ModifiedLogic

If you’re like me you KNOW that Twinkle is THE twitter app for the iPhone. It has been missing from the app store. I decided to contact the good people at Tapulous to get the hot scoop on what’s going on and here is what I received.

Free free to blog that it has been with Apple for some time and waiting for approval. So any day now you’ll get to see it. And it will be sporting:

* a sexy new interface

* all the standard Twitter features

* some failsafe protection that your tweets/messages will be delivered to your connections that are also on Twinkle

* the ability to use Twinkle even if you are new to Twitter or not a Twitter user

Cheers,

Andrew

Co-Founder, Tapulous, Inc

Thank you Andrew. I can’t wait!

I find that following somewhere around 50 people on Twitter is a "sweet spot". I don’t like to follow to many people because I inevitably miss things. It’s hard enough forgetting to check my replies. I miss enough of those as it is.

There are so many ways to connect to social networking, microblogs, and other web based services these days. When you sign up for Friendfeed or Socialthing or any of the updaters like ping.fm or hellotxt, you are greeted with a sea of icons for many many different services. You have video, social, micro, news, rss, pictures, music, books, misc, and just about any other web service out there.

If you’re like me, you use many of these services. If you’re like me, you do want to share this info with everyone. But it has become increasingly harder to keep track of it all and even more difficult to filter out the noise. In some respects it goes hand in hand.

Take Friendfeed as an example. I’m currently only following about 10 people on that site. By default "friend of a friend" updates are shown, so you can multiply that 10 people by 2 or 3 at any given time. Friendfeed is just a sea of text. If you follow any of the "weblebrities", their posts usually yield many comments. Those posts keep getting to the top of my page after being commented on for over 24 hours. So sea of text plus a few weblebrities equals a lot of noise. I’ve been reading about everyone’s favorite peanut butter on Friendfeed for the past two days because it keeps floating to the top. I suppose I could just hide it.

A service like Friendfeed needs something like groups that you can create and customize. This way, I could make a "weblebrities" group where I would add Kevin Rose, Veronica Belmont, Chris Pirillo, and iJustine and keep them and all of their ever growing popularity in a "cage". Furthermore, I could keep real life friends in the "real life" group.

Friendfeed isn’t the only service that would benefit from this. Um…like…everything in which you add people could benefit from this. In turn, all of the apps and services that connect to these benefited outfits would…uhh…benefit. Alert Thingy would be more than just a prettier copy of the sea of text.

So it’s easy. Too much noise equals disorganization. How to you organize disorganized data? With groups baby. Or labels, or containers, or folders, or whatever. We’re just looking for some kind of UI options that make many things easier to see. Kind of like how folders work in the gReader. I’m sure the minds behind these services will figure it out and implement "groups" in an even cooler way than I’m thinking.

I’m currently following 39 people and being followed by 67. Of those 67 people, I would venture to say at LEAST 20 of them are full fledge spam accounts. I get at least one or two random spam accounts per week following me lately. I guess the trick there is, they hope you are a Twitter zombie and just follow back everyone who follows you. I’m sure there are plently of people who do that, but I definitely don’t.

The only thing you can do to these spammers is block them. But then, sometimes it’s hard to identify a Twitter spammer. First thing I do is to check how many people they are following. If it’s in the thousands, I generally call "spam". Another way to tell is if all they post are links to the same website over and over and nothing else. Whichever way you choose to look at it, the growing spam problem on Twitter is the beginning of more bad things to come to a seemingly innocent, and by far, the most honest and open social community around.

Obviously, the Twitter devs have an opportunity to nip some of these issues in the bud. Some of the other things that may be waiting on the horizon are things I am surprised I haven’t seen. Things like malicious postings, overdoing self promotion, and blatant product placement (Jason Calacanis has an opportunity to be a pioneer there if he so chooses. If you’re one of 25k followers of his, you might recall hearing about a Tesla roadster or Dash GPS.)

The good thing about Twitter right now, is that you get to choose the noise level. I choose to only follow a small number of people so the conversation is at least intelligible. I am VERY picky about who I follow. If you’re following a thousand people, you’re definitely missing things. If you’re following twenty five thousand people, what can you really read? Just random tweets. You might as well refresh the public timeline, no?  In that case, you’re a great talker, but a terrible listener.

There are plenty of people who have ridiculous amounts of followers. A lot of those people are having contests and races to see who gets the most followers. You might think that it’s an innocent race to the top for bragging rights, but I think otherwise. Scenario: You have amassed fifty thousand followers. Starbucks marketing contacts you and offers you $500 to mention that you just had a latte and link to their website. It’s going to happen, but is it a good or bad thing?

I think spammers, scammers, and other malicious beings are looming on the horizon of Twitter’s future. It’s all just more reasons I would be willing to pay for Twitter. I hope Twitter’s plans for development are faster and better than anything the "bad people" are cooking up. That goes for good people too. One of Twitter’s major problems lately has been the overloading of normal (not sure if "normal" Twitter usage has been or can be defined) usage as the user base grows and grows.

Twitter, my wallet is open for you whenever you’re ready to take some money.

Currently myself and many others are experiencing an issue with Twitter that is apparently not allowing the display of most friends’ tweets. A few people have suggested that you can unfollow/re-follow a friend to fix it, but if you are following many people, it can become tedious.

According to the following status update now showing on everyone’s home page, tweets are in fact "going through", they just can’t be seen.

With these latest Twitter outage/errors, I realized that I would be willing to pay for Twitter.

I currently pay the $9.00 every 3 months for last.fm to hopefully contribute to service, development, and the "My Radio Station" feature. Another thing I pay for is the $24.99 a year for a premium flickr account. I use both of those services quite a bit, but I use Twitter more.

If it meant more uptime, more features, etc…I would pay a small fee for Twitter in a heartbeat.

In all of this confusion with the current issues, I found this Twitter account that spits out status updates and bugs. Friend it up if you want the latest straight from inner twitter. http://twitter.com/twitter_status