ant

I’m totally convinced that the iPhone prototype Gizmodo is in possession of is Apple’s. It has been reported that an Apple Software Engineer, Gray Powell, left this behind at a bar by mistake. Later it was rumoured that Gizmodo bought the prototype for 10 grand. They have had 2.5 million page views and have easily made that money back from ad revenue.

These points back up the fact that the iPhone prototype was purposefully leaked by Apple:

MobileMe and GPS Functionality

This is pretty obvious, the iPhone prototype was working and in use at the time it was ‘found’. MobileMe has a ‘Find My iPhone’ feature in which the iPhone can be tracked by GPS and a message can be displayed on the screen. The person who found this prototype reports that they called several Apple numbers to return the phone but no one took him seriously.

If Apple really did want the iPhone back immediately then they could have easily within a few hours located the iPhone or sent a message to it saying they wanted it back. But instead they decided to remotely brick it. If they could do that (this is one of MobileMe’s functionalities) why couldn’t they have done the other options which would have most likely resulted in it being returned?

Also, Apple has the highest level of secrecy and surely they would have the advanced system in place to get the GPS co-ordinates of a lost iPhone prototype?

Apple’s Secrecy Involving its Products

Apple is well known for their intense secrecy around product’s before release. One person even committed suicide due to them losing a previous iPhone prototype. I’m sure Apple will go to any lengthy including interrogation to prevent its trade secrets from being released. Normally devices are chained and bolted to desks in a room with no windows. Why did a common Apple employee have possession of such a secret device?

Maybe Apple’s executive team might have such a device but it confuses me as to why Apple would let one of their software engineers take this device into the wild when they are generally chained to desks deep inside Apple’s HQ.

The Person who Lost It

The 27 year old Gray Powell was at a German beer garden in Redwood City, California on the night he lost the iPhone prototype. Firstly, he was drinking. Who would drink knowing they might make some stupid choices when in the possession of a secret Apple device? While drinking the possibility of your iPhone disappearing is huge. No one would ever like to lose a device like this.

Secondly, why on earth would this guy not even bother to check he still had the device on him before he left that bar? If you were in possession of this kind of device, one would be keeping an eye on it every second of the day and make sure to check they still had it when leaving somewhere.

So Why Would Apple Leak an iPhone Prototype?

Apple is hugely secretive about their products however they do gain benefits in this device purposefully being leaked.

Hype is the key here, Gizmodo have received millions of page views and the features are being reported by all the major tech blogs and the huge news networks such as CNN, WSJ and NY Times. Twitter with 100 million users is buzzing right now with this news. Millions of people are talking about this device and the features it has, Apple likes that.

People have said that they will be buying the device and some have gone as far as saying that they are beginning to draw up apps that involve the new features that this iPhone has. Apple is going to gain huge benefits from this leak which is why I think they were the ones who leaked it on purpose.

Think different or agree? Do you think Apple really is gritting its teeth right now or enjoying the spotlight? Let your thoughts out in the comments!

Everyone loves the news, coming in many different forms from newspapers to blogging everyone reads it. As with this I can guarantee that pretty much all of you love social media and have Facebook or Twitter. Digg is here to take the best of both worlds and combine them together.

“Digg is a place for people to discover and share content found on the web. From the biggest online destination to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users.”

There are however specific aspects of Digg which make it truly awesome and unique:

Unique Stories

Us Diggers love reading stories and the range that exist is phenomenal. These stories that you see are submitted by users just like you and offer anything from breaking news to a crazy old man growling like a dog. Never fear, just about anything that you would enjoy is on Digg and it is the community decides what you see.

Digg literally is the ‘go to’ place to find some awesome stuff when you are procrastinating or just surfing the web. However as with traditional media the news is extremely topical and mostly has relevance to your life. How do crazy pictures and videos have any relevance to you? They are just plain awesome and are posted by people just like us.

True Internet Culture

Except for maybe 4Chan this is the place where memes are born, overused, then killed.  Rickrolling, Pedobear, ??? Profit, It’s a trap, ASCII art, /s, F*** THE RIAA and much more are commonly seen around the stories submitted and the comments posted.

If you want to see some awesome stories and comments filled with memes, Digg is just your place. For example any story submitted that is about a child, the famous pedobear will frequent!

Comments

This is pretty much what makes this place awesome. As with the stories it is the community which decides whether your comment is worthy of being dugg up or buried. Sure you will have jackasses and trolls who will say stupid stuff but the other comments are awesome.

Inclusion of memes, Apple hating, Oatmeal love, Kevin Rose love and much more will set you up for success. Make sure everytime you click on a story on Digg you check out the comments, they are awesome.

