23 Mobile Things #1: Blogging & Registering

Write a blog post for Thing 1 telling us what you hope to get out of the program, says the first prompt for this latest version of 23 Things on a Stick. Expanded horizons, I answer.

When I participated in the original version of this program, I was comfortable using computers, but I wasn't all that adventurous. I spent most of my time online doing basic web-surfing and email, and I still spent a lot of my computer time offline, working with Microsoft Word. I participated in a number of mailing lists and I had a wee bit of experience dealing with Usenet. I knew there were things like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter in the world, but I wasn't sure what they were, and no one I knew used them, so there was nobody to ask. Oh, and the whole blogging thing: why would you write whatever came to mind and make it public—and why on earth would anyone be interested? What I got out of 23 Things on a Stick was encouragement to try all these things. It was difficult for me to play with something if I couldn't see a practical reason to do so, and the program itself was such a reason: play with this and tell everyone what you thought of it and what your experience was like. And although I almost never used it as such, I thought of it as a support group: if I had a problem with one of the Things, I could read other people's experiences of it and see if that helped.

In the end, what I got was a much bigger online world. I had been introduced to Facebook and Twitter, and I still participate actively on both today. Okay, it took a while to decide I liked Twitter, but no one said I had to adopt everything instantly, and I only managed to stay on the MySpace site for about two minutes before fleeing it forever. My mailing lists have been replaced with Facebook groups and friendships. I miss the in-depth discussions, but on the other hand, I feel as if I have a much better sense of the other members as people. And it turned out I liked blogging and ended up starting several different personal blogs—and as you can see, I never took this one down.

So what do I want from 23 Mobile Things? The same thing: a bigger world. I'm still not the most adventurous soul in the world, although I love my mobile toys (iPad and iPhone). I tend to look for variations on the apps I already have, and despite all of Apple's exhortations of There's an app for that! I rarely think to look for anything completely new to me. I'm hoping to be introduced to totally new apps, to apps that help me do what I still have to do on my desktop computer, and to apps that maybe I don't need but that my friends will find useful. And above all, I hope to learn really interesting things. (Or Things. Whatever.)