Understanding Twitter for Baby Boomer, Web 1.0 Users

Twitter has stormed to center stage. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook are all talking about Twitter.

What is it? Why has Twitter become ubiquitous?

What is Twitter?

Twitter is simple. Open an account. Log into your email account to connect with friends. It takes minutes.

Your profile immediately streams endless chatter from friends and casual acquaintences. Click on friends and friends of friends to follow more chatter. The more people you follow, the greater the number of messages.

One box lets you send messages. Messages are limited to 140 letters - short. Your message joins the endless chatter. 

Why Ubiquity?

With such a simple concept, how did Twitter become so pervasive?

• First, Twitter serves millions of self-promoting artists, writers, politicians, consultants, pretty women, and enterprise brands. Many have tens of thousands of followers. Thus, they're motivated to continue the chatter - ten times per hour for many. Obama does not chatter, but leads the follower parade.
• Unlike Facebook and Myspace, Twitter is an open, global chat room. Anyone can listen and broadcast to anyone else. Messages are not buried in forums, groups, rooms, or other confined spaces.
• An open API appeals to millions of programmers. The simple interface allows access to any content, opening the doors to thousands of sites that make the chat stream relevant to their audience. In contrast, the Facebook, Google OpenSocial, and Myspace API have been mired in complex methods that restrict content access.
• The 140 character message integrates the much larger mobile phone world with the web. Anyone can use SMS text messages to participate - not just smart phones like iPhone, but any basic cell phone.
• Pundits call this microblogging. Does this replace blogging of longer messages? 

What's Next with Twitter?

In reality, Twitter is an open database. Each message is a free-form record, searchable and accessible with any program.

Unlike microformats, Google Base, and other complex structures, Twitter opens data sharing to one, huge database. It's easy to send data to Twitter. It's easy to extract the data for presentation and analysis.

As programmers work with Twitter, we've just begun to see the stream of innovation. See Media Life at http://media.tearn.com for one example - where we use Twitter as the comment system that is shared with Twitter users - globally. Comments return to Media Life, real-time, through the Twitter API. Incredible.

Will Twitter change chatting, blogging, and commenting? More importantly, do they become one global database? What do you think?

CLIP Flickit: Gracefully Add iPhone Photos to Flickr

On any given day, there are thousands of people snapping iPhone photos and uploading them to Flickr. So many in fact, that the iPhone is one of the top five cameras. That's amazing - but not for the reasons you'd think. It's amazing because the default process of getting a photo from the iPhone to Flickr should be easier. And while any number of apps have attempted to solve that problem, Flickit handles the task in a way that is arguably the most graceful - and iPhone appropriate - of them all.

We've had excellent ways to view photos on Flickr from the iPhone - Flickr's iPhone-optimized mobile site is great and we're fans of the Cooliris iPhone app. Getting them to Flickr however - either by emailing them to a Flickr dropbox or using an existing app - always seemed to lack that certain je ne sais quoi.

Flickit is different. It's a beautiful little app that offers a simple - yet rich - Flickr uploading experience. Or as Lifehacker puts it, "the free Flickit application is [Flickr's] truest friend on an iPhone or iPod touch." We couldn't agree more.

While Flickit's functionality can be found in other apps, the look, feel, and usability give it something special. It has an aesthetic that matches the iPhone, with big chunky buttons and stylish animations. Long story short, Flickit just feels like an iPhone app.

And like the iPhone, it's easy to use. How easy? The IKEA-like instructions should provide a clue.

Once you've installed Flickit and logged into Flickr, you'll start with Flickit instead of your camera. Shoot photos directly from the app or grab pictures from your existing camera roll. Select a photo with which to work and you can edit title, description, and tags, add it to a set, choose its visibility, and geotag it with your current location. Press upload and you're done - fast. And it's all thanks to Flickit's streamlined uploading engine.

Downside? Flickit is an upload-only utility. So you're not going to be browsing your photos from it. That's unfortunate because given how they handle the upload process, we'd love to see how they handle viewing.

Want to give it a try? Download Flickit for free.

MySpace Quietly Launches Site-Wide Image Search

MySpace has introduced a new image search feature to its integrated search engine, allowing users to quickly search through photos shared by their friends and the MySpace community. While MySpace did not officially announce the new feature, the company has confirmed that it recently went live, and indexes around 3 billion of the site’s photos. The addition reflects MySpace’s apparently increasing focus on its search engine, which also includes the site’s video and music content along with a Google-powered web search.

Users are given the option to search through photos their friends have shared, those with viewing rights set to ‘public’ by other MySpace users, or images on Photobucket, which was acquired by MySpace’s parent company in 2007. MySpace says that all results are shown through a “social lense”, which means that the engine pays attention to keywords in your profile and who your friends are to try to generate the most relevant results...