ant

Just a few days ago Twitter announced its acquisition of Tweetie, a popular Twitter iPhone app. Ev at Twitter says that Tweetie will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and made free (currently $2.99) in the iTunes App Store. I’m sure all of us are pleased that Twitter picked such a great iPhone app to have as the basis of their official app. When I reviewed Tweetie 2 a while back it was evident that atebits had displayed great innovations such as ‘pull to refresh’, ‘swipe’ and more. These features of Tweetie 2 have been adopted by many other iPhone apps which is increasingly testament to the innovation that Tweetie has shown.

Ev said that

“People are looking for an app from Twitter, and they’re not finding one. So, they get confused and give up.”

This seems to be the underlying motive on Twitters side in the acquisition of Tweetie and the possibility of many negative consequences arise:

The Death of Other Twitter Apps

This is probably the most likely effect of Twitter’s official iPhone app. Look at Facebook, one rarely sees another Facebook app for the iPhone that has enough users to compete with the official app. The likes of Echofon, Tweetsville, Twittelator, Twinkle, TweetDeck, Twitterific and many more are at risk of death. While I think Tweetie is the best app out there, these other apps boast many great features.

However this point can be refuted by the example of Flickr. They have a free and official app on the App Store however there are many great competing apps such as Flickit Pro, MobileFotos and Mobile Flickr that exist. Time will tell if these other apps die or not.

‘Walled Garden’ Effect

As demonstrated by Apple, it is highly unlikely but Twitter may start to impose a ‘walled garden’ on the third party Twitter apps due to their increasing range of ‘official’ apps. While this may seem like an extremely stupid approach, many others such as Facebook and TradeMe have done it to limit the use of external apps. Third party apps are what built Twitter and if they would make this move it could essentially kill it.

This would lead to a decrease in innovation as what essentially drives quality is competition.

Complete Lack of Innovation

This could be one of the worst consequences from this news. As the official Twitter iPhone app would be released, for Twitter there is little incentive such as revenue or user base to add more features and propel innovation in this niche. For atebits the prospect of many more sales and a greater user base drove him into making a greater Tweetie.

Another simmilar issue that presents itself is due to Twitter giving this iPhone app away for free, developers would have to decrease the price of their Twitter apps and even give them away for free in order to compete with the official iPhone app. Thus there will be little incentive for other developers to continue to innovate.

However while Loren Brichter is on the Twitter mobile dev team is is safe to say that we do have many great things to see.

What do you think is in store for the future of Twitter iPhone apps? Let everyone know in the comments!

So most New Zealanders would know that XT Mobile Network had an outage this morning and early afternoon. This again is to be expected with a new network and Telecom worked and the problem has since been resolved.

What has since been the issue is 2degrees behavior on its Twitter account concerning the XT Outage. This started off with a fairly simple tweet from Geekzone founder @freitasm about using 2degrees data during the XT Outage. After this tweet a vastly uncalled for and cheeky mock about the outage was sent to Mauricio from 2degrees.

After this tweet I sent a reply to their Twitter account as shown below:

This resulted in another conversation between their Twitter account and myself which basically resulted in them not responding and deleting their original mock tweet about the XT outage. No apology to Telecom either.

Now I hope I’m not the only one but I think this was a totally uncalled for mock against XT; for a company with an already bad image on Twitter due to their recent ‘spam attack’ they should really be working on improving their online image rather than lowering it. It’s an unwritten rule amongst telcos not to attack another telco while it’s down.

Maybe this post is a bit over the top? However a Vodafone employee in Hungary was fired for something similar, once again 2degrees I am unimpressed, I suggest you smartly sharpen your Twitter image before you lose even more potential and current customers.

With the release of Tweetie 2.1 today, Tweetie is and has been for a long time the best Twitter app for your iPhone. It’s phenomenal and combines two fundamental elements together, function and style. This is why I love it.

