Rather than a story of connecting on IM with some people chatting I would like to put forth a few insights & potential ideas which may be the future technologies in mobile computing. India is on the verge of becoming a smart phone superpower. In few years smart phones would become more & more economical & make into hands of most of the Indians. Different people will use different apps based on their profession passion, hobby, day to day living, but surely everyone needs to connect with their family & friends anyway. So there needs to be a most economical method of information exchange quickly at least for small text messages like I reached office, on way to home etc. Sometimes we can do away with full duplex communication, isn't it ? This is where the currently competing IM's like WeChat, WhatsApp, gtalk/hangout, FB chat come into picture & really serve this purpose well.
In some countries in past & even now I suppose, like minded people like scholars, philosophers or so would hang out in small groups near a river or pub & discuss various ideas. This would enrich their knowledge in their respective fields, solve problems, make progress on a particular stuck topic. This is a great approach for creating community for working towards new ideas & achieving new frontiers in science technology or any other domain. This kind of unofficial meetings really help rather than closed room meetings which bind you to rules of an organization. Free thinking & connecting with the community can make faster discoveries & inventions.
If I could connect with five or more people in the past, then I would connect with the great physicists like Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Paul Dirac, Edwin Hubble etc. What a wonderful opportunity to learn new discoveries happening. There was so much physics happening those days. So may wonderful discoveries. It's the ideas which intrigue me rather than the end results i.e. the journey towards the end result is more fun rather than the end result itself. Besides the best teachers like Feynman etc could reach towards a larger set of audience if a video/voice chat was available at that time. If people like Einstein, Feynman, Dirac could create a community in which the public could be included, then the society would be more open minded to fund these scientific experiments going on. I suppose if mobiles with 3G internet speed & chat/audio video features were available that time, then all could come together for a casual meet from the comfort of their homes itself. Even today, we can have a cloud of like minded people discussing on various topics. People could join in in some community & discuss , ask questions get answers etc using a IM instantly.
We are a group of Amateur Astronomers from Bangalore from a community called BAS- Bangalore Astronomical Society, a non-profit Amateur astronomy organization aimed at popularizing astronomy both as a science & a hobby. Such IM's & group chats can help people getting updates about something interesting events to watch out in sky for instance. Say a halo is visible around the sun, moon. Just drop a message to the group chat already created. It would reach to say 100 people. Some of them who may be interested in photography will grab a camera to capture the event. Some of them may grab their telescopes to view the Jupiter near moon or events like that. People can ask questions & get answers instantly.
Coming from fiction to reality, my friends are my inspiration, they are my Einstein, Feynman etc. So a community can be created & nurtured & everyone learns in the process. It would be very nice to get a google hangout kind of experience on mobile phone with IM as well with the feature to turn ON/OFF video feed as that determines the data downloaded. there is a lot of potential for the IM's in advertising domain as well apart from the above topic. All the best WeChat. I will look forward to flock together bringing like minded people connected through WeChat.
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