“What happened to PhilMusic?” and other Pesky Questions

A few weeks ago the questions started to pop up out of thin air and lunge at me. There were text messages, Tweets (public tweets and DMs), Facebook PMs. They were incessant. They arrived at odd times of the day – while driving to work, while at a meeting, while having dinner. You would have thought someone had died. 

In a way, someone had. The questions were “What happened to PhilMusic?” “Did you sell PhilMusic?” and the more direct “I can’t access Philmusic, when will it be back up? I need to sell my guitars.”

After some investigation, we figured out that the site was indeed inaccessible – our backend dude’s attempts to connect to the server directly returned a cryptic error message that apparently pointed out to a damaged hard drive. After some exchanges with our web provider we quickly decided the best thing for the site’s long term health was to to back up the data and move on and set up a new virtual server at a US-based provider.

But that would have take a bit of time – it was Christmas after all. And PhilMusic.com doesn’t currently operate as a commercial enterprise, so taking time off for vacations from our real jobs takes precedence over internet hobbies.

That explains the downtime – probably one of the longest ever spells since the site domain was registered in December 1996… Making PhilMusic.com 16 years old and probably one of the longest running Philippine websites around!

But what to do about all the nagging questions? Answer them! So without further ado, here’s a mini FAQ:

What happened to the site and domain? The server crashed. Investigation pointed to a faulty hard drive. We have had enough with the old provider so we are moving to a new provider in January 2013.

 Did you sell PhilMusic? Not that I know of.

 Will you sell me PhilMusic? I get this all the time. Give me an offer, preferably a P15M offer

 When will the new site be up? No firm timeline, and please don’t bug us, we have day jobs. Sometime January 2013.

 Are you on Facebook? 

Yes! We are on Facebook! You can keep in touch with Facebook (especially during the downtime) through our Facebook presence. We have two URLs:

PhilMusic Facebook Page – http://facebook.com/philmusic.dotcom

This is our official FB page. Public announcements and bulletins about the site are posted here.  We have about 14,000 likes. Please like us! You can never have too many likes.

The Official PhilMusic Facebook Group - http://facebook.com/groups/philmusic

We just started this a few days ago, for discussions and user posts. We’d like to keep the FB page clean, so this group is more for interactions, discussions, for-sale postings etc. We’ll also use the file area as a repository on FB for community documents. The group is set so anyone can read, but you must Join the group to post. We have over 1,500 signups today and expect to hit 2,000 by New Year’s Eve. Or maybe 2,500. Join us!

There are a number of other “PhilMusic” groups on Facebook, but they are maintained by over-zealous fans or impostors, or both.

Are you on Twitter? Hell yeah, since 2007! We are @PhilMusic (http://twitter.com/philmusic) Follow Us!

Will all the old messages be restored on the new site? We’re restoring from backups. Expect a lot of the newer messages gone, but hopefully the bulk of the 7-8 year old database should be there.

We want to donate to keep the site going! How do we do this? Thanks for the generosity! Crowdfunding is in vogue on the interwebs, so we will be considering crowdfunding models for new projects.

Are you a start-up? We’ve been a “startup” for 16 years! haha

What’s next for PhilMusic.com? Ok, so Ver 1.0 was PhilMusic as the music scene documentarian (what you would call today as a blog), Ver 2.0 was PM as the Musician’s Forum slash Buy-N-Sell slash Sulit for Musicians. There will be a Ver 3.0 in 2013. I’m not sure what it is yet but I would like to explore a mobile app based service. We would like the blog to return, assuming we can get music bloggers to contribute. And events! Expect some live events in 2013. None of these dreams can come true without community support, so we hope you’ll be there for us.

And last of all, thanks to the PhilMusic community for sticking by us all these years, through all our incarnations. You guys are great!

For upcoming announcements, stay tuned to our Facebook page. No Facebook? What are you, a martian?

Crowdsourcing local music scene documentation: The #PhilMusic hashtag on Instagram

Some years back, around the time the first generation Digital SLRs made their appearance. the photo bug bit me hard. Of course, every “serious” photographer eventually finds a speciality – mine was the area of concert photography. I liked the scene, loved the exaggerated stage lighting, and the unique expressions coming from musicians. 