So you’re probably thinking why pay the extra $4.20 NZD for an app with a bit more functionality, after all all I want to do is tweet. I’ll tell you why. Instead of writing about all the awesome features of Tweetie, I’ll list my five favourite features. If you want the full list check it out.

Swipe

I absolutely love this feature. Simply swipe either  in the right or left direction over a tweet and a bunch of options will appear.
As shown to the left heaps of options appear that lets you do just about anything you want to with a tweet. You can first click to reply to the tweet, the most common option. If the tweet includes a link you can press the paperclip icon and you will be given secondary options to open, mail, repost or Instapaper the link. The multitude of options avalible allows you to do just about anything you want with the link. Thirdly and fourthy options are given to either view the persons profile or favourite the tweet. The last option allows you retweet, mail and translate the tweet.

Being given all these options from the Tweetie home screen is truly revolutional and adds a totally new dimension and ease of use to Twitter clients for the iPhone.

Composing a Tweet

So this must appear fairly basic right? All you need is some blank space and a keyboard? Wrong. Tweetie adds in all the great features you’ve always wanted.

If you’re out and want to take a snap or video it’s easy as clicking the camera button then pressing capture or record. You can also add a photo from your photo libary, geotag your tweet, find usernames, hashtags and even shrink urls. With all these features literally at your fingertips you can achieve so much without having to leave the composition screen.

This functionality and much more is shown and displayed in Tweetie 2.

Massive Third Party Support

Tweetie 2 provides a huge variety of third party clients that you can use within the app, some of which include Twitpic, yFrog, Mobypicture, Tweetphoto, Twitgoo, img.ly, Twitvid, Posterous, Vid.ly, Twitlonger, Follow Cost, Tweet Blocker, Favstar.fm, TextExpander, Read it Later, Instapaper, What The Trend, Birdhouse, bit.ly, TinyURL, is.gd, I.pr, u.nu, Linkyy, Overlapr, Favrd, Tweeteorites and much more!

That’s an insane amount of third party clients to add to an iPhone Twitter app and pretty much all the added extras you will ever need!

Refresh

This is a small but totally awesome feature.  Instead of looking for that small icon to refresh your Twitter stream or shake to refresh therby damaging your iPhone, Tweetie provides and easy and intuitive way to refresh your tweets.

Simply drag your finger vertically down and release to refresh. It’s that simple! Your stream is automatically reloaded with the newest tweets you want and it is extremely easy to refresh.

Trends

This feature does what its title says it does. It shows the most popular trends on Twiter right now. This is very useful to know what is going on right at any moment by what people are tweeting about.

Sure, any other iPhone Twitter app includes this feature but not to the extent that Tweetie does. You can save the trend, search throughout it and what I find awesome is definitions of the trend are automatically source from What The Trend, therefore if you don’t exactly know why a topic is trending you can tap one button and find out!

So while I love Tweetie 2, push and chat bubbles back would be an even better improvement!

You should download Tweetie 2 right now! It costs less than a cup of coffee.

Follow me on Twitter at @antbs and share your thoughts about Tweetie 2 for iPhone in the comments.

So it’s Sunday evening and I’ve done very little study this weekend. Final exams are coming up in just over a week and it’s getting pretty stressful.

So I set myself to study 4 x 40 minutes on Saturday and Sunday for exams. Easy right? Well no. I haven’t done much so far but I’ve done lots of procrastination! You see I’m the master of procrastination and I can bet I’ll destroy you at it. I will do just about anything to not study, this weekend I’ve cleaned my room countless times, thrown a bunch of crap out and been generally productive. But I’ve done none of what I actually wanted to do.

So instead of looking at this weekend that I did nothing I can say I’ve done heaps of stuff!

So procrastination, embrace it.

(P.S: I also spent countless hours on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, playing on iPhone, eating and sleeping :])

Wow it’s October already, how crazy is that?

So I can’t really vouche for my absence from my blog but just to let you know I am here and good things are to come.

