The design is drastically different and includes many more features you find on the full web app. The frustrating thing with version 2.5 is most of the items on the news feed were un-clickable (meaning pressing the screen!) and was begging for a little bit more functionality. Thankfully our prayers have been answered.

The first thing you notice is the home screen has a grid of icons rather than starting with the news feed.

The first issue I came across was the fact that videos show previews but the they haven’t been converted to MP4 for the iPhone to play, so you get a very helpful alert box!

The other big additions are Events, video uploads, pages (in addition to just friends) and a much improved inbox. There are some subtle additions too, like a new icon.

Overall the app is very well put together and has some extra touches that just make it classy, even down to the way you can move icons on the home screen just like the actual iPhone home screen, as shown in the screenshot below.

Download it from the App Store

But why has this happened?

What happened?

The impression from tr.im’s homepage and blog post seems to be the following 3 things:

1. No-one wants to buy or invest
2. No-one wants to advertise or see adverts
3. No point in developing the site further

It is pretty conclusive, they are pretty screwed. With the service being popular it was always going to have high costs and no income, which is just a massive spiral that you don’t want to be a part of. They only way they could save themselves would be to get investment, but investors want to know how they will get their money back.

Advertising with short URL services

There are 2 ways that you could do advertising with short URLs. Both of them are intrusive and would most likely push users to another service.

Interstitial
Showing a whole page of advertising for a certain amount of time before redirecting to the target page, this obviously means that the user experience is degraded and with sites like Twitter being a “now” network, who wants to wait 30 seconds before getting to a site they just clicked?

Bar
We all know what has happened with sites that use frames and bars. But what if the bar had a line of Google ads instead of other buttons and info? If it was a small enough ad then I personally wouldn’t care about it. The problem would be getting targeted ads, Google would need to be given info about what the page content is (as its sat in another frame) or using a private ad network.

Custom shortening services

I think these are the way to go. By custom short URL services I mean the way TechCrunch uses tcrn.ch for their short URLs (built on top of awe.sm).  The problem with really popular short URL services are that they aren’t short anymore! Some of them still have a 4+ letter domain name plus 5 letters after. Just look at is.gd or bit.ly they are getting longer. The benefit of a custom short URL  service is the URLs are actually short, you can collect all the stats you like, you can do whatever you like with the URLs. Be it adding advertising, bars/frames or simply collecting details stats. As long as the service does a 301 (or possibly 302) redirect sites like Google and TweetMeme can index sites correctly. So all round there aren’t really any downsides. Obviously this solution is just for businesses, every day users would still need a service to use.

The end of smaller services?

Of course its not the end of URL shortening services. Sites like Bit.ly obviously have the backing from Twitter since they swapped to them from TinyURL for their shortening service of choice. Bit.ly also has a large amount of investment. But what about other services, that are large, but not as large as major shorteners like bit.ly and tinyurl?

My personal opinion is that they will have a tough time staying afloat until they can get investment and make money, and as I have written above, it will be hard for them to find the “correct” way to get money.

I’m really interested in your thoughts so please post your comments below.

Most celebrities just tweet about them selves and use the whole platform for plugging the hell out of their stuff. Almost seeing $$$ signs. I know that is still the case with most celebrities who use Twitter as they have to publicise their stuff somehow, but when you follow someone and you don’t realise its all marketing? For me that’s a good person to follow.

So how does Imogen utilise the power of Twitter? Well I’m writing a blog post about it? So clearly this is only going to work in her favour. I doubt she would ever read this though. But this post is more about good ways or marketing youself on Twitter. So what has Imogen done?

Video blog

I haven’t seen another artist video blog their album creation in so much detail, down to the people who helped out, previews of songs and when she is meeting her record label and what they are going to discus. It’s not giving the album away but its enough of a tease to make me want to learn more about the album and most likely buy it. See the video blogs on her YouTube channel.

Get followers involved

This was done in conjunction with her video blog, twitter and her site. She asked everyone watching/reading to send in ideas for album art for her new album. After users sent theirs in she looked through them all and found someone with the right style and invited them to her house and they would then create the artwork for the album. What a great way of getting people involved?