Armed with a PhilMusic.com media pass, I prowled the backstages and mosh pits of some of the more raucous music events in Manila in the late 90s and early 2000′s. I would shoot several times a week, thinking I was doing my bit in documenting the events of that period.

My weapon of choice was a large and heavy camera rig, a Canon SLR (I eventually settled on a Canon 40D) and my favorite lens was the formidable Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS  zoom – superb low light optics that was about a foot long weighed a ton or two. I nicknamed the white beast “the bazooka”.

That lens is one heavy bitch to carry, but the results were always worth it. With it’s tack-sharp focusing and versatility in low light situations, it was the perfect concert lens, and I could always count on it to capture dramatic closeups of guitarists grunting and vocalists emoting on a distant stage.

Well that phase went by quickly. My beloved Bazooka stays in a cabinet unused for most of the year. I stopped going to gigs. I moved on to small cameras that shot fine stills and HD video, like the Lumix LX-3, and lately, the Canon S95. The pocketable S95 is about as small as a smartphone, so this is my go-to “real” camera.

But more often than not, my photographic weapon of choice nowadays is a phone. I went through a number Android phones over a 2-year period before settling on an iPhone 4s as the primary phone – and primary camera.

“The Bazooka”

With its sharp focusing, vivid colors, and most of all – wide array of camera apps, coupled with the ability to share photos instantly via social media, the iPhone is often the only camera I use and need, even on travels where I would have lugged along an SLR body and several lenses in the not so distant past. Indeed a number of tech blogs have posed the question, “Is the iPhone 4s the only camera you need?“

Among the many fine photo apps is Instagram, a portal to a community of cameraphone photo enthusiasts, which is more fun than  barrel full of monkeys.

The photo sharing app with the hipster filters has evolved into photo-oriented social network. And the twitter-inspired hashtag concept has found new meaning in the Instagram – a popular hashtag used by a number of people in the Instagram community becomes a crowdsourced photo album for that topic. Click into a hashtag and you can see an album of thousands of photo contributors all posting with the same theme.

So with that in mind, I remembered my “music photojourno” persona of years past and figured that Instagram might be the best vehicle to revive that aesthetic. And at the same time, I no longer have the time or even the stamina to attend the hundreds of music events that pop up in Manila. But it’s a sure thing that other people will be there, armed with their smartphones.

Last night’s Fete de La Musique street scene in Makati Avenue, posted on Instagram

With the right phone in the right place (usually a smartphone), anyone can be a music photographer like Annie Liebovitz and Instagram can be your  Rolling Stone. Why not crowdsource the role of music scene documentation, and provide a venue (in this case a hashtag) to collect all the photos in one convenient place?

Hence the birth of the #PhilMusic hashtag. I propose this as the hashtag for photos of music events in the Philippines. I hope that if it catches on , anyone who wants to get a bird’s eye of the local music scene can just click on the #PhilMusic hashtag and get a glimpse of the vibrancy of the local music scene.

As an example, just last night, the annual Fete de la Musique festival took place in Makati Avenue, which took a lot of people by suurprise. The festival wasn’t promoted too extensively, so it sort of snuck up on a lot of people and a lot of people missed it. But if enough people on the scene were posting photos on Instagram and tagging them with #PhilMusic, others could at least check in on the “channel” to view photos of the gigs and attend them vicariously.

Granted that peering into a smartphone or tablet screen won’t give you thrill as actually being on the scene in person, at least it gives you  bit of the flavor, less the smell of the moshpit sweat!

Here’s how to post a photo on your smartphone (an iOS or Android device running the Instagram app)

To post to the #PhilMusic hashtag “channel” on Instagram, just add the tag #philmusic to any photo covering a music-related event.

To view the #PhilMusic album – look for a photo tagged with #PhilMusic and click on it. Or use Instagram’s search function to search for the hashtag #PhilMusic.

Why Some Are Calling Jessica Sanchez the “World Idol” And Other Twitter Mysteries

A social media meme of sorts has popped up in the Philippine online space since yesterday’s American Idol results. The meme goes: “Jessica Sanchez may have lost American Idol but she is the World Idol” or something to that effect.

