CellSpin has announced that its mobile application now lets you post to micro-blogging services Twitter and Pownce, not just as text, but with audio, video and photos too. The company is flagging up the multimedia aspect as a key selling point, since Twitter famously only supports 140-character text tweets. “This is the next obvious step in the micro-blogging revolution,” says CEO Bobby Gurvinder Singh. The app is free, and available from CellSpin’s website. This kind of social media aggregation application is a really interesting area, providing one point on your mobile to post stuff to a range of social networks and other Web 2.0 sites. Of course, CellSpin isn’t the only company providing this, with a variety of standalone apps trying to do a similar thing, while other firms are providing operators with this kind of technology too. One mobile application to rule them all, with ‘them’ being the social media sites? It’s already happened. Trouble is, there are lots of companies fighting to be that one application…
Tag Archive for 'Twitter'
ShoZu is ace: it was one of the first mobile applications to make it easy to upload your mobile snaps (and later videos) to the web. And it’s stayed relevant due to gathering a bunch of services in one place - I use it to upload to Facebook, Flickr and YouTube for example. Anyway, ShoZu has just announced that it’s added eight new destinations, taking its total to 36. Twitter is the most high-profile new addition, allowing you to check your timelines and post new tweets from within the ShoZu application. Other popular additions include Dailymotion, Photobucket and Friendster. The other four are more niche: Twitpic, Cellfish, Seesmic and Ipernity, but it’s good news if you’re a user of any of them. ShoZu says it plans to add more services in the coming weeks, too.
Rmbrme is a clumsily named (all the good URLs are gone, remember?) but possibly quite useful mobile service that is meant to make it easier to, well, remember people.
Rather than some Derren Brown-esque memory training witchcraft, Rmbrme uses your mobile phone to bridge the gap between casually asking for someone’s phone number and getting them to join your social network.
As illustrated by a flash animation on the site’s homepage, you just text the person’s number to Rmbrme’s shortcode and then it will do the rest - texting the person and inviting them to ‘friend’ you in whatever social network you list in your profile.
The stalking applications of this technology are obvious, and it would seem to be a boon to exceptionally lazy Lotharios who would like to ensnare casual acquaintances in their web of seduction but are pressed for time and would prefer their victims did most of the work for them.
Supported networks include Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, Manhunt and Beebo although the actual SMS service seems to be open only to US carriers at the moment. Surely this would do well in the UK too?
The simple ideas are the best, don’t you think? Twiter is at heart just a simple way of telling people what you are up to. Just type your message in the box and click the button… Done!
It’s a bit weird, then, that most Twitter clients add extra functionality like search boxes and friend following. Twit Today is the first Twitter client I’ve seen outside of the more esoteric command-line variants that just gives you a plain old Twitter status line form and nothing else.
The app is freeware and should work on any Windows Mobile device that has a Today screen (i.e. one with a touchscreen). Once installed, it just sits on a seperate line of the Today screen. To use it just give it a tap, type your Tweet and tap the OK button. Easy peasy.
The Today portion of the app just handles posting Tweets, if you want to read your friend’s contributions, just tap the ‘t’ icon and your Twitter home page will open in Internet Explorer.
If you twitter and this kind of minimalism appeals to you, you can grab a copy here.
One microblogger client to rule them all..
The thing that bugs me about Facebook and Twitter, etc. is that if you have several groups of friends all signed up to different services then you need to update your status for each of them.
This used to be especially annoying before Facebook dropped their daft ‘all status must begin with Username is..‘ requirements but even now it is a bit of a drag.
The web service HelloTxt gets around this by giving you a single page to update several such services at once. It’s one of those simple websites that seems obvious but can quickly become invaluable if you do a lot of this kind of social networking/microblogging.
HelloTwitFace is a Windows Mobile freeware app that is essentially a front end to HelloTxt, but with the added bonus of tabs for Facebook and Twitter that let you read what your mates are doing too.
That’s it realy, Simple but effective. You can update Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Bebo, Pwnce, Myspace and several others all with a couple of taps.
The app runs on Windows Mobile 5 or 6 and is available for free here.
Another day, another mobile Twitter client.
Actually, that’s a bit unfair. Twitter is a great service that meshes well with mobile use, so it’s only natural a lot of clients would pop up on the various phone platforms we cover.
Twinkle, a soon-to-be-released iPhone Twitter client has a couple of new tricks up its sleeve too, as seen in this preview via Just Another iPhone Blog.
Making full use of the iPhone’s display, Twinkle is a bright and colourful take on the Twitter experience, with nice big buttons for your fellowtweeter’s avatar pics. The most original feature is a ‘location aware’ people finder.
With this turned on, Twinkle will seek out other Twitter users within your current location (the default radius is 50 miles, but this is configurable) and then display their tweets. Twitter instantly becomes something more like Dodgeball - Google’s city-based mobile social network - but with a more random element that could reveal some interesting info about your current location. Of course, if you like what one of your local Twitter suers has to say, you can always direct message them.
Basels Reply v2.0 for Windows Mobile works a bit like Anfy Call Filter for S60.
It’s an ‘answering machine’ for your mobile but, rather than playing callers an amusing message in a funny voice and then recording their voicemail, Basels Reply uses SMS.
In ‘reply mode’, Basels will simply text a short message to any incoming caller. Nice, but not that interesting.
In ’server mode’ however - things take a turn for the weird-yet-possibly-useful.
You can configure Basels Reply to respond to a list of SMS commands prefixed with the letters ‘br’. e.g. if someone texts you with the command ‘br status’ Basels can reply with a bit of user-supplied text explaining what you are up to.
It’s like an on-demand Twitter. A bit.
Basels Reply is freeware, available here.
Twitter, the messaging service that lets you whack out SMS messages simultaneously to all your friends, has apparently been a victim of its own success.
Although users can update Twitter by sending unlimited (paid-for) messages from their phone, their friends’ replies arrive via a free SMS and this is where the problem lies. Because Twitter doesn’t make any money on these messages (only those sent from a mobile not to it), it has decided to limit the number of inbound SMS to 250 a week.
You can still send as many updates to Twitter from your mobile phone as you’d like, but you now have a limit on the number of replies you’ll receive. In the US, users are still able to get unlimited SMS replies, but then that’s because Twitter doesn’t lose money on them. Here in the UK it costs to handle the SMS replies and that’s the problem for the company.
If only the people behind Twitter had thought of this before they launched the service. Twits.
[Via Tech Crunch UK]
Mobispine is a ‘mobile media browser’ (read: RSS reader with a few extra functions) for your mobile that claims to help you ‘njoy life on the go’.
Whether this is the same thing as ‘enjoying’ life on the go isn’t immediately clear, but I’m sure they know what they mean. Perhaps the usual spelling of ‘enjoy’ is copyrighted, or something.
Anyway, Mobispine is actually rather good - once you have installed the (Java) client, it will scoot off and fetch cut-down versions of whatever feeds you like. It comes with a load of predefined ones (news, sport, etc) and adding your own is simple enough either on the handset or via the Mobispine website.
The software will download simplified text-only versions of most feeds, which should make it a lot faster (and cheaper) to catch up with your favourite sites.
There are also plug-ins available to integrate with Facebook and Twitter.
Should you wish to inflict you views on the world you can sign up for a Mobispine blog - this lets you upload content (photos, movies, etc) to a personalised page. There is a fair bit of content up there already, albeit mainly in Danish thanks to a recent deal with the Danish arm of mobile carrier 3.
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