Whatsapp and other Social Thingamajigs Adoption Cycle

Sun, 2 Sep 2012
2 min read
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(via)

Back in 2007, there was a short period of time that my good friend Deputy Public Prosecutor Yang Ziliang tried to convince me to start using Facebook.

“It’s gonna be the new Friendster,” he said.

“What for?” I asked. “I’ve already got Friendster. I don’t need any other social thingamajig to complicate my life.”

“…”

For the record, I did start using Facebook some time thereafter.

I can’t remember why, but I suspect it was because all my friends had moved to Facebook and Friendster had become a ghost town.

Now it’s 2012 and I’m in a somewhat similar quandary.

It’s not that I don’t have a smartphone (although I bought mine some time after everyone else bought theirs so I guess the principle underscored by the graph above still applies).

It’s just that I was stubborn and purchased a Palm Pre because I’d been using Palm PDAs since 2003, and I was, like, brand loyalty and all that jazz.

Unfortunately, because (and, perhaps, even though I knew) Palm had been losing market share for some time, many apps were never developed for the WebOS platform and probably never will be.

One of these apps is Whatsapp.

I’ve known of Whatsapp’s existence for a while, but I never really realised what I’d been missing out on until the night before, when I hijacked my colleague’s phone and started messing around with Whatsapp.

And I was like: OH MY GOSH THIS IS SO FUN! THE LAST TIME I DID STUFF LIKE THAT WAS WHEN MSN WAS THE TOOL EVERYONE USED FOR CHAT AND…

…

So I’d like to announce that I’ll be getting a new phone when my mobile contract expires in three weeks’ time.

This phone will have Whatsapp support, and you will know this when you see the words “WHATSAPP ME” appearing everywhere as prominently as a Bat-Signal.

In the meantime, text me. Or call me. Maybe.

P.S. Mr Yang, if you’re reading this: I AM PUBLICLY CONSUMING HUMBLE PIE AND IT TASTES LIKE THAT PIG-BRAND CIDER WHICH YOU AND CORAL ALWAYS SERVE AT YOUR HOME.

Gmail Meter

Wed, 1 Aug 2012
2 min read
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So I’ve been using Gmail Meter on my work account for a couple of months now because I’ve always been interested to know how and whether email at work is used efficiently.

I don’t have any conclusive data (because I’ve not been actively tracking things!), but I thought I’d share some interesting statistics which recur every month, without fail (the graphs and pie chart I’m using are from July 2012, BTW):

Daily Email Traffic
Daily Email Traffic
  • From the visual above, most email is sent in the morning and just before lunch.
  • People enter the office after lunch and try to send a bit of email but they’ve more or less cleared their quota for the day.
  • Work is still done in the evening, after dinner. Work-life balance, anyone?
Monthly Email Traffic
Monthly Email Traffic
  • LOOK AT THOSE PEAKS! The most emails are sent at the start of the week, on Mondays.
  • Thankfully not a lot of traffic on weekends, though you can see some traffic from me last weekend – I was clearing stuff in preparation for the surgery I underwent on Monday.
Email Categories
Email Categories

Last but not least, most email messages I get are not exactly… relevant to me. Either that or I don’t like storing a lot of mail in my inbox.