It sounds like consolation (or shall we say “consuelo de bobo“) for the hopelessly diehard fans still reeling from the results – shocking to some, but predictable to me, as I had an inside track that the Philip Philips – the archetypical “white guy with the guitar” – was going to win. After all, the most recent winners were all white guys with guitars! But I also knew that the twitterverse had revealed a more scientific explanation, as detailed in my last post “Did Twitter Correctly Predict the Winner of American Idol?”

That post detailed the findings of the paper “Beating the news using Social Media: the case study of American Idol“ written by a group of reputable social scientists (read the PDF here) and essentially pointed out that despite mentions of Jessica Sanchez consistently beating her out her opponents in global social media updates (specifically Twitter) over the course of the last few episodes, if you narrowed down the tweets to just those coming from the USA – Philip Philips was going to win. And he did.

Because at the end of the day, the show is called “American Idol” and the votes are cast in the good old USA.

While the American Idol live broadcast on Star World was underway Thursday morning, I had an interesting exchange with Maria Ressa of the blog Rappler.com over Twitter. Two hours before the show results, Rappler had just posted an provocative analysis called “Social Media Indicates Jessica is Next Idol” which in a nutshell laid out a case, supported by all sorts of twitter analysis tools, infographics and such – that explained why Jessica Sanchez was the most likely winner.

I had just read the previously mentioned paper, so I replied to Ressa’s tweet by pointing out that Geolocation (the geographic origin of the tweets – embedded into the twitter stream via mobile apps and web browsers) is relevant. And I pointed out a link to the paper, which Maria Ressa had not apparently seen before.

Ressa defended the initial analysis: “(We) Looked at total activity: follower growth, socialmention, sentiment140 & Zaba research (which uses predictive engine model)”…

But I reiterated the relevance of geolocation in doing this type of armchair analysis – American Idol may have a worldwide audience, but the voting mechanics are still locked in to the USA.

The paper’s methodology went one step further than the Rappler analysis because it examined the geolocation information in the tweets to determine where the data was coming from. And in the final analysis, Philip Philips had the most mentions in the USA – hence was more popular than Jessica where the votes counted. And thus he was most likely to win, as he did.

Quoting from the paper:

In the US, Phillip appears to have the largest fanbase of the two contestants (see also the cartogram of Figure 6). If the possibility of votes coming from abroad is discarded, using the available data, we could then claim that Phillip is going to be the winner of the 11th edition of American Idol.

About an hour after the Idol results, Rappler reversed its previous findings with a series of articles explaining Why Philip Philips actually beat Jessica Sanchez - this time citing the findings of the Social Media paper.

Ironically, a cursory glance at the Twitter and Facebook stats showed that the follow up piece garnered thousands more social media mentions than the original article which predicted Jessica Sanchez would win. So in page view terms, it was all good.

While Rappler may have erred in its original analysis, both studies show that if you just went by the total amount of tweets that whizzed by the twitterverse, Jessica Sanchez really did have the most amount of global support.

That is, if you consider “global support” to equate non-USA support. Further analysis will need to be done about a geographic country distribution of the tweet origins, but the paper did cite the Philippines as a source of the majority of the Idol tweets. So in yet another case, pinoys have shown their mastery of online medium.

As the paper pointed out, in the course of the American Idol tweet-a-thon, “The Philippines are distinctly more active than any other foreign country.”

Interestingly enough, the paper also expounded on the type of cheat techniques used by Filipinos (widely publicized in Philippine social media circles) to cheat the voting system.

The voting rules of American Idol are quite clear, as cited in the paper:

On Wednesday the participants perform on stage and the public is invited to vote for two hours after the show ends. Voting can take one of three forms: toll-free phone calls, texting and online voting. The rules of the competition only allow for votes casted by the residents of the U.S., Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands.

These rules clearly exclude the Philippines, but crafty pinoys devised “voting tunnels” that allowed to vote from the Philippines.

Officialy, Sanchez’s popularity abroad should not have any impact on voting, since, as mentioned above, only the U.S. based audience is allowed to take part into the election procedure. However, it is interesting to note that the Filipino-restricted Twitter activity concerning Jessica is strongly peaked in the two voting sessions of American Idol for the East and West timezones, and that numerous websites explicitly address the issue of ”voting tunnels”: “

Here’s an example of one of the many blog posts detailing “How to Vote for Jessica Sanchez from the Philippines and Other Non-US Countries” .