Have a tweetup

Get your followers to gather altogether and discus the one thing they all have in common, the love of Imogen Heaps music. But don’t forget to turn up yourself! What artist do you know that would get fans together locally and just have a fun evening of chat and music?

Download tweet exchange

By this I mean you send a tweet out from twitter.imogenheap.com publicising the album and get a free HD copy of her “canvas” video (not a single, just a cool video). The system uses OAuth to it makes sure the tweet is actually send and then redirects to the download page. What a neat little way of publicising a free download. The only thing that is missing is downloading a free track or something along the lines of what Coldplay have done.

Overall I think Imogen (and possibly her management, not sure) have done a great job of using social media properly and getting some buzz around her album. I wouldn’t have written this post without it! See the video of “Canvas” below.

They are encouraging hundreds of employees to handle online customer service and company promotions using Twitter. Basically Best Buy employees can use the @twelpforce account and their own Twitter account to register for the service. From then on tweets from the registered account will be displayed in a single stream on the @twelpforce account. All they have to do is append the hashtag #telpforce to tweets on their account.

But what does this mean for general customer support via Twitter?

Why is it effective?

The reason these corporate customer support accounts are run is to help their image on Twitter. As communication via Twtter is so fast they need to have people who know what they are doing and don’t need a script to follow, like a normal call centre. So the people running the account are normally experienced or a few levels above the standard CSO (Customer Service Officer).

The chances are that when you ask one of these accounts a complicated or unusual question it will get answered properly by someone who knows what they are talking about. This was the case with BT (British Telecom). I asked their account about canceling my service and instead of me waiting in a queue on a phone line I simply direct messaged my phone number and account number and they rang me back! No more wasting money ringing a so-called “freephone” number on my mobile/cell and it costing an arm and a leg. I was incredibly impressed with the service I get, despite the fact I was canceling their service.

But what was the secret to that? Well there are a few things that made the service really good:

1. They knew what they were talking about
2. The number of tweets with questions is a tiny fraction of the phone calls they get
3. The CSO’s are higher up and therefore can command people ring back or do things that aren’t in the script. Like using common sense.

What will happen when it gets popular?

As you can see with Best Buy they are now letting their own employees answer questions. This may be wise as they aren’t reading from a script but as soon as they get popular their support quality will deteriorate.

So what is most likely to happen is if the amount of questions to twitter increases corporations will then have to create proper support software in place and that can only lead to more scripting and “dumb” CSO’s. This basically means that if their Twitter based support gets popular they will have to integrate it into their overall customer support strategy, which can only be a bad thing.

How can we help?

They only thing we can do is be selfish! If we have some excellent support don’t tell every single person about it, the more popular it gets the faster the deterioration in support.

Please let me know what you think and I am open to any suggestions you may have. Even if it’s to say I am being totally cynical!

So it is now clear that I need some convincing that 3D video is actually something worth looking at. I have therefore split this article into a few sections. Feel free to add your comments. I am totally open to your suggestions about what it can be used for.

Video quality

Video quality is really important, the ability to see all colours of the spectrum is a must. Sitting at my desk with green/red glasses watching what then looks like a grey video doesn’t fill me with excitement. It really needs to be full colour and not blurriness.

Webcams

There are now webcams being sold that can record in 3D. They have 2 lenses that are a few inches apart, it therefore knows the distance and can work out the angles and produce a live stream of 3D video. So lets say you want to watch a 3D stream, you have to find the stream and get the right glasses. These could be cyan/red, amber/blue or polarising etc. You would then have to buy glasses that matched the stream and hope that other videos are in the correct format.

YouTube

YouTube have the right idea. One of their developers is doing a project to add 3D video. What they are doing is allowing the user to swap how the video is viewed. So you can swap the format the video is in, colours and views all in real-time. This is obviously the way to make the video compatible with all kinds of glasses and viewing techniques. For istance see the video below. You need to view the video on YouTube to see all the viewing options for changing colours and aspect ratio etc.

