail message on a mobile phone. Why? I guess many of us are just not used to speaking to a machine without getting any response.

Googles' introduction of 'voicemail' on GTalk might just change this. Although the fact that you are speaking to a machine still remains, I think the comfort level here lies in the fact that you are in control of sending the message after recording a message as opposed to recording it directly onto the receivers device and not having the control.

I guess we'll know how it takes off only once I start using it. For now I am just happy that finally someone came up with real voice "mail" !

With regard to the post below, it reminds me of the output of my final year Diploma project. The project titled 'Xtend' also revolved around the concept of the power of social networking. As an output of the project, I had designed a mobile application which allowed you to peep into your friends mobile contacts (Friend of a Friend aka FOAF) to check and match profiles with the kind of peope you were looking for. If you found someone who matched your profile you had to ask your friend for to introduce you to that particular person. This way a human filter would (hopefully) prevent people from contacting people they din't know randomly.

I personally find the topic of Social Networking through mobiles extremely interesting. However I am much more interested in the aspect of how people carry around their identity with their mobile devices. Whether we like it or not... most of us have some sort of digital identities. An email address, a credit card transaction account, an Amazon account or membership to a social networking site, etc, etc, etc. With internet becoming more and more mobile how will this affect our interactions with people?

How will technologies like Wimax affect peoples interaction and stumbling upon other people? Will location based profile matching take off? Will blind dates get a new meaning? Will we be able to make more friends or will we start protecting and hiding ourselves more than before as our digital identities will be traceable and trackable?

"Thinking Out Loud"

This is a Diploma Project blog that Shruti Ramaiah, a friend and a final year student at Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology, Bangalore (India).

What is the blog about? As described by Shruti in her own words...

"This blog is dedicated to my current project. And as the project floats forward without a name I tell people ?it?s about how people negotiate their identity in cyberspace? particularly social network sites like hi5, orkut, MySpace, Friendster??