It’s unclear if these attempts to vote from outside the US actually worked. But even the paper mentioned this phenomenon as a possible wild card:

Officially, Sanchez’s popularity abroad should not have any impact on voting, since, as mentioned above, only the U.S. based audience is allowed to take part into the election procedure….  Although we have no proof of any irregular voting activity, tweets analysis clearly points out to a possible anomaly that may be a concern.

In the end though – all these nefarious methods failed to crack the American heartland. The Americans voted, and got their American Idol.

Jessica Sanchez might still be qualified as a “World Idol” – in a world predominantly Filipino

But don’t weep too bad for the gifted 16-year old, whose considerable vocal chops will get her a career span’s worth of notable gigs. The first bit of news came out on the Twitterverse before the American Idol results were announced, , attributed to Mexican singer/actress Thalia:

@thalia: WOWgreat news! #TommyMottola just call me from #AmericanIdol & he is confirm to work in the first #JessicaSanchez CD

Tommy Mottola (Thalia’s husband) was the ex Sony chief who essentially created Mariah Carey back in the day (and subsequently married her). That does smell “hit record” (or “hit download” as they might say today). So even if “the white dude with the guitar” got the plum prize, Jessica Sanchez has landed on her feet and then some.

Did Twitter Correctly Predict the Winner of American Idol?

As I write this, it is 9:22 GMT+8 so it’s almost an hour or so before the actual tweets announcing the winner of American Idol go out over the Twitterverse. But if some Idol-tracking scientists from universities like Harvard, Northeastern University, and the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences in Turin, Italy – social media (specifically Twitter) may have already predicted the outcome.

In their paper titled “Beating the news using Social Media: the case study of American Idol“, the scientists examined the data coming over the Twitterverse after the elimination episodes. They also considered the location of the tweets as they considered USA tweets to be more influential over the final outcome than those coming from overseas (which skew heavily towards tweets from the Philippines.) You can download the complete paper (in PDF format) here.

The conclusion?

Based on aggregated worldwide tweets, Jessica Sanchez clearly wins the Twitter popularity poll. But if you consider only the tweets coming from the USA, Philip Philips edges out Sanchez.

Considering that voting is mainly a US-based activity, geolocation is relevant. The paper concludes:

In the US, Phillip appears to have the largest fanbase of the two contestants (see also the cartogram of Figure 6). If the possibility of votes coming from abroad is discarded, using the available data, we could then claim that Phillip is going to be the winner of the 11th edition of American Idol.

** Update, it is 10:02am GMT+8 and Philip Philips was just declared the winner.

 Twitter correctly predicted the outcome.

Battle of the Corona Trial Hashtags: A Case of #TooManyCoronas

Think of it as the idea of Twitter hashtags gone wild. Twitter hashtags were invented  by the online community (as is the case of many Twitter conventions) , in this case,  by users who wanted a simple way to embed keywords into the Twitter stream, making it easy to search for conversations or topics. (The full first-person account of the invention of hashtags in 2007 is chronicled in this Quora article.)

Originally, hashtags were organically created by the Twitter population to promote certain topics that had become repeated often enough to become part of the current social media zeitgeist.

Today the Twitter hashtag has become a kind of instant brand. TV shows and ad campaigns artificially create their own hashtags and incorporate this into ad campaigns and the corner of the screen of new TV sitcoms (as in “#2BrokeGirls”) in an effort to create their own memes and trending topics.

The hilarity begins when certain groups attempt to “own” a hashtag of a public event through repeated promotion.

The Corona Impeachment trial is an example of a public story that sectors of the news media are now trying to own – using their own brand of Twitter hashtags. It’s classic one up-manship that harkens back to the days of duking it out on news stands. Just as the old print media tried to out-scoop each other in the quest to sell newspapers, new media – which can now encompass everything from independent bloggers to websites of old media establishments – has its own attempts to top each other in the quest to generate eyeballs and pageviews.

Rather than settle on one easy to remember hashtag for the Corona trial, I’ve counted five  different Twitter hashtags.