View the video on YouTube

Digital TV

This is interesting to me. The Sky network in the UK has been testing 3D broadcasting this year and says it might have some programmes out at Christmas. I would love to see how this works and the technology behind it. Does it require 2 simultaneous streams of the same programme for each “eye”? Will they supply viewing equipment? I will definitely expand this post when I find out more.

Please let me know your feelings on the subject. I think that there could be a place for 3D but it needs to be standardised or open to different viewing techniques.

So now that we are all caught up on the news we can start analysing what we actually think of the idea of the Chrome OS. Obviously baring in mind that it has barely started development and won’t even be seen until next year. So lets start with comparing it to Android.

Chrome OS vs Android

So Android is Google’s mobile OS that allows developers to create apps, mainly in Java, that are installed onto the system which means that they don’t need necessarily internet connectivity to be used. These are quite often specialised pieces of software that utilise some of the devices hardware like a bluetooth, 3G, GPS and camera.

But recently some developers (not Google) have managed to port Android onto a netbook (Chrome OS’s initial target market) and use most of the apps (except GPS and camera etc). So already we can see an overlap with their two operating systems but as Google haven’t done this themselves we can be sure that they won’t be doing it in the near future.

Many people have been asking the question “Why have Chrome OS and Android?”. Well I feel the answer is pretty simple. One uses local specialised hardware and one doesn’t. Chrome OS is very likely to have desktop with links to lots of web apps that make use of HTML5/Gears technology and use the cloud extensively. Whereas Android has apps installed on the device that require a completely different language, UI design and marketing.

Chrome OS vs Windows/OSX

So these two popular desktop Operating Systems obviously make use of the local file storage for everything from the users documents to programs they have installed. Will this way of computing change when Google Chrome OS comes out? No way. You can’t run Adobe Photoshop in a web client unless it is a full Java Applet, which to me isn’t a true web technology.

Google Chrome OS wants to use the cloud, which doesn’t require any local storage other than the local OS and any cached files for offline working. This won’t be extensive as it is more likely to be documents and spreadsheets that get stored rather than large media files. Even thinking of a large movie file, how is that handled? When a file is streamed there is a local cached copy placed on the hard drive. I’m interested to see how will they over come this?

I really don’t think Microsoft or Apple have much to worry about. Microsoft may feel that XP (which almost 8 years old) might have some competition in the netbook market, but Chrome provides a completely different solution to the problem and it would be up to the consumer to see which solution suits them better. Cloud computing and web apps or using installed apps and local storage. Obviously there will be a small overlap and is not to be taken literally.

Apps

The apps that will be built for Google Chrome OS are going to be totally different. For starters they will be using different programming languages to the installed apps on other Operating Systems. There will be minimal overlap between desktop programming languages and those that are used on the web (apart from .NET and ASP.NET).

The web apps that are created for the Chrome OS are said to work on all standards compliant browsers. For a starters we know that all browsers are different and that IE should die a painful death. So this must mean that the browsers on other operating systems must be able to accommodate some small local storage for caching of files and small databases. Therefore they need Google Gears or an HTML5 compatible browser. At the moment it seems only Opera, Safari, Firefox and Chrome support a couple of HTML5 standards (like video and audio tags, Safari also supports local database storage without Gears). So by the time Chrome OS comes out all these browsers need to support HTML5 which IE9 most certainly won’t support all of them.

Will Chrome OS take over the world?

Errr…. no! I don’t think it will take over the desktop OS world, though it will have a pretty good stab at the netbook market. It could change the way we work remotely (without a laptop). This is Google, everyone knows them so no matter what they do they will have some traction in any market they choose. I just don’t think the world is ready for complete cloud computing, especially the security aspects of it keeping you personal documents on a server somewhere else on the planet.

Most people don’t realise they use cloud computing. Do you store photos on Flickr/Facebook? Do you use GMail/Hotmail? They you already use cloud computiong, so the change to using pure cloud computing isn’t as great as you think. But still I think Google have a lot to prove and I really look forward to seeing what they come up with.

Please leave any questions of comments below.