So I’ve realised in terms of dedication, blogging isn’t my thing, I like to write but often I lose interest in things very easilly. However one thing I always update is Twitter. Increasingly we are seeing blogs dying and Twitter taking over due to it’s ease of use and simplicity.

So no, my blog is not going to shut down or move. However I have decided that more ‘me’  blog posts will come on my tumblelog while tech posts will stay here. So you will be seeing quite a few more posts on ant.geek.nz and a few less here. I’ll aim to keep this blog updated with an informative post fortnightly or monthly, depending on how I go!

Make sure to subscribe to my tumblelog, you can do that here.

This time period is all about awesomeness. Coming up in June, this blog will be one year old! I’ve used over three blogging platforms in this time and have always without fail come back to WordPress. You know why? Cause it’s awesome!

This is why I think WordPress is the best blogging platform:

It’s Free!

This is the best thing! People love free stuff and so do I! Other platforms such as Movable Type Pro cost quite a bit of money and people don’t generally want to invest in a blog without any traffic and are unsure if it will succeed or not. WordPress is built by the community and for the community. With plugins and themes anyone can to their liking. Which brings me to my next point…

Plugins

WordPress plugins are awesome and incredibly easy to use with WordPress 2.7. They allow you to add great features to your blog or website with little fuss and ease of use. They provide great functionality and are free! My favourite plugins are  Twitterpress by Peppery, Optimal Title by Aaron Schaefer, FireStats by Omry Yadan and flickrRSS by Dave Kellam. What are yours?

Ease of Use

I use Dreamhost as my web host. As with other web hosts they provide awesome one click installs of some popular software. This makes it incredibly easy for someone to install WordPress. The navigation and admin panel in WordPress looks and acts amazing. It’s very easy to get around. They key elements are easily positioned. WordPress gives you the ability to operate a website without any programming knowledge. If installing WordPress on your blog is too hard for you, you can always try wordpress.com!

It Just Works!

It’s Apple’s favourite line but it’s very much applicable to WordPress. Since WordPress is so easy to use and there is such a large community behind it, it is always in its best form. Only occasionally do you get any error messages, if you do it’s normally on your end not WordPress’s. If you do come across an error with WordPress there is a huge community to help. Or feel free to Google it!

Themes!

With one click of a button you can easily change the look and feel of your blog! There are thousands and thousands of themes out there to easilly change your blog. A simple visit to the WordPress Themes Repository or a simple Google search will get you away with finding awesome WordPress themes!

Using WordPress makes you smarter.

Yes, it’s true, you’ll gain IQ points when you blog with WordPress because you do need to learn to take full advantage of it’s power. WordPress may be intimidating at first but after a walk-through of the system and a few tips, you begin to add plugins, try out different features, and generally start exploring all that WordPress has to offer.

Download WordPress today!

- – -

I have just touched on what WordPress has to offer. There are so many other features out there! What I love about WordPress is the versatility. Feel free to point out any other awesome uses or features of WordPress.

Enjoyed reading this post? If you want more you can subscribe to my RSS feed. Subscribe by email. Or if you want to know what I’m doing you can follow me on Twitter.

Today is my one year anniversary of tweeting! My first tweet was posted on 29th May 2008 at 7:27:24 pm. Yep, and this blog post was published exactly to the minute I posted my first tweet! Over the past year I have tweeted nearly 4000 times and have ove 300 followers. The stats are not so important to me though, the connections and awesomeness I have discovered is priceless!

So as you know I love list posts! Here I will describe the best parts and uses of Twitter I have discovered over this year.

Real Time Search and Results

Twitter Search has been named as a Google killer. What do you think? The keyword here is real time. With Twitter Search you can instantly know what is going on in an event straight after or during it. For example the Mumbai attacks were tweeted by thousands of people in real time. Events first were heard about through Twitter rather than any other classic news source. The news about the Hudson Plane Crash was first heard on Twitter by Janis Krums who posted a picture.  Another example was the President Obama inauguration. The list of events tweeted real time are endless.