So far we have:

1. #CJonTrial
2. #CoronaTrial
3. #CJTrialWatch
4. #CJTrial
5. #CJCorona

CJonTrial (i.e. “Chief Justice on Trial” for those of you not hip to current acronyms) is the hashtag being championed by ABS-CBN.

Not surprisingly, GMA News has chosen not to use this hashtag, using instead #CJTrial.

The blog Rappler continues to thumb its nose at old media by using neither, settling on #CoronaTrial instead.

Some independent bloggers follow their own path and are using #CJTrialWatch.

And armchair political analysts retweeting existing articles or typing in their own bon mots are using #CJTrial, and #CJCorona

Prior to the impeachment circus, the word “Corona” on Twitter was mainly used to refer to the Mexican beer. Hence the prior existence of hashtags like #Corona, and #CoronaSunset, which promoted @Cerveza_Corona.

If you ask me, all these competing hashtags are just nullifying each out. When I want to search twitter for news about “Corona Gate”, I ignore these hashtags conventions and just search for the word “Corona”.

Of course, this also turns up all sorts of beer references, but really now, the thought of a Chief Justice racking up luxury condominium purchases left and right is enough to drive a man to drink.

2011: The Year I Plunged Into Streaming

2011 was the year  I finally experienced the Internet as a head-on replacement for traditional broadcasting. Not just for words (the net already replaced print media in my life) but for music and “tv” broadcasts. My personal access to bandwidth had reached the tipping point where it had finally become possible to use the net as the full fledged replacement for radio and television.

This might be genuinely frightening for a few people out there in the business of broadcasting: in TV and radio. It might even be a concern for the advertising industry and the advertisers who rely on the medium to deliver the eyeballs to experience their message.

It will probably take quite a few more years in the Philippines, but the path is clear that given enough bandwidth, the Internet can fill in our addiction to audio and video content. And we may not even miss traditional TV –  but we may end up wondering how did we do without the Internet to deliver content.

The tipping point in my case was bandwidth. My TV was already the “third screen” for internet consumption, after computers, and mobile devices (phones and tablets) after I had plugged it into a couple of set top boxes – a Boxee Box, and a Logitech Revue (running the Google TV platform). But the best these devices could do was act as media streamers for downloaded video files, streaming was not ideal given my sluggish bandwidth.

As for “radio“, podcasts, downloaded music, and playlists on iTunes had long replaced radio programming. But new apps like Stitcher and Tune In (available for both iOS and Android) now allow you to stream podcasts and overseas radio stations – eliminating the need to download audio files.

But back to the tipping point: This year my home DSL connection moved up from a miserly 1.8 Mbps to a fairly respectable 3 Mbps. And improvements in mobile broadband networks now meant my mobile devices could reliably expect at least a 1 Mbps signal (on a very good day and location the mobile bandwidth available even exceeds my home DSL speeds, hitting 4 Mbps and better).

An increase to 3 Mbps meant I could now watch YouTube clips without buffering regularly at 480p resolution (roughly DVD quality) – and since I could access YouTube on my TV, I now had access to the biggest repository of video content on the planet. On good days I could watch 720p (near high-def) videos with some buffering. (It turns out that PLDT caches accesses to YouTube – I verified this through the Mac app Little Snitch – so YouTube videos run smoothly on their network.)

As for mobile, improvements in 3G networks (particularly the rollout of HSPA+) meant getting reliably getting from 1-2 Mbps in Makati. At this point it allowed me to stop feeding my iPod with songs from iTunes and stream audio content directly from the cloud instead.

Here were the apps that got me hooked on streaming in 2011:

For video: The inescapable YouTube remained my go-to channel for video of all types, from viral memes to professionally produced content – and even full length features. Only now, YouTube was omnipresent – from my Mac laptop, iPad, iPod, Galaxy Tab, phones (Android and iOS), right up to my TV.

There was also Flixster and iMDB on the web and on apps for my movie trailer feed, and Boxee apps for the New York Times video feeds and Leo Laporte’s TWIT podcast network. For streaming US TV content via a Slingbox connection, I have Slingplayer on the iPad and on the web. Through the magic of proxies, I also access Hulu and Amazon Instant Video (movies and TV specials) on my laptop. I’m considering adding Netflix for 2012.