They achieved it! All the donations came from users of Wikipedia. I think this an awesome way to get funding, not only do the users not get ad’s thrown at them but if they want to they can donate to the cause. You would have thought turning on advertising would bring in more than that amount. being one of the most popular destinations on the Internet. But that defeats the object of the great community that surrounds Wikipedia.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Meebo now has support for the following IM’s:

• MSN
• Yahoo
• AIM
• Facebook
• MySpace
• Yahoo!
• GTalk
• ICQ
• Jabber

This is an amazing portfolio of sites they now support and I can see why the site is so popular. You can also see why MySpace where pushing for Meebo to integrate their service. On the Meebo Blog they said:

Many people outside of Meebo helped make this happen. First off, thanks to the folks at MySpace who encouraged us and helped us to test and gave us their support. A particular shout out to Ali, Dawn and Tom.

The Facebook Integration does seem to be done in a different way, they have a been helping contribute to an open source project that integrated with Facebook chat. I would never expect Facebook to be proactive in asking Meebo to integrate their service.

The strange bit with the Facebook integration, when you sign in you are not using the new Facebook Connect platform. For security purposes I would prefer to be using their new system. I am happier with the MySpace integration as they were helping with the solution.

What do you think? Is this as big a deal as I believe? Post your thoughts below.

The founder of the internet and W3C director Tim Berners-Lee said a few words about the new tool, “it does a nice job helping you improve your content one step at a time.”

Before you put your site through the new validator you can have a look at a few pages that have their best practices specification and a group to join. This is also a way to make sure users get the best experience across the mobile web. But to give you a few tips here is a short list:

• XHTML Basic 1.1. for markup format
• Images should be small, either GIF or JPEG, and have alt attributes
• Remove whitespaces and comments by adding a cleaning step in the publication process (e.g. through tidy)
• Keep page size under 20 KB, and the markup under 10 KB to ensure timeliness of retrieval and rendering by mobile devices
• If you use scripts, ensure scripting support is not required
• Don’t use frames, pop-ups or applets
• Formats that require plugins are likely to break on mobile devices.

Have a look at the new validator, at the moment that validator is having a few problems, possibly due to the ammount of traffic. Let me know what you think.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Have a look at the job listing and apply (if you think you match the spec).

Source: TechCrunch, TweeterStuff

It is a really great second step into the world of HD. They have some example videos up and I just watched one and the quality was incredible and the loading time was amazing too. I have very limited bandwidth here and loading a 4 minute HD video only took about 6-7 minutes.

What do you think about the way YouTube is moving forward with HD?

Source: TechCrunch

This has all been developed to meet the needs of the BBC trust that means all downloaded programmes must be deleted after 30 days or 24 hours after the first play. This was all possible through Microsoft’s DRM technology that runs in their WMA files. Obviously isn’t compatible with any other operating system. So now the iPlayer is compatible with the following operating systems:

• Windows Vista
• Windows XP
• Mac OS X 10.4
• Mac OS X 10.5
• Fedora Core 8
• Ubuntu 7.10
• Open Suse 10.3

So with this AIR application you can download the TV episodes so they can be viewed offline. I think it’s a great idea as their current application doesn;t work with all browsers on Windows, they had to create a firefox extension, but this still left Safari and Chrome out. So this is the natural solution, though I was suprised an organisation such as the BBC has created an application using the AIR technology. Whats your opionion? Are you a Mac or Linux user that has been waiting?

[Download the AIR app]

There were some benefits to having a desktop application. The user experience could be more tightly controlled. Plus they built in peer-to-peer technology to all. As the files were coming from other users this mean that Joost had lower bandwidth bills.

In September Joost enabled their complete flash site that acts similar to the Joost application. This is obviously down to the fact that users are so used to getting their video content through the browser in desktop format.

They aren’t saying why they have discontinued the desktop application. Joost doesn’t offer anything particularly unique or compelling to users over competing sites with proprietary content (like Hulu can offer, although they do have series 1 of Peep Show which is a really funny show.

I still remember having people queuing up on TechJuicer for invites for the beta. I think they will have to find a new USP in order to compete with the likes of Hulu and YouTube.

