Reading twitter on a smartphone has been unexpectedly beneficial. The benefit is that I can zoom with a flick of my fingers; and this comes into play when someone posts Roman coins which display now vanished buildings. I can then zoom in, very easily, and see what is portrayed on them.
I have been impressed by the results.
This tweet consists of a coin of Trajan, showing the facade of the Basilica Ulpiana. I have attached the image here.
But on a smartphone I can zoom on the image on the right. Here is the same image, blown up clumsily using a graphics editor (Paint.net), and sharpened a bit:
We can see the wording FORVM TRAIAN at the bottom clearly. We can see the facade much more clearly. We can see the entrance in the middle, the four statues in recesses, two on either side. We can see the chariot on the roof.
All this is far easier on a smartphone.
The technology we use is changing. People read twitter for updates on every subject, and they read it from their smartphones, not from their Windows PC. Any blog that doesn’t have a mechanism to allow a read to share their post on twitter is losing out, because clicking that button is what I instinctively do when I see a good post which I want others to read; I and a hundred others. I don’t bother with Facebook, which seems to be dying; but twitter is a must. Probably – for I am no longer on the leading edge – there are other sites also for which the same is true.
Loving those gold coins, tho.
But it takes so long to load everybody’s post-doohickies. I don’t like to complain, but it drives me nuts to wait an extra twenty seconds to a minute (to never, on particularly bad days), while just waiting for little gadgets to load. Facebook doohickies seem to take the longest, although some days Google and Twitter seem to be pretty slow.
I know I’ve got the world’s slowest Internet connection at home, but I don’t know why people put up with all this bandwidth suckage.
It does rely on fast broadband, it is true.