With all this going on, who has time for local cable?

For audio, I rely on two free go-to internet radio apps on my mobile devices – Sticher and Tune-In (available for both iOS and Android). These allow me to stream hundreds of podcasts and foreign radio stations. NPR also has a number of apps that provide access to the programs for free.

For music, there is Spotify, a commercial service that alows you to create playlists out of a selection of thousands of tracks already in the cloud. Spotify’s music service is so comprehensive, I have given up on stuffing my iPod with new content. Also through the magic of proxies, I have taken to using Pandora, another cloud-based music service with pre-defined playlists of different music genres. I sometimes use Google Music for accessing my own music collection through the cloud.

These are all early days. For 2012 I hope to see my home bandwidth options increase and prices kept reasonable – I’m looking at hitting 10-12 Mbps this year. At some point I might also just chuck away my internet tv set top boxes and plug in a real computer to the TV – maybe a Mac mini via an HDMI cable. And increasingly the concept of TV itself is becoming decentralized since you can use a laptop or tablet to view the same content anywhere at home.

I also see streaming replacing my car entertainment, through content streamed into my smartphone and hooked into the car stereo system via bluetooth. The Philippines never got satellite radio stations like XM, but that point might now be irrelevant when digital audio content already comes to you via mobile internet.

I don’t see any of these technologies become mainstream soon. For the forseeable future these will be the playground of crazed early adopters like myself and some like-minded geeks who might find each other on some Facebook group. This is all still too complicated for the masses. But you never know when the next tipping point will arrive to make this all explode into the mainstream. I give it three years.

Skycable has already seen the signs through its Iwanttv.com.ph site that allows you to view video content on demand on your laptop or tablet. In a few more years I see Skycable becoming less like Comcast and more like Netflix. This is the inevitable future.

————————

Here’s a recent article in the Wall Street Journal that backs me up here: Cutting the Cord on Cable

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Google TV’s CES 2012 presentation gives us a glimpse of what’s possible now on Internet TV:

Did Asia Crash Twitter last New Year’s Eve? Apparently So

Time was when New Year’s Eve would creep up and your phone would start beeping frantically as all the text messages would come in. The mobile operators’ SMS network tubes would clog up and it would be impossible to get an SMS in, edgewise – until an hour past midnight.

Well that was then (maybe just about 3 or 4 years ago), this is now – and the reality of the now is that HNY greets are coming in through web and mobile messaging – BBMs, iMessages, Facebook status updates, and increasingly, #Twitter.

For several hours leading up to New Year’s Eve in our time zone (GMT +8), Twitter started to burp and grunt and finally ground to a halt, displaying the infamous Fail Whale and the “Twitter is Over Capacity” error message.

Since ramping up their infrastructure and now claiming to have 100 million users, the Fail Whale has been appearing with much less frequency. But on New Year’s Eve, the volume of greetings was just too much and overwhelmed the Twitterverse’s servers.

I put two and two together and deduced that this was a SouthEast Asian thing. After all,  Twitter is especially strong in Social Media happy strongholds like Indonesia and Philippines. And Japan has traditionally been a Twitter mad nation, being the first country outside of the US to have a Twitter office).

The Economic Times in London put it all in perspective by posting that Twitter clocked in a staggering 16,197 Tweets per second around midnight Japan time, which was a transaction rate that was enough to bring down the servers.

LONDON: Social networking site Twitter was out of action for over an hour in Britain after it was overloaded with New Year messages.

The site crashed around 3 p.m. Saturday. It coincided with midnight celebrations in Japan when revellers were sending a record 16,197 tweets per second, the Daily Mail reported Sunday.

The overload meant no one could post new messages or read existing ones. Instead, frustrated users were greeted with the error message: “Twitter is over capacity.”

The site returned to working order but then stopped on several other occasions, prompting speculation that it was being hit by the arrival of New Year in different parts of the world.

The meltdown happened as the world welcomed in 2012, a year of historic importance for Britain, with the Olympics, the Paralympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee set to be defining moments.

Up to 250,000 people poured into Central London, some in Trafalgar Square and others watching the pyrotechnics centred on the London Eye, the Mail said.

