The Twitter service has had a lot of buzz for a while now. I’ve had my eye on it, but never really seen the use for it. But the buzz has been loud…even if tainted with head-scratching concerning how the company will ever make money…so when I saw this headline on Technorati the other day that intrigued me: “Twitter – what it is and what it does.” I thought, maybe, just maybe I’d find a good reason for Twitter. Well, I read the PDF of the article linked off of the blog post, and I have to say that I still don’t know what the hell Twitter is really useful for. But I decided that in the spirit of experimentation and since…to boil the article down for you…Twitter can be anything to anyone! (yay!) maybe Twitter would end up being useful in some way to me, I signed up.
So, I’ll let you know how it goes. You can follow along with my Tweets (Twitter messages) on my Twitter site. Even better, get a Twitter account and “follow” me! Let me know if you join or if you already have an account and I will “follow” you too! Ah, social networking, its so warm and fuzzy…
/der
UPDATE: An interesting discussion of Twitter vs other social networks by Tim O’Reilly. Question: do you need to be famous for this to make sense?
So, I’ve been living with an iPhone for almost four months. Despite its shortcomings (closed development space, no Flash, no Java….etc), its the best mobile device I’ve ever used. For the most part, the UI is very smooth, but as I keep adding applications, its becoming difficult to sort them and move them around on the various home screens which support a 4×4 grid of icons each. At the moment, I’m just added a sixth page…
Now, I’m not saying I’m the most efficient at this. I have several apps that duplicate features. Why, I have four dedicated weather apps alone….plus two icons for going directly to hurricane-related websites. I’ve also been periodically testing QR-code readers, so I have a couple of those, as well as the requisite random apps to show off the accelerometer feature (e.g. iChalky and Labyrinth LE). It’s getting difficult to envision them all so as to group them appropriately, and the UI for moving the app icons around isn’t the most user-friendly….especially once you get up past a page or two of apps.
So I decided to screen cap each of my home screens (A great shortcut! Press the Home Buttons and the Power button simultaneously, then release. You should hear the photo shutter sound. If you hold those buttons down too long, you’ll be able to power down the device….keep holding them down for a reboot. A screen capture of whatever happens to be on your screen is now saved to your photo album. Great way to prove your latest high score.). That way, I can view them on my desktop and plan out how I want them arranged before I launch into that effort on the actual phone. Yeah…I know….geek…
Below are my six current home screens….before rearrangement and editing…I’ll try blogging later about particularly useful/interesting apps that I’ve been trying out. Let me know what your favorites are….always interesting in pushing the limits of a device….wonder how many home screens I can get…
