Twittering with the iPhone
So what makes Twitter different today? More importantly, what sets Twitter apart from the myriad of other social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook? In 2006 I dismissed Twitter as a mere fad, mostly because, for me at least, twittering was confined to the web browser. I had no embraced text messaging (as a matter of fact it was disabled on my Sprint account). Text messages is the main way in which you connect to Twitter to provide live update of your status and receive notification of what your friends are doing.
While none of this has technically changed with the introduction of the iPhone, the iPhone enables my to interact with Twitter in a more convenient way which makes it more likely that I will post status updates and makes me look forward for the updates of the people that I follow. So how does the iPhone make Twittering more fun and approachable? Through the many decided twitter apps available from the iTunes App Store.
Twitterrific is my app of choice for twittering on the iPhone. It has a clean interface, which although is quite minimal compared to the other offering, is quite well done. With the twitterrific app I have access to all the basic twitter functions at my fingertips, which makes it more likely that I will post a tweet while I am waiting on the train, getting a bite to eat, or when I see something really cool while walking on the street. Twitterrific also has support for twitpic, so that I can not only capture an event while it is happening in words, I can do it with a picture as well.
However, what really changes things for me is the iPhones built in GPS. While Twitter itself does not natively support geotagging tweets, it opens the door for a slew of possibilities. A competing product, Twinkle, gets around the fact by first positing your tweets to an intermediate server where they are geotagged. While I am not to keen on having my tweets posted to the Tapulos, this allows you to filter public tweets based on location, which is a very cool feature!
Michael Petnuch is a graduate math student who enjoys walking on his hands, drinking diet coke, solving math problems, and being silly!
