twitter – ɔimoɈɒ

iPad Adventures in TwitterLand

On the iPhone, I use two Twitter clients. For my main Twitter account, I use Tweetie 2 and for some of the minor accounts I use EchoFon. I use EchoFon because it has Push Notifications and the accounts in that client receive messages infrequently. Tweetie 2 won me over with it’s excellent support for geo-tagging … Continue reading “iPad Adventures in TwitterLand”

On the iPhone, I use two Twitter clients. For my main Twitter account, I use Tweetie 2 and for some of the minor accounts I use EchoFon. I use EchoFon because it has Push Notifications and the accounts in that client receive messages infrequently. Tweetie 2 won me over with it’s excellent support for geo-tagging Tweets. I geo-tag everything I can. Between the two of these clients, I’m pretty comfortable.

I foresee difficulties ahead as Tweetie has been purchased by Twitter and it’s usual that official clients compromise so much that they permit others to overtake them.

On iPad, it’s somewhat different. There is no clear winner for me for a native Twitter client, and I’ll tell you why.

Twittelator is nice.

I love the floating palettes. I like the animation. I hate the big stupid envelope and I dislike the limitations around the main timeline view. And my dislike gets worse when I consider the portrait view. It’s just a jumble. But my biggest issue is in the UI for creating a Tweet. It seems I have to go to the Drafts tab and hit a + sign. Then a tiny little field entry seems to bubble up from the keyboard. I just think it’s a bad user experience.

Tweeterena 2 I don’t like.

I do not like Tweeterena. It’s simply boring. I don’t like the way it wastes the space available and the design just rotates without showing anything cool between landscape and portrait. It’s just snoozeville.

I’ve never liked TweetDeck.

I just don’t like the way it lays stuff out. Whether that’s on Mac, on iPhone or, seemingly, the iPad. I just don’t like it.

Twitteriffic works. But meh.

There’s nothing wrong with it and the UI is nicer than Tweeterena but really, is that the best they could come up with? It’s a complete waste of the space making it an upsized version of the iPhone client.

It stings therefore that the IconFactory declare that the iPad made them rethink software because it’s really the second most boring Twitter client. But one thing it has over the rest of them – it’s reliable. Never once failed to refresh.

But what pisses me off is the fact that to get rid of the ads in the ‘ad supported’ version, I have to perform an in-app purchase. In-app purchase on iPad is currently only available to folk with a US iTunes account. And there is no standalone Premium version that I can buy. And I really don’t like ads. So you’ve shot yourself in the foot there, guys.

Twitepad has a lot of potential but it needs work.

The layout I love but the bits and pieces I dislike. I love the built-in browser pane, I love the buttons and the wee pop-up where you enter a tweet. I like these things. I like the Conversation support (a chain link in the tweet).

Things I don’t like. There’s no Location bar. Just a search bar. That’s annoying. It should at least work like the Chrome dual function location/search bar. Or rather – it does work a bit like that – but it’s not done nicely. The domains resolve but there’s a weird disconnect in the UI. Changing the default home page from the annoying InfoXenter page is not done in the Settings app, but is done when you click the + sign, which is conventionally used to add bookmarks. So it was hidden when I looked because I didn’t want to add a bookmark! I don’t know what the Down arrow does at the bottom of the browser screen because all it seems to do is change to an up arrow when I tap it. I don’t like the placement of the tabs along the side – being in the middle of the screen feels wrong and I think it’s because they’re in the wrong order. And last, but not least, it doesn’t always load my timeline when I switch to it and getting it to refresh at all is a challenge which makes me think they’re routing it through their own server or something? No other client has this issue but @Twitepad thinks it’s a Twitter issue. Not helping, guys. That said, having an active Twitter account is something to be commended because they tell me they’ve an update in the works and a few bugs will be ironed out.

So it seems like there’s heaps I don’t like about TwitePad but to be honest, I think it has the most potential of current iPad Twitter clients.

global conversations

Graham Linehan writes: We are sharing links to thought-provoking articles, we are making each other laugh, we are keeping each other up to speed on current events…we are communicating with each other on a platform that encourages good manners, that rewards us when we’re interesting and lightly smacks our hand when we’re not. For the … Continue reading “global conversations”

Graham Linehan writes:

We are sharing links to thought-provoking articles, we are making each other laugh, we are keeping each other up to speed on current events…we are communicating with each other on a platform that encourages good manners, that rewards us when we’re interesting and lightly smacks our hand when we’re not. For the first time in history, the human race is having a global conversation, and despite all our differences, we actually seem to be getting on quite well.

Public Twitter fights notwithstanding, this is the beauty of Twitter. I see Twitter beating the broadcast news by hours and the newspapers by days. I see people of all ages talking in a public manner and without much needing for policing – it’s the first time I’ve seen this kind of conversation without it seeming seedy and ‘chatroom-like’. Some people don’t get it and liken it to a chatroom but that just shows they’ve never engaged with it.

It’s not about reading how your favourite singer is “making a cup of tea” or how your favourite cycling athlete is “going out for a ride”. It’s more about finding who within your network – both geographical and social is doing something exciting, who’s holding an event, who’s baking cupcakes, who’s wanting to talk tech, or beauty or creativity or whatever.

