Jianjun's Blog

Fring is an integrated instant messaging/VoIP service that works on your mobile device. With Fring, you can log into your Skype, Twitter, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Gtalk, ICQ, AIM, Fring and SIP accounts simultaneously over wireless plans such as EDGE, GPRS and WIFI.

Fring promises encrypted data transfer when you submit credentials of these services through the mobile interface, giving you peace of mind.

Once you are logged in, it automatically imports all your contacts. A green icon means the contact is online and available. Away, busy or unavailable buddies are marked orange. When a buddy is offline, the icon turns gray.

Fring’s intuitive interface makes you feel at home the first time you use it. As you see in the photo above, Chinese characters in my MSN buddy’s name are nicely displayed.

Fring client is currently localized into 6 languages, including Simplified Chinese, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish. As they are still in Beta, I expect to see more languages over time and more professional translations.

Now Chinese users may feel confused when they see ‘On/Off’ under the ‘Show Fring Signature’, etc. menus being translated as “连接/断开”(Connect/Disconnect). Some other problems also need to be addressed.

How much bandwidth does Fring use and how about the sound quality?

Fring Support says each 1M bandwidth equals to 15 minutes of Fring call (Fring to Fring). I tried it on my EDGE plan. The bandwidth usage of the one-minute Fring test call was around 90K, and the sound quality was amazingly good! SkypeOut and SIP (I use FWD) calls, however, were not as satisfactory – in other words, you can’t use them for any serious communication and they use too much bandwidth. 3G/WIFI connections should give much better quality.

You can set Fring to run in the background if instant mobile messaging is important to you. When you receive a message or a call via Fring, it’ll alert you with distinctive tones. But the software does eat your battery. When I had it in the background for about 20 minutes, the battery became hot too.

Overall, Fring is still useful when you are traveling but suddenly have something urgent to discuss with your friend on MSN or you simply want to catch up with the Twitterati while waiting for your plane at the airport.

Fring website

OoVoo (what’s ooVoo? Read this post.) recently sent a survey request to users asking for feedback on its functions and possible improvements. Most of the survey questions compared ooVoo to Skype, which gave me a feeling that they were committed (and in the end ready) to grab some market share from that big brother.

However, a few days later when a new version of ooVoo came into being, it only let me down. Instead of offering more useful features, it takes away some of the coolest and charges a fee if you want them back.

The standard (free) ooVoo option now only has these:

Like Facebook, one of the charming features of Twitter is its extendability. Although standard Twitter functions are kind of limited, third-party applications make up for this perfectly. Here are some of the services I used and liked:

1. If you think text tweets are too boring and would like to share your snapshots on-site occasionally, give brightkite a try. Brightkite allows you to post your current location, notes or pictures via web, SMS (if in the US) or MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) – as an email.You may choose to link your brightkite and Twitter accounts so each time your update on brightkite, a new tweet appears on Twitter. Brightkite has a privacy option so you can always control how detailed your location should be shown to whom. Brightkite is currently in Beta and you need to wait for an invitation to participate. If you can’t get one from their website, leave me a message here. I’ll send one to your email on an availability basis.
2. Ever wondered who’s been following when you didn’t get follower notification? Or are you feeling frustrated when someone unfollows you after you followed them back? With Twitter Karma, in just a few clicks you will find all those information plus a couple of other functions.
3. If you are one of those twitterbuds who can’t stop tweeting even during sleep, here’s a good one for you. Tweetlater sends out pre-scheduled tweets at your own local time. You may also use it as a reminder service tweeting to yourself. But this only works when you use, again, a third-party service notifying you of such tweets. Another use of Tweetlater is auto-follow your new followers. However, since Twitter spammers are on the rise, take the risk when you use this.
4. Did you know many of the most active Twitter users don’t visit Twitter website to interact with other friends? There are many Twitter ‘enhancement’ applications, one of which is Thwirl. Thwirl is an Abode Air application that sits in your system tray. Besides all standard Twitter functions, it also gives you a sound alert when @yourusername appears in the middle of someone’s tweet body. This is a great addition. Twitter by default doesn’t send the message to your ‘reply’ tab unless @yourusername comes first in a tweet. Some other nice functions:
   • re-tweeting a useful message, spreading it far and wide;
   • keyword-searching twitterland messages;
   • shortening long URLs with snurl;
   • picture-sharing via TwitPic.

There are many other great Twitter extensions. But since I didn’t have a chance to try them out, I won’t be able to cover them until I update this post later.

Nice tweeting…