Immediate Answers

Another awesome feature of Twitter is almost immediate answers to a question or anything else. For example if I were to ask “Why do some folders in Windows have blue text?” I would get the answer that the “folder is compressed” instantaneously. How cool is that?

If you are working on a project or trying to brainstorm ideas Twitter is even better! Just post a tweet and get loads of responses (depending on how many followers you have). The possibilities are endless!

Interact with your Favourite Companies

The companies on Twitter I love to interact with are Orcon and Vodafone. Not only can I know what is currently happening on the network and know about new features but I can easily message them for support. If I’m having a problem with any one of my accounts I can just send a message to one of the awesome guys there and they can
easily help me out! I’m not saying this is the right channel to go for support but it is one awesome way to get it quickly!

Building Awesome Relationships

This point is short! Over the past year I have made awesome online friends, you know who you are. With these people I haven’t tried to befriend them to get information or help, just want to hang!

Just Interacting with Your Friends

Well, isn’t that the point of Twitter? You’re right! Just finding out what your friends are doing is the best feature for me. Long are the days when you would have to wait to call your friends them to find out what’s new in their world. Twitter is here and it’s set to stay!

- – -

Here I have just surfaced the uses of Twitter. Have anymore? Discuss! Can’t wait for my next year of tweeting!

Enjoyed reading this post? If you want more you can subscribe to my RSS feed. Subscribe by email. Or if you want to know what I’m doing you can follow me on Twitter.

Over the past month I have started getting much more involved in the micro-blogging site Tumblr. When you sign up for Tumblr, you create a tumblelog, A tumblelog is a variation of a blog that favours short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts associated with blogging. Most peoples tumblelogs associate with the pictures, videos, links and quotes they discover while surfing the web. However tumblelogs have other creative uses such as Trailwaker, a tumblelog set up to broadcast Team Stiles participation in the Oxfam Trailwalker New Zealand Challenge. Or another creative tumblelog is Lunch Bag Art, a dad who creates unique and impressive lunch bag for his kids.

This is why I love Tumblr:

Easy As

It’s literally not much more than a click of a button (ok, maybe two or three clicks) to update your tumblelog. This feature of ease of use attracts many people to Tumblr as most people don’t have the patience to maintain a blog and write lengthy posts. My favourite ‘Goodie’ in updating my tumblelog is their bookmarklet. if I come across a nifty photo, video, link, quote or piece of text I want to share with my readers and friends all I have to do is click the Share on Tumblr bookmarklet in my bookmarks toolbar in Firefox and it automatically reads my mind in what I want to post. All I have to do after that is click Create and it posts the content to my Tumblr. Easy huh? Other nifty goodies for updating your tumblelog is an iPhone App, Mac OS X dashboard widget, call in audio, email posting and a variety of other awesome third party apps.

Customisable

With very little design or tech know-how you can easily create a beautiful tumblelog. One can choose a theme from Tumblr’s extraordinary Themes Garden or easily create one themselves. (It’s not that hard!)

Another cool feature is that you can register your own domain and link it with your tumblelog. This is a nifty idea for a lot of people as they can have their easy, great looking space on the web with their own domain name. This also provides uniqueness so that you are not just a subdomain of Tumblr.

Great Content

One can follow different tumblelogs and they can appear in their dashboard. As I look through my dashboard I see awesome  types of content. The content is almost always aesthetically pleasing and great looking. It’s great to know that people are putting out this awesome content not just to profit off ads but to add benefit to the Tumblr community.

It’s Cool

Tumbling is cool. It’s easy, takes little effort and a lot of fun. I can often sit and spend the whole day looking throughout different tumblelogs. Tumblr helps to promote your creativity and uniqueness.

