Take old gift cards and turn them into coasters…
But don’t we have enough coasters in this world? And coasters that essential that we have to keep on making more? Can’t we just think a little harder and figure out other ways of recycling(or upcycling) our used materials than… Coasters?
Here’s a better idea, for saving paper: Reduce the margins in your word processor to save paper.
Looking at the Twitters, the Facebook statuses, the Tumblrs, and all the other micro-content services that broadcast your state of mind to your network, I can’t help but be nostalgic and hearken back to the we-knew-it-way-back-when of the .plan file.
Back in the day, when all you had was UNIX, and you used mh or mail or elm or pine to access e-mail, you could create a text file called “.plan.” Then, when anyone “fingered” you (similar, at least by metaphor, to the “poke” functionality in Facebook), they could see when you last logged in and what was written in your .plan file (and also your .project file).
If you were crafty, you’d run as a daemon “masterplan” which did a DNS lookup whenever someone fingered you (i.e., read your .plan file) and then tried to tell you what username fingered you and when. Masterplan ultimately died because of the number of DNS lookups it had to perform to determine your fingerer—it would take ages and bog down the system. (This was also possible back then because fingering was limited to user accounts on the same system. It wouldn’t work with the multiple servers and clients model of the current Internet.)
But the .plan and the .project had purpose: Really, what is your current “plan,” and what is the current, smaller “project” that you’re working on? It ultimately morphed into the “plan” being a quote from a song or some funny quip that communicated to the other semi-anonymous, obfuscated user (Who the hell is “97psh” or “burble chips”?) what your predilection of mood or drunkenness was at at the moment. It also worked because, unlike perhaps Twitter, you were *always* UNIX to read your e-mail. You couldn’t “background” the OS like you can close or background the Twitter Firefox window. It was more like your status while you were cruising around Facebook.
But just like .plan and .project had purpose, maybe Twitter or Facebook or Google Talk can have purpose as well. It’s an area where you can tell people what you’re working on–and whether you are interruptable or not, in general, or for a specific purpose.
Working in a law firm, I keep track of my time by client/matter number. What if that client/matter topic was posted on a Twitter? Then when someone wants to contact me, say, by IM, they can mouse over my name and see that I’m working on a certain C/M. Then they can say, quietly to themselves, “Hey, I’m working on that right now, too, so maybe I should IM him now!” Or alternatively, “Eh, he’s working on something else, so maybe I won’t bug him now.” And then have an application—yet to be written—where it matches my Twittered C/M with every else’s Twittered C/M and shows me who else is working on my project at that time.
Great place for someone to build on Jabber for a law-firm specific IM system.