Here the bottle floats in a night-time ocean, I guess because it’s evening in Haidian/Beijing, where it thinks I’m from (the Weixin version I have on my phone didn’t allow me to input an location outside of China (update: of course, it knows where I am anyway with location tracking). Without video you don’t have to worry about acres of naked strangers, but you can still have a pretty good conversation in more-or-less realtime with instant voicemessaging. Yes, there are still lots of guys looking for MMs but you can just throw those bottles back.

I’ve thrown out my own drift bottles in spoken English and Chinese and had chats with people in Beijing, Wuhan, Chengdu, and Taibei about random life-y details, and there was one soliloquy by a young Beijinger about finding love after the age of 25.  Just this evening I picked up a bottle that said: I’ve made too many mistakes, I’m afraid, and I don’t want to go on. I wrote back: Don’t be afraid, everything will be okay. Received a thanks. Hope it helped.

Since the start of the year my voice functionality for throwing or replying to drift bottles has inexplicably disappeared, but am assuming it’s a version problem and hoping it goes back to both. I agree with TechRice’s Sunny Ye that 2012 should be Weixin’s year – and maybe not just in China…Not only are there lots of people who could practice Chinese by using it, but there’s nothing like it in the mainstream US app space and I, for one, am trying to get my colleagues and friends to adopt it as well.  The walkie-talkie like voice-messaging makes voice calls much more convenient and fun for those of us who don’t love talking on the phone in realtime.

Update: threw out a drift bottle asking about why I couldn’t use voice feature anymore and apparently lots of people are having the same problem after the recent upgrade.  If you friend the person, you can talk directly with them…but the whole point is that you might not ever want to connect with them again.  If you use the “shake” feature, though, which tells you where someone else is shaking their phone at the same time, you can connect with people directly via voice. Since I’m in the US, I get linked with people who are 9000+ kilometers away, shaking their phones in a time zone 16 hours ahead…

Ai’s blog has transcripts after transcripts of calls to nursery schools, elementary schools, middle schools, education and civil affairs and government offices at the municipal, county, and provincial levels, where the caller tries to get specific numbers of the dead, and their names.  There is a rhythm to the conversations and you can, if you want, learn something about how to talk to someone in an official position in a way that more or less works.  Not works, as in, the caller gets what he or she wants, but works in that you can have an actual conversation.  Which isn’t always easy.

A few of the schools give actual names and numbers–2 students at an elementary scbool, names, ages–but most go something like this one from a call made on March 13, 2009 at 4:13 pm to the Chengdu Ministry of Education.  Phone number 028-61881710, length of call 36 min 2 second. The caller is not Ai Weiwei but a woman whose name isn’t given on the transcript.  Her words in bold, the person at the Ministry in regular font.

Hello, is this the Chengdu Ministry of Education?  Are you Section Chief Liu?

Yes, hello.

We are Beijing, individuals, we want to get the list of student names and numbers for those in the 5.12 tragedy.  Can you provide it for us?

That, I can’t provide it for you.

Why?

Because you are an individual, and what does an individual want that for?

We, along with some netizens, are very concerned about the specifics of the situation. For instance, broad numbers are no longer meaningful.  We want more detailed materials.

We’ve already distributed relevant materials.

But we still don’t have accurate materials!  This is not fair for people who want to donate or who have already donated; they at least have the right to know.

Donated!  You can go find the Civil Administration Department!

But as for the issue of the student deaths, the Civil Administration Department can only provide limited information.  The Education Departments should provide accurate data.

There are a lot of related materials, and we’ve already taken care of the list of specific student names.

Can you release that list to the public?

We can’t release it, there is a problem of privacy.

There couldn’t be a privacy problem because those materials are exactly the kind of thing that the Department of Education should publicize, and every citizen has the right to know.

You have to see if the families are willing to tell, some of them aren’t willing to tell, they don’t even want to talk about it.  The data you want are all at the Civil Administration Department, we’ve given it to them.

Even if the Civil Administration Department has the data, you too should be able to provide it.

This is about localized management, maybe you should ask the Publicity Department.  Call 114, the Ministry of Statistics or the Ministry of Civil Affairs can give it to you.  Online too.

So if you love this stuff too, you’ll definitely want to watch the brilliant video of the iorgane Touch Cool phone.

It’s got music! film! games! Internet! QQ! It’s “really fantastic! It is so cool writing message with single hand! Apple? No! This is orange!” Umm, except it’s spelled iorgane.  Right.