iTweet featured in "The Voice of the iPod Generation"
The January 2008 issue of iProng Magazine just came out and I am featured in an interview about iTweet, the Twitter UI for the iPhone (and now the desktop) that is my pet project. iProng is an iPod- and iPhone-centric website, magazine, and podcast that is headed up by Bill Palmer (no relation, I swear!).
iProng's tagline is "Voice of the iPod Generation" and this really describes the focus of their collective efforts well. The magazine and podcasts feature Mac-geek interests such as Macworld Expo articles, interviews with Web/iPhone developers like Joe Hewitt (and, um, me I guess), coverage of PodCamp, BlogWorld Expo and VON events, and also cultural interests like album/concert reviews, interviews with musicians like Silverchair, Rebecca Loebe and Internet darling Matthew Ebel, features about yoga podcasting, iPod games and more. There's a little something for everyone.
iProng has a main website where you can contact them for information, read reviews and find out where they are appearing at events. You can find the magazines available for download here. They are also provided in an iPhone-friendly format here (nice touch!)
I've been listening to the podcasts for a while and I'll vouch that they're as entertaining as the magazine. You can listen to them from your browser or subscribe to them in iTunes for free.
Bill lives in Los Angeles and has a remarkable talent for getting pictures of himself with celebrities. His Twitter updates often make me laugh and miss living in Hollywood, you can follow him here if you're interested.
Click here to download the latest issue of iProng Magazine. (My interview is on page 4!)
Leave comments on this blog, or let's talk on Twitter or Facebook.
Create groupings and search the Twitterverse for information!
I started experimenting with the Terraminds Twitter search API last night and wired it into iTweet, my Twitter UI. Originally my intent had been to add the capability of searching #hashtags, as a way of better indexing my own tweets. After I spent a while with it and I was happy with the tagging implementation, I realized that I could also add a simple search box to the interface and it would be useful on a different level.
Now you can do a quick search to mine the Twitterverse for anything you want, in the same place you do your Twittering from. Enjoy.
You can also embed groupings into your Twitterstream by employing the use of #hashtags. These links will appear in green, and clicking them will lead you to a search page for that term. iTweet also "cleans" the pound sign from your search tag to make a nicer-looking, easier to read Tweet. (But yes, it still counts in your allotted total of 140 characters.) Easy, right?
What's the big difference between the two methods (tagging and searching)? The system of tagging is a more specific way of tracking and contextualizing conversations on Twitter; people are embedding the tags purposefully, to create ad hoc channels or groupings. What TerraMinds does is different, it's a generalized search engine for the Twitter service. You can read more about #hashtags in my blog and at the Twitter Fan Wiki. Stowe Boyd and Chris Messina were early proponents of the idea and they have written about it at length as well.
Hashtags.org also has a great service for employing hashtags. Why am I using Terraminds for #hashtags then? Users must be following the @hashtags Twitter user in order to have their tweets scanned and registered by the hashtags.org service. At the time of this writing there are only about 620 users following @hashtags, so IMO this service doesn't really permeate the Twitterverse enough to establish ubiquity (yet). For this reason, I recommend following @hashtags on Twitter. I would prefer to use the hashtags.org service until Twitter adds this feature natively; unfortunately at this time I don't feel like hashtags.org is widespread enough to add it to iTweet without confusing a ton of people. (I also do not know if they support 3rd-party services via an API.)
The development of iTweet has been very fun due to feedback from you, the users...so let me know what you think. Get in there and try to break that sucker, as I know you will. ;)
Leave comments on this blog, or let's talk on Twitter or Facebook.
Cross-pollinate social networks? Sure! Join the iTweet Facebook group.Note: iTweet.net's browser interface currently works great in Firefox and Safari. I will debug it for the evil Internet Explorer as soon as possible. I will also be adding the search and tagging functions to the iPhone version as soon as possible.
Enough people have expressed interest in a desktop browser version of iTweet (examples: one, two, three) that I started putting one together tonight. Twitter's recent dropping of the hyperlinks in @replies is fixed by just a few lines of code in iTweet... so if you like using @replies, here you go. A lot of iTweet's functions are built around convenience for the iPhone, so expect this version to change a lot as I modify it for the desktop browser. Eliminating the constraints of bandwidth and Mobile Safari's funkiness, lots more is possible. On the other hand, without Safari's wonderful CSS3 support, this version doesn't have all the lovely rounded corners of the iPhone version.
Anyways, it's a work in progress, but seeing how everyone misses the linked @replies I thought I'd just publish this early so people can use it. Enjoy.
Click here to give it a try.
So far I have only clicked around this version a bit in Firefox and Safari on the Mac before I blew through the API limit on both my accounts. I will test and debug it for other browsers soon.
I welcome your opinions and feature requests for the desktop browser version; please leave notes for me in the comments.
Or maybe even better, follow my updates on Twitter and join the conversation there.
The January 2008 issue of iProng Magazine just came out and I am featured in an interview about iTweet, the Twitter UI for the iPhone (and now the desktop) that is my pet project. iProng is an iPod- and iPhone-centric website, magazine, and podcast that is headed up by Bill Palmer (no relation, I swear!).
iProng's tagline is "Voice of the iPod Generation" and this really describes the focus of their collective efforts well. The magazine and podcasts feature Mac-geek interests such as Macworld Expo articles, interviews with Web/iPhone developers like Joe Hewitt (and, um, me I guess), coverage of PodCamp, BlogWorld Expo and VON events, and also cultural interests like album/concert reviews, interviews with musicians like Silverchair, Rebecca Loebe and Internet darling Matthew Ebel, features about yoga podcasting, iPod games and more. There's a little something for everyone.
iProng has a main website where you can contact them for information, read reviews and find out where they are appearing at events. You can find the magazines available for download here. They are also provided in an iPhone-friendly format here (nice touch!)
I've been listening to the podcasts for a while and I'll vouch that they're as entertaining as the magazine. You can listen to them from your browser or subscribe to them in iTunes for free.
Bill lives in Los Angeles and has a remarkable talent for getting pictures of himself with celebrities. His Twitter updates often make me laugh and miss living in Hollywood, you can follow him here if you're interested.
Click here to download the latest issue of iProng Magazine. (My interview is on page 4!)
Leave comments on this blog, or let's talk on Twitter or Facebook.
I started experimenting with the 
