After not so many weeks of waiting, Tweetie 2 has been repackaged and released as the official Twitter app. As covered before, atebits, the one-man company behind Tweetie, has been bought up and added to their team at Twitter. They even called this app Twitter 3.0 in recognition of Loren's hard work on the first two versions. But let's get back to the updates to the official Twitter app:
This past Tuesday Twitter made the long-awaited announcement regarding how they will finally monetize their service. The idea is called Promoted Tweets and in a nutshell they are regular tweets that an advertiser would normally post, which eventually get promoted by the advertiser for a fee.
You heard that right, as of April 9th Tweetie will be the official Twitter app. Loren Brichter was the lone developer behind both Tweetie apps, and he will continue his innovative work as a Twitter developer. If you've never used Tweetie 2, check it out when they relaunch it for free (it is well worth the $2.99 now, however). It is an amazing Twitter app, not to mention an amazing iPhone app in general, setting the bar high for any iPhone developer.
We've finally gotten around to adding App Store links for iPhone Twitter apps! You'll see the unmistakable "Available on the App Store" graphic in the right sidebar on any iPhone app review. Hopefully it will be more convenient once you decide which iPhone app you want to go with.
If you have any other suggestions please give us your feedback!
This week, everyone who is anyone on the internet is in Austin, Texas for the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) interactive and music festival. It can be quite overwhelming to a newcomer (or even someone who has been before!). There's is so much going on that you need real-time information to catch panels you want to see. What better source of real-time info than Twitter? In fact, they debuted Twitter at SXSW 2007.
After a not-so-secret limited beta, Twitter has released a new feature called Lists. It's quite simple, yet powerful at the same time. You can now create custom lists of other Twitter users, which others can follow with a single click. The topic of the list is up to you, and there are all sorts of great lists already.
Mashable reports that the Twitter Phishing Scam is on the run again. It shows up as a Direct Message that says "you're on this vid", "haha, that u on here?", or "lol this is funny" with a fake link to log into Twitter. It's pretty easy to avoid this type of thing by following a couple simple steps:
An interesting site has popped up recently called Tweets for Boobs. At first glance it may sound a little immature, but it's actually a charity being run through Twitter! They're working with the Susan G. Komen Foundation to raise money for breast cancer research.
Twitter is planning to add location data to each and every tweet, instead of the Location field you can update currently. This definitely takes real-time to a new level, since twitter apps and mashups will no longer have to guess where you are based on that one field, although it is not going away. Some people just like to use it as a generic profile field, saying "I live here!"
Here's the skinny on the updates, provided at the Twitter Conference in LA:
What a confusing week in the world of link shortening!
You may have heard that tr.im is closing shop by the end of 2009, but they have changed their minds several times. First they said they were closing the service immediately, and turning link forwarding off at the end of 2009. Then tr.im explained how costly it was to operate a URL shortener, and revealed that they had chosen to continue the service (due to the user backlash) while quietly approaching select businesses to buy their assets.