If your not on Tumblr you should definitely sign up. It’s the place to be. While your exploring why don’t you check out my tumblelog?  Have any other reasons why you love Tumblr? Comment!

Enjoyed reading this post? If you want more you can subscribe to my RSS feed. Subscribe by email. Or if you want to know what I’m doing you can follow me on Twitter.

I love RSS, the ability to gather all the information and news into one application is phenomenal for me. RSS readers (the application that lets you read all this content), come in many different shapes and forms. I went with Google Reader, a web based RSS reader that would let me read my feeds from any computer with an internet connection. This is very useful for me as I am normally on more than one computer during the day. However some people prefer a desktop application, it’s a personal preference.

Google Reader has some awesome feature like beautiful and very fast interface. However it is missing a pretty important feature:  password protected feeds support. Examples of feeds that are password protected are your Gmail inbox or your Twitter feed.

The secret to get password protect feeds into Google Reader is a third party application called Feedburner. Warning – Your feed is most probably password protected for a good reason, by parsing it through Feedburner it takes the secure layer off it and is potentially viewed by anyone.

First

Find the password protected feed you want to import into Google Reader. I’ll Use my Twitter RSS feed. http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/123456789.rss

Second

Take the Feed URL and burn it into Feedburner, you can sign up here. Feedburner will tell you that it is not possible to burn the feed as it is password protected but it does tell you how to correct the feed and let it parse.

The feed address you entered is password protected. You can specify a username and password in the URL like http://user:password@www.website.com/index.xml.

So what you would do is stick your username and password in the specific part of the feed URL. http://user:password@www.twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/123456789.rss. You should then burn your feed into Feedburner.

Third

You should now have your Feedburner feed. Now all you have to do is add that feed to Google Reader. Now everything should work! Remember that you should not give that feed URL to anybody as it is of your confedential account.

That should do it! Any better ideas? Comment!

Enjoyed reading this post? If you want more you can subscribe to my RSS feed. Subscribe by email. Or if you want to know what I’m doing you can follow me on Twitter.

After months of discussing and debating we have finally made the move to Orcon. I couldn’t be happier. I will give you an outline on how hard it was to change to Orcon.

1. Call Orcon, give them all the relevant details
2. Wait a few days
3. Congratulations, you are now with Orcon!

It was really that simple, nothing went unplanned, it worked perfectly. The hardest part was deciding whether to switch to them or not.

The reason we did decide to switch to them was the horrible and expensive service from Telecom (phone line) and the slow, unstable, annoying broadband from Xnet. Xnet was the main issue for us to switch. On the Geekzone Xnet forums there has been a lot of issues with Xnet in general but more to do with their slow international speed. During peak hours the internet with Xnet came to a grounding halt. YouTube videos took an age to load, nothing could be downloaded. It was practically dial up. Xnet went downhill from there, introducing a Torrent plan which would let users download 80gb of data at off peak hours (12am – 7am). Xnet have still failed to realise their mistake and have lost a lot of customers because of this. Over the past few months frequent outages have occurred, no not just normal ISP outages but the connection being lost every couple of weeks. However we signed up to Xnet for a totally different reason. Xnet was a revolutionary ISP, only charging for gb used, no excess $10 fee and a great customer service. While all those factors have remained they have really been trodden by shocking speed, outages and sheer annoyance.

So like many other Xnet users we spoke with our feet.

We couldn’t be happier that we are with Orcon. On the the Silver+ plan with a 25gb addon for $99.95 a month. This was the same price we paid with Xnet + Telecom but much faster speed, better reliability and more bandwidth.

I’ll give you a small comparison: Xnet vs Orcon: speed.

That’s a huge difference! Also remember that this is international speed, national is much faster. I advise all of you to change to Orcon if you are not satisfied with your current ISP. It’s very easy.

Enjoyed reading this post? If you want more you can subscribe to my RSS feed. Subscribe by email. Or if you want to know what I’m doing you can follow me on Twitter.