The 81-day experiment

Simple Things You Can Do To Use Smartphones Safely--see list on Facebook and add to it!

I was insipired this week by the "Simple Things You Can Do to Live Green" list that Ellen Leanse showed in the lunch & learn webinar that she presented about Facebook (titled Facebook in Action). The "Simple Things You Can Do to Live Green" included items such as:

And there is more. You can refer to the full list by adding Ellen's "Lists" application to your Facebook applications.

Inspired by Ellen, I added the Lists application, and started a new list: "Simple Things You Can Do to Use Smartphones Safely". After all, I have been quite interested in smartphone safety and put some significant effort in the last couple of years in trying to promote and define how we can use smartphones more safely. So these are some items from the list:

Happy and safe smartphoning!

Free services and Cellphone/smartphone etiquette

Just in case you didn’t see David Pogg’s entry on “Free Services to Inspire Your Cellphone”, it has some nice references to many interesting services. After all smartphones are cell phones, and all these services would work on your smartphone.

On a different note, I recently had two experiences where some generally agreed upon cellphone etiquettes would have been helpful. One person sat next to me at a café, and started to have a loud cellphone conversation that lasted about half an hour. I learned a lot about his business, but unfortunately it wasn’t something to write home about. Another one was at the cashier, where someone was ordering and paying while continuing her engaging cellphone conversation. I don’t think this was appreciated by the cashier and the long line behind her. We probably should be beyond these “incidents” by now knowing that we have been using cellphones for 10+ years.

Let us skip the cellphone etiquettes (knowing it is an old topic) and get right to smartphone etiquettes (which are probably a superset of cellphone etiquettes anyway)? What would be the situations where smartphone etiquettes would be helpful? And what would they be? Just a question for now to start some thoughts as I continue to discuss this topic with users and experts and hopefully bring back some useful insights.