Q. whom I should follow on Twitter?

I can give you an idea of who I *think* you might want to follow 🙂 but that’s not the same thing. There’s social media “experts”, VCs and Angels, technologists, entrepreneurs and they’re mixed with stay-at-home mums and make-up fanatics. There’s plenty of arseholes too – but then it’s the Internet 🙂 I’ve stopped following … Continue reading “Q. whom I should follow on Twitter?”

I can give you an idea of who I *think* you might want to follow 🙂 but that’s not the same thing.

There’s social media “experts”, VCs and Angels, technologists, entrepreneurs and they’re mixed with stay-at-home mums and make-up fanatics. There’s plenty of arseholes too – but then it’s the Internet 🙂

I’ve stopped following most of the “A listers” like Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble – because they

a) follow too many people and therefore they would never hear you
b) constantly babble which means you miss good stuff from others
c) are wrapped in their own ego bubble.

I still follow Michael Arrington/TechCrunch because he’s very real – he only follows 590 people but is followed by 203000 people. Compare that to Scoble who follows 75000 people and is followed by 68000. If you follow too many people then you’ll be labelled as a spammer.

With Twitter, the emphasis is on listening, not talking. Who do you want to hear from?

Something new for Twitter in ’09?

Today I was complaining about the poor suite of features in the default Mac OS X Twitter client, Twitterific. @IanRobinson pointed me at this from Otter Software which also has the bylines… Spring 2009 will see the arrival of a new way to integrate your Address Book with Twitter. and In the summer of 2009 … Continue reading “Something new for Twitter in ’09?”

Today I was complaining about the poor suite of features in the default Mac OS X Twitter client, Twitterific.

@IanRobinson pointed me at this from Otter Software

which also has the bylines…

Spring 2009 will see the arrival of a new way to integrate your Address Book with Twitter.

and

In the summer of 2009 we will be launching Digestive, a fresh approach to Twitter.

Now I’m all excited…

{You can follow Simon Wolf on Twitter)

Twitiquette

What is the etiquette around Twitter? pcnerd37 writes on the Global Geek Blog: “With the explosion in popularity that Twitter has received, especially with the massive usage at SXSW, it has become very clear that some facets of twitter are beginning to annoy people. For the benefit of all twitter users, I have made a … Continue reading “Twitiquette”

What is the etiquette around Twitter?

pcnerd37 writes on the Global Geek Blog:

“With the explosion in popularity that Twitter has received, especially with the massive usage at SXSW, it has become very clear that some facets of twitter are beginning to annoy people. For the benefit of all twitter users, I have made a list of rules for Twitter usage.”

A lot of these rules are pretty much the same as the netiquette so no big surprise there.

I’m wondering though about the etiquette specific to Twitter – like – if you get followed, is it necessary to rabbit out a “thanks” to each and every person? It really just ups reduces the signal:noise ratio even further. Bollocks to it I say. I don’t think it has any place in the conversation.

I’ve only unfollowed three people so far. These would be @guykawasaki, @jasoncalacanis and @scobleizer. Reason? Too much irrelevant signal. It’s not strictly noise when you’re talking about when it’s luminaries like these guys but at the same time, they’re hearing so much from their thousands of followers that there’s no conversation. And they update sufficiently frequently that Twitter just turns into their monologue. They put out signal, they only hear noise.

If you do get unfollowed and you’re informed about it by a tool like Qwitter, then please don’t waffle and beg and ask why. It’s just sad. Fix your signal.

More on stolen time…

Following on from yesterdays post – how much time have you spent writing on Twitter? Add to that you’ll have to guess how much time you’ve spent reading Tweets. Are we feeling productive yet? Related posts: DE-clutter Twitter: so how does it make money? Ten Apps I Want… iPad Adventures in TwitterLand

Following on from yesterdays post – how much time have you spent writing on Twitter?

Add to that you’ll have to guess how much time you’ve spent reading Tweets.

Are we feeling productive yet?

Maemo now supports Twitter

Maemo now supports Twitter Still looks gawdawful. Especially compared to Twinkle, the latest of the iPhone Twitter apps: I still find it hard to justify breaking out my N800 when I have an iPhone. The UI is still like wading through molasses. Related posts: Nokia N800 versus iPod touch Google Calendar? 30 Boxes? Yahoo!? Entourage … Continue reading “Maemo now supports Twitter”

Maemo now supports Twitter

Still looks gawdawful. Especially compared to Twinkle, the latest of the iPhone Twitter apps:

I still find it hard to justify breaking out my N800 when I have an iPhone. The UI is still like wading through molasses.

Thinking about iPhone 2.0

In the next week, we’re going to see what Apple has on offer from WWDC. Everyone is expecting some news about the new iPhone models because, with the exception of a minor memory storage upgrade, the iPhone will have been on sale for 1 year without any changes and Apple likes to upgrade their devices every 9 months – 1 year. So it’s not a bad speculation. What are we likely to see in terms of hardware? Faster wireless is for one thing. It’s a little early for solar-panel displays but we could reasonably see the camera gaining a hardware ‘button’ and a small camera mounted on the front of the device for video conferencing.