In Tokyo, people released helium balloons in front of the Tokyo Tower at midnight with notes attached listing their hopes for 2012. Many wished for a better year, following the earthquake and tsunami of 2011, the newspaper added.

The site eventually went back up, and as the celebrations creeped through the date lines towards the West, the servers held fast.

Which all indicate that Asians really take New Year much more seriously than the west, and that Twitter is becoming a preferred communications channel for ringing in the new year. #hny2012

Photo credit: New Year celebration photo – shot in Eastwood, Quezon City by Santi Magno. 

Ramona Bautista takes her Sister Act to Twitter

Murder suspect on the lam Ramona Bautista (aka Ramona Revilla, Mara Bautista-Revilla, etc) briefly hit worldwide trending status on Twitter last night when Filipino Twitter users took to their computers or phones to suggest alternate movie titles for the hashtag #replacemovietitleswithRamona.

While the hashtag went viral quite fast, I’m afraid the submissions were less than inspired. As some one pointed out, you could just replace an entire movie title with the word “Ramona” and stop the meme in its tracks.

One wonders if Bautista/Revilla – rumored to have escaped to Istanbul, Turkey – got wind of this, and if the showbiz genes in her bloodstream got a bit of a tickle. Well probably not.

SMART Extends its Facebook Mobile App for Java Trial All the Way Till October 31

They said it was going to be free. And they were right. They said the free trial was going to last until October 14. But in that case, they were absolutely wrong. Because in a dramatic turn of events, tantamount to a mobile internet product manager momentarily taking leave of his senses, SMART’s Facebook for Java Mobile App free trial has been extended all the way till the end of the month, to October 31.

That’s right, Facebook nation. If you belong to the smartphone-deprived 95% of the nation’s mobile phone population, why let the upper 5% have all the fun – the fun of using mobile apps for social networking that is.

Facebook’s Mobile App for Java allows the previously lowly feature phone – who just happens to have mobile internet, a web browser, and the ability to run java apps – to run a full featured app from Facebook itself. Thus giving feature phone users a taste of the convenient app-driven mobile lifestyle enjoyed by the upper crust with their iPhones, Androids, Blackberries and other tools of the capitalist class.

Forget those graphics-challenged Facebook Zeroes. The Facebook Mobile app for Java is a full fledged Facebook client. Users can manage status updates, leave comments, reply to comments, check notifications, read and respond to private inbox messages, “Like”, upload photos, view photo albums, and all the accoutrements  of a Facebook app, using the phone you already own – which based on studies is most likely to be the feature phone you already use for texting and calling. Facebook claims 2,500 Java capable handsets are supported. A partial listing of compatible phones compiled by Facebook is posted on SMART’s Facebook app FAQ page here.

And best of all it’s FREE – free to download, free to use by SMART customers, until October 31. Thanks to a close partnership with Facebook, SMART has decided to offer this for free for a limited period. No internet charges to pay, just download, install, and Facebook away. Greet your friends, leave a funny comment, take a photo, spread a meme. You can absolutely go to town with this – right till October 31.

Complete details of the offer are posted here.

In a nutshell, let’s assumed you checked out your phone, established that it has a web browser (and can thus access the internet). Just to be on the safe side you can test it by accessing the Smart mobile portal at m.smart.com.ph – go on try it, that’s free (no internet charges).

Having established that, you can get the Facebook mobile app download link by texting FB to 211. This sends a free SMS to the phone with the link to http://fbapp.smart.com.ph (well the SMS does save you the trouble of typing that).

And here’s a video that explains what its all about if, like me, you happen to like videos.

 

Get Real: People still believe the DPWH is suing Adobe

Sometimes you just want to shake your head. A random search through Twitter tonight reveals that a lot of people still believe that satirical blog post that says the DPWH is suing Adobe for bad performance of Photoshop.

I guess I tried to do my part with this think piece I published on this blog. Even GMA News’ site had their own say (“Read More: Why You Should Really Click This Link“) but people will still believe what they want to believe.

In an ideal world, people actually read the whole article in the URL of a tweet before RT’ing or commenting. Well that world is the Planet Zorba. Not this one.

Here are a few zingers picked up from tonight’s fishing expedition: