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 was very happy with my jailbroken iPhone. I was using more apps than I ever had. Today as I browse the iPhone App Store (just search for AOL in iTunes 7.7), I realize, at least on Day One and the immediate short term, I am giving up certain things, hopefully not for good though.

Losing - Twinkle. Awesome location based Twitter app with picture attaching.

Gaining - Twitterific. What seems to be a plain Twitter client.

Losing - Mobilescrobbler. The fantastic app that helped me scrobble more tracks than ever with super functionality. Reading lyrics to songs that the iPhone was playing was pretty damn cool.

Gaining - Pandora. Totally different service.

Losing - Mobilechat. aim/chat client with horizontal orientation.

Gaining - Official Aim client. Not sure if it gets horizontal.

Losing - iFlickr. I only took pics with this program.

Gaining - Mobile Flickr.

Losing - uSirius. I was able to go to a restaurant on lunch and listen to Howard Stern while I ate over EDGE!!

Gaining - Nothing.

Losing - Summerboard. My PRECIOUS UI! Icons and wallpaper. Some sick themes.

Gaining - Nothing. This could be the biggest loss because I don’t see an Appearance, UI, or Tweak cateogry in the App Store.

NemusSync - gCalendar sync

Gaining - Nothing

So those were my main ones. Other than that I think overall:

Losing - Fully free software, constantly updated apps, unofficial OS tweaks and fixes

Gaining - Better game selection, a "funded" development community,

In the end, I hope it’s just a matter of time before my truly favorite apps are sent to the App Store because the ones I’ve listed are the ones I will spend cash on without batting an eye. I really am not optimistic about Summerboard though.

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.

I walked out of the theater thinking "what was the point". I ignored 20% on rotten tomatoes. I ignored all reviews. I wanted to believe. I really really liked the Village.

On a comedic note, this movie could be summed up like this:

Something happens in the northeast

People die, people run

People meet an old crazy lady

Crazy lady dies and more people die

The something stops happening in the northeast

Flash forward three months:  some main characters are living their lives

The something never gets a definition.

The ending scene is that something starts to happen in France

End credits

Now. Mix in to that some weird acting and some weird ass dialogue. Marky Mark acts like some well mannered innocent who is trying not to sound as such. I was hoping that much of that weirdness was a clue for something bigger or cooler. A bug eyed girlfriend, a scared shitless military private, a whacked out plant expert who likes hot dogs, and a crazy lady who has separated herself from society are all part of this weirdness. Some was injected for comedic value, (much like my simple rundown of the movie), and some was injected for suspense which otherwise was not delivered by whatever the fuck the happening was. Another annoying thing was people actually saying thing’s like "let’s go where this isn’t HAPPENING" or "why is this HAPPENING".

The most suspenseful shots are of regular plants and trees swaying in the wind, which was to make you believe the happening was caused by something airborne. Which in the end was never determined, so as an audience member, I feel cheated. Was it a plant toxin? Nuclear leakage? Terrorism? Government experiment gone bad? Aliens from Signs? We were never meant to know. And it is for that reason I feel this movie may have been just a REASON to be able to make a movie that showed peoples’ bodies hitting the ground and someone committing suicide by laying in front of a lawn mower.

This is one of those movies that tried to entertain with what you don’t see, suggest vague notions, and really be open ended. It totally works for a little while. Seeing people commit mass suicide is pretty entertaining. But when you find out that you have no idea why they did it and you have been getting freaked out by windy camera shots, the entertainment value drops.

Not only are you not going to be told what caused the happening, the ending shot shows it start again. You’ll get plenty of conspiracy theories which are very heavy on the "plants releasing toxins into the air because they’re pissed at us for ruining the earth."

I don’t know what it is or what caused it AND it never ended. There was no resolution. That could have be fine, but there was no point. This movie would have been better if you found out they were really on a moon colony surrounded by glass and there was a leak, or aliens were watching us and really existed in a different dimension we couldn’t see and they were controlling our minds, or if everyone was possessed by the devil and judgement day had arrived. Or, even just a little something more was given.

For most of the movie, I forgave the weird acting and dialogue in hopes it was for a reason. I was entertained by some of the "happenings" and the build up to what was really no payoff for me. There were suspenseful moments. But in the end, I was just let down. There were times in the movie where I thought it would blow me away. I could go on and rave about how the movie is so different and breaks the rules.

Instead. I felt like there was no point.

The keynote has come and gone. There were no real surprises. I feel pretty lukewarm due to the simple fact that I cannot buy a new iPhone, Me.com account, or download iPhone 2.0 right now.

The iPhone 3G - Yes I will be buying one immediately. I am however, FURIOUS that I have to leave my house and wait in a shit line for it though. It does not have ALL the features I was looking for in an update. I’ll take better battery, GPS, and 3G though. My missing feature list mirrors that of this one on Macnn. It’s the same crap I’ve been asking for forever that I thought would be "no brainer" material. But things like A2DP, referred to in this article as "headphones support for music listening" would most definitely eat up further the battery optimizations Apple figured out for its challenges with 3G. So maybe that will come in the iPhone 4G when gadget batteries run on oxygen or dust particles.

Me.com / MobileMe - While I don’t have an immediate need for MobileMe since I have Exchange support at work, I feel like I can make some good use out of the service. Ultimately dropping $100 on a yearly service is fine with me as long as I think I can get my money’s worth. I think I can.

Sidenotes -

- macrumorslive seemed to hold up the whole way through

- twitter had it’s share of issues

- it would be nice of Apple to have a live QT feed

- Scott Forestall’s evil grin each time he walked back to the stage after each dev did a demo bothered me

- So did Phil Schiller’s polo shirt

- The 3G is being touted as thinner, yet it’s widest measurement is wider than current gen (12.3mm to 11.7mm) I guess they mean the weird curved empty space around the edges?

- When Apple’s website came back up, it didn’t come back up all at once. It took about 10-15 extra minutes for the new pages to show up. Wonder if someone got yelled at for that. It’s been smoother in the past

- So far the 3G cases I’ve seen look like shit. I can only hope that Contourcase ignores the new curve and makes a case VERY similar to the showcase. it is THE BEST cell phone case I have ever owned.

I think it’s all but imminent that the, one, or multiple iPhones are announced today at WWDC. In all of the excitement and rumors leading up to it, as an iPhone user, the hopes that I have I feel, are realistic.

I hope that GPS, Bluetooth A2DP,  is up in there. Hopefully the battery is a little bit better of a performer especially with the 3G and GPS options being a factor. I hope they didn’t fuck with the form factor and case design too much (but a flush headphone jack is more than welcome seeing as how I lost my $15 dollar adapter for the moment). I hope iPhone 2.0 is available today and that it blows me away. I hope the App Store opens today so I can drop loads of cash. I hope I can order a new iPhone today even if it doesn’t ship right away.

All of the rumors about a tablet, OSX for PC, would all be bonuses for me.

Also in this leadup to what looks to be a big iPhone day, I looked back on the last couple of months with my current gen (last gen) iPhone. Currently I’m still using ZiPhone as a jailbreak. The apps and customizations that come along with it need no introduction or explanation. I can safely say that I cannot live without apps like Twinkle, iFlickr, Summerboard, and MobileScrobbler. So today is a crossroads. Am I going to have to choose between two versions of functionality meaning, the apps that are ready for 2.0 or apps available via a Jailbroken iPhone? In my imaginary world, those four apps, amongst others will magically and quickly show up in the App Store. If that happens, I am ready to dish out cash for them immediately.

"Regular" functionality of the iPhone lately has improved by way of companies like Google just enhancing their code. The latest build of gReader is almost perfect. That’s a far cry from what it started out as. Web apps like Hahlo, now 3.0, have come a long way as well.

There’s also some weird things that I started to notice just based off of the amount of time spent with the thing. I was sweating profusely the other day and had my ear up to it in a phone conversation. When taking it off my ear to press some buttons on the keypad, they wouldn’t work. I had to dry it off. Then it was fine. And this past winter,  while driving, I learned you can’t use the iPhone with winter gloves. Probably obvious, but a rude awakening in the heat of the moment nonetheless.

One thing that really gets me sometimes, is when BLASTING music off the iPhone, while in the car at super high volume, and I am singing along, at high volume…the phone rings. Music cuts out (which is a spectacular feature in most other cases) and I’m left singing a cappella. Maybe this leads to a hold calls or go straight to voicemail button or mode.

As I’ve said many times in the past. The iPhone is a huge part of my daily routine and beyond. Whatever the new model is or is not, the ultