TiVo Saved My Marriage!
Ok, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration. It dawned on me the other day, though, that it's been a long time since there have been any fights in our household over whose TV show we're going to watch. Even better, in those increasingly rare moments where my wife and I do both get to sit down and watch TV, we always get to watch something we like, as opposed to whatever happens to be on.As quickly as I've already taken it for granted, time-shifting is really the ultimate convenience (and usability feature). The two most sought after commodities in our culture are time and money, and time is the only one that's truly irreplaceable.
The funny thing, though, is that TiVo and podcasting seem to be getting most of the credit for time-shifting, when we already have one of the most amazing time-shifting devices of all, the internet. Somehow, since TV and radio always tied us down, we've found the freedom remarkable, but the internet has time-shifted virtually everything we do. We can shop, do research, or catch up with friends whenever we have a spare moment, even if it's at 3am.
It's amazing how, just over a decade into its mass-adoption, we already take almost everything about the internet for granted. The ability of the worldwide web and, increasingly, all mass media, to be both time-shifted and place-shifted (with the advent of smaller laptops, PC-based media centers, etc.) has barely begun, and it will continue to revolutionize much more than just how we watch TV.
Kevin
· Monday, February 5"time and money"
I don't see a difference between the two unless one feels he or she has an excess of the second, because most people end up using the a lot of the first making a little to a lot of the second.
Mike Maddaloni
· Friday, February 2If you use Vonage, then voicemail messages are made available as WAV files, so you can even extend this model further.
When it gets to the point that it's the *only* way that we communicate, then we really have to worry...!
mp/m