Hacker News Reader

Curious - all of our parents' preferred methods of communication cost money...letters, long distance phone calls, mobile phone calls. All of Josh's sister's (and her peer sets) methods of communication cost nothing (Instagram, Facebook, Kik, Twitter, Tumblr). Just an observation. Implications of this? Will companies one day pay us to talk to each other?!

Separately - isn't Skype basically Facetime over 3G/4G (and not just wi-fi)? What is Skype lacking here?

View on HN

Josh's sister's (and her peer sets) methods of communication cost nothing

You gotta have a data plan to access these from anywhere. Most schools don't have wifi. So, the actually can cost more than phone calls, letter etc...

Fair point actually - didn't consider that the cost is embedded. That said, How often are those the data hogs? (Anecdotally from myself, I rarely come near the data caps). My assumption is that even today, video apps are the most data intensive - outside of those, are folks hitting their data caps on a regular basis?

In my point of view, skype is way too slow on ios. It takes ages to load and lags somehow.

I experience this also. In addition, the UI is kludged into iOS - they just did their best to port the desktop UI. It works, as apps go, but obviously wasn't built from the ground up for mobile.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com