We’re also going to see the new iPhone operating system. The big news there is obviously the Application Store. Why do I want it? So I can play a couple of casual games while I’m not in a good network region. So I can read my RSS feeds while mobile without the clunkiness of the online readers. So I can twitter by only sending my data and receiving others twitter data rather than having to receive the text and graphics from pockettweets. It would be nice to be able to receive MMS messages and also to be able to forward the odd SMS but, to be honest, there are a lot more easy wins in this respect. Double-tap to zoom in a mail message for the idiots who keep sending me 800-pixel wide images as their email signature?

waffle writes some speculation about the 3G iPhone

“Loading freeze-dried sites from bookmarklets using the current iPhone software takes almost as long as loading the site itself, which suggests an efficiency problem in the browser and rendering software, not the network hardware.”

Except that the bookmarklets on your home screen are just bookmarks – they’re not freeze dried copies of the web sites themselves. The renderer in MobileSafari over EDGE is quick enough to outpace the slower renderers on faster 3G networks so I think we can reasonably expect that if the EDGE limits are removed, we shall get much faster data and therefore faster rendering.

Lots to think about and only a week to go.

Twitter: so how does it make money?

A thoughtful piece from 37Signals on the necessity to monetise Twitter “That doesnâ€™t exonerate them from building a more stable service. Especially not considering that they have five million dollars of other peopleâ€™s money to do it with and a few years of practice.” “If the growth in Twitter usage was mirrored by an equal … Continue reading “Twitter: so how does it make money?”

A thoughtful piece from 37Signals on the necessity to monetise Twitter

“That doesnâ€™t exonerate them from building a more stable service. Especially not considering that they have five million dollars of other peopleâ€™s money to do it with and a few years of practice.”

“If the growth in Twitter usage was mirrored by an equal growth in Twitter profits, the necessary investments needed for infrastructure would be self-evident. But when the money pot is an ever-shrinking gift-with-strings-attached, you canâ€™t just blow your way out of the issue with cash.”

It’s true. Twitter’s scaling issues are a bugbear in their sides because as their userbase is growing, the Potential Value (in terms of Attention) of the company grows but the Actual Value (in terms of revenue) stays stagnant. And they have a huge amount of Virtual Debt in the shape of investors who will want a return. So, yes, the service itself is cool but is it sustainable?

It seems to me they have three options:

Someone buys them for a gazillion dollars. This is what happened to Jaiku. Google bought them and then kinda ignored them. I guess it was a defensive buy? It then becomes someone else’s problem at how to make money out of it? I must say I don’t mind the way Twitterific handles it – advertising sponsored play is good enough. This is the model that the investors will likely want.
They find out a way to make money. What about building in the feature that Twitter-ites (Twitterlanders? Tweeters?) could make their own adverts? Anyone can tweet but Tweetvertising allows graphics? Maybe even audio or video? Maybe even some opt-in tracking (as if I’m being forced to watch adverts, at least make them interesting to me!). Or maybe offer Tweets separate to SMS to mobile phone companies? Make it unlimited for people who have signed onto Tweet plans but limit those of us who slip in under the radar with data. That’s certainly going to reduce some of the ‘noise’. I am guessing here that they already get a percentage of every SMS sent them? Unless this is truly revolutionary, it’s probably not going to please the investors.
They break out the infrastructure and make it P2P. This could shift the responsibility for uptime to others and allow them to host their own options for advertising or value-added services. Maybe even license the software out so there are a bazillion twitter servers out there. This would be the method by which Twitter could sneak up and murder Instant Messaging in it’s sleep. I tweeted recently that Twitter was not Broadcast IM. But, of course, it is.

End of the day, it’s not my problem but I wonder what happens when they spent the last cent of the VC money they have received. Does the world go dark?

Pat Phelan on Twitter. Unfollow the popular

“First one Iâ€™ll call it Broadcasting Mode. Fucking annoying. I un-followed Guy Kawazaki for this reason. 200 tweets per day with hyperlink.Duh!! Have you heard about RSS feeds?? What are you trying to do? The worst usage someone can do of Twitter is definitely Broadcasting.” – Pat Phelan – Is Twitter Gone Mad This is … Continue reading “Pat Phelan on Twitter. Unfollow the popular”

“First one Iâ€™ll call it Broadcasting Mode. Fucking annoying. I un-followed Guy Kawazaki for this reason. 200 tweets per day with hyperlink.Duh!! Have you heard about RSS feeds?? What are you trying to do? The worst usage someone can do of Twitter is definitely Broadcasting.”

– Pat Phelan – Is Twitter Gone Mad

This is why I unfollowed Jason Calacanis last week and unfollowed Scoble and Kawasaki today. It’s all adverts and ‘aren’t we having a great life’. I went onto Twitter because of the promise of less advertising (though it seems that’s coming as they monetise their assets blah blah)

But these A-listers whom we all flock to for wisdom and who follow thousands of people (and thoughtfully ignore most of them) They provided absolutely nothing in content. All noise.