Source: TechCrunch

I have also noticed that many of the official torrents you can download from the revision3 site don’t work as not enough people have the file to download in the first place meaning most of the time there are 0 seeds.

I think these 2 things combined might be the reason that Revision3 has removed the torrent download option from their episode pages (shown in the image above, there used to be a green BitTorrent logo next to the download arroe). To me this might not be a big deal but as a new media company that wanted to distribute their shows in any way possible without regard for breaking their own copyright (as any new media company does). But to take away a legal, legitimate and official way to torrent their shows might take away part of their audience. But if you download torrents you will know there are other places of getting their content.

I am a big fan of Revision3 and many of their shows, even after axing a few “internet superstars”!

The app is pretty basic, so it will work on any device! It also means it works well on a slow connection, but also makes for a pretty rubbish user experience. They have been clever with the structure of the articles as they have been split into several pages to make browsing faster but also save on the amount of data sent to the client.

What do you think of it? Do you use any other client applications for your mobile device?

Source: ReadWriteWeb

We are not sure why Hasbro have dropped the lawsuit, but we can probably conclude that they got what they set out to do and it was more of a scare tactic.

The majority of users preferred the original version of Scrabulous and preferred it over Hasbros own attempt at a facebook app. The Hasbro version is currently rated 1.3 out of 5!

But the main point is that neither Hasbro of RS Software, the makers of Scrabulous have to go through and expensive court battle.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

TwitterLeague, the site I created in 7 days from scratch is no longer in an invite-only beta! To get an invite you had to read the TechCrunch article or follow me (@ollieparsley) where you would get a code.

But the site has been tested enough and fixed a few bugs so now you don’t need an invite code. Just enter your Twitter credentials to signup/login. Then create your leagues.

If you have no idea what TwitterLeague is then please read the TechCrunch article that was written about me and the application itself. Then just visit TwitterLeague.com and create a league! An example TwitterLeague is below:

Please check it out and let me know what you think by commenting below

But here comes Pastebud with their solution. This does not require a jailbroken phone or even the app store. It is simply a clever bookmarklet that uses Pastbuds servers to allow you to hightlight some text and then use a second bookmarklet to paste the content.

There are a few limitations, the main one being that it can only be used with safari. Here is what you can use the Pastbud app for:

• Safari to Mail
• Safari to Safari
• Mail to Safari
• Mail to Mail

The last 2 items are acheived by forwarding a full email to a dedicated private email address at pastbud which will then return a URL back to you, this then opens safari and then you can copy from that page using the 2 bookmarklets.

Have a look at the following video to see how the app works. Don’t forget to head to pastebud.com for a more in-depth description of how to install the bookmarklets.

I have been using the beta version for a few weeks to run TechJuicer.com, OllieParsley.com and TweeterStuff.com. The main difference you notice is the radically overhaulled User Interface. The design is nothing like version 2.6.x. The main navigation is now down the left hand side. It was a lot to get used to but the speed improvement is really good, especially if you install Google Gears which will download all the JavaScript and run it locally, thus decreasing the time taken to execute JavaScript.

Check out the following tour of the new release:

As WordPress is an open source platform it was great to hear that more that 150 people had their code directly inserted into this release, the highest in WordPress history (albeit not that long a history).

A lot of people have commented on the fact that it looks more like WordPress 3.0, not 2.7. On the WordPress development blog they had this to say:

For those of you wondering why we didn’t call this release 3.0, it’s because we abhor version number inflation. 3.0 will just be the next release after 2.9. The major features in new point releases approach also works well for products like OS X, with huge changes between a 10.3 and 10.4.

I personally think the whole package is awesome, I have been a WordPress fan since I started blogging a few years ago and this has made it so much easier to push out a new post and administer the whole blog. What do you think?

[Download WordPress 2.7]

The IWF have removed the page from their black list and had this to say:

IWF’s overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect.

They are obviously talking about the fact that although lots of users could not access the page, many more around the world wanted to see what the fuss was about, this then brought a lot more users to the article.