WWD Coffee Break – DWT, Twitter via IM, and Scrabulous
January 14th, 2008 (8:00am) Mike Gunderloy 4 Comments
DWT Considered Harmful – According to the Washington Post, Virginia and Maryland are among the most recent states to be considering legislation banning DWT – that’s Driving While Texting for those of you who haven’t been following along at home. With 20 percent of all drivers texting (according to Nationwide Mutual Insurance), this has the potential to be a hugely unpopular law. On the other hand, none of us really wants to be crunched by some teen sending inscrutable messages, no matter how attached we are to our Blackberries.
Of course, banning DWT is just the tip of the iceberg; more and more states are starting to restrict cel phone usage for drivers as well. We may be moving towards a society where mobile professionals need to recognize that drive time is not in fact surrogate office time – or else rely more on taxis and less on rental cars.
IM it to Twitter – Twitter itself has jabber integration, but TwitterIM adds MSN Messenger and ICQ to the list of supported clients. Just add their bots to your buddy list and you can get two-way integration, complete with automatic TinyURL replacement and the ability to retrieve your direct messages.
Hasbro Cracks Down – Now that Scrabulous is getting a metric boatload of daily page views on Facebook, Hasbro has lawyered up to protect their intellectual property. While this will certainly be an unpopular move for many addicts of the online Scrabble clone, there’s a lesson here for web workers: you ignore IP law at your peril. Maybe the Scrabulous guys did need an attorney after all.
4 Comments Post your own comment
Mark says: January 14th, 2008 8:44am
Let’s be sensible: NO ONE should be fiddling with a handset device while driving. Most states and municipalities that enact laws, though, don’t ban talking on the phone while driving, just using a handset. Hands-free, bluetooth headsets are fine.. Talk all you want. Don’t expect support for trying to managing two computers at once (as cars are now packed with them) where one can easily become deadly.
Peter Roizen says: January 14th, 2008 9:31am
As self-serving as this might be, maybe it is time to step up from Scrabble to a game that is about a real vocabulary and creative thinking.
Take a look at http://www.wildwords.us
Peter
Christopher Johnston says: January 14th, 2008 10:00am
I recently blogged about this. In most states there are already laws against reckless operation of a motor vehicle. I would imagine that if you were try to drive while looking at the screen of a mobile device your driving would appear reckless to an observer. This is probable cause enough for a police officer to pull you over.
We don’t need any additional laws but we do need better enforcement of the ones already on the books.
NatalieMac says: January 14th, 2008 11:28am
I personally know a young woman who hit a pedestrian because she was texting while driving. This poor soul has been in and out of the hospital for nearly a year and is suffering severely for her indiscriminate texting. Don’t do it!!