Diggnation

This is the famous podcast hosted by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht in which they discuss the top Digg stories while getting drunk. Firstly, these guys are awesome and are pretty knowledgeable. Secondly not only are the stories great but their ‘analysis’ on them is even better.

One thing that would be cool is if they read out the top comments of that story. Other than that you should go download Diggnation today!

The Oatmeal

This guy is a legend. Matthew Inman the creator of this awesome site frequently posts awesome web comics that are liked by pretty much everyone. What does this have to do with Digg you say? Everything.

Without Digg The Oatmeal would be a depressed comic writer with no traffic, however due to the uniqueness of Digg this guy is an internet hero. Check out his comics if you haven’t already!

Don’t forget to be my friend on Digg!

Follow up blog post coming out Wednesday on ’5 Things That Don’t Make Digg Awesome’

Let everyone know your favourite features of Digg in the comments!

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.

If you would like more information about what Twitter is and what it can do for you then click here.

The great thing about Twitter is the use of third party applications with Twitter. The Twitter web interface really isn’t the most convenient way to tweet for us all (however there has been a great redesign). In this blog post I will outline my favourite Twitter web apps, these are great not only for tweeting but for finding information and fun from ours, our friends and the Twitterverses tweets.

TweetStats:

TweetStats is one of the best statistical tools for Twitter out there. It lists many stats about the way, you tweet, when you tweet and even what you tweet. TweetStats gives you statistics on how many times you tweet a month, aggregate daily tweets, aggregate hourly tweets, interface used and so on.

Another awesome feature is the TweetCloud. Basically like a tag cloud, but words that appear most often in your tweets. Best of all you can look up the stats of any Twitter user you know. The only downfall is if you want to refresh your stats, you can only do that every 8 hours and you have to retype in your username, except for that it really is an exceptional service.

Twitterfeed:

If you run a blog then Twitter is a great tool to direct traffic to your posts. As we all know its a huge pain to remember to tweet our blog posts. With Twitterfeed the hard work is done for you.

Twitterfeed can automatically check your blogs RSS feed from 30 minutes intervals and you can specify how many blog posts it lists. You can also change the opening text such as “New Blog Post:” for your kind of blog.

TweetWheel:

Twitter can also be about building a community of like minded people. However its a pain looking through your friends followers and so on to see who follows who. TweetWheel really simplifies this problem, by creating a unique wheel you can really see who know who on your Twitter profile and who you should maybe stop following.

One problem with TweetWheel is if you have a slow internet connection and follow lots of people and your friends follow lot of people it can take an age to load the page.

TwitPic:

The old saying goes “a picture can paint a thousand words”, a tweet can only say 160 characters. This is where TwitPic comes to play. TwitPic gives you the ability to share photos with your Twitter friends easilly.

You don’t even need a unique login, TwitPic utilises the Twitter API so the only login you have to give is your Twitter login. Photos are a breeze to upload and share.

Twitscoop:

Twitscoop is quite a cool service which can be a source of some fun. Twitscoop shows in the form of a “tweet cloud”, telling you trending topics in real time. For example A search can often show up word such as “2am”, “3am” etc as people realize that the are up late.

Twitscoop describes there process as:

Through an automated algorithm, twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentionned more often than usual. The result is displayed in a Tag Cloud, using the following rule: the hotter, the bigger (no joke here).

Quite a unique service that should definately be checked out.

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.

National Party’s leader John Key has been labeled clueless by the search engine Google.

If you go onto google.co.nz then seaches “clueless” under “pages from New Zealand” then press enter or “I’m Feeling Lucky” You will see John Key’s website as the first result.

Not once is the word clueless mentioned on John Key’s website. This technique is known as “Google Bombing”. Where an undesirable word has been linked with a person. George Bush has also been “Google Bombed” with the word “Miserable Failure”.

Auckland computer programmer Rochelle Rees emailed friends a year ago asking them to link “clueless” with John Key’s website. “But at the same time the word describes John Key’s performance”.

There is not much John Key can do to stop this though. Google said that it would not alter bombing as it wants to keep the integrity of its search engine.

Enjoyed this post? You can subscribe to my RSS feed here. Or if you would prefer to subscribe by email you can also do that here. Interested to know what I’m doing? You can follow my constant status updates on Twitter.

Okay, so youre probably wondering what is Twitter? (or not) Twitter is an exciting new invention soon to change the way we interact. On my right top pane you will see constant status updates. They change very often. I can update my feed via my blog, the web, mobile phone, Facebook status, desktop gadgets, iPhone etc. These updates are called Tweets. You can also subscribe via the Twitter website to your friends, families or co-workers feeds all with a few simple clicks, after all its the simple things that count.

Twitter will change the way you think about Social Networking, be sure to check it out at twitter.com!

For those of you who didn’t understand me here is a short video clip called Twitter: In Plain English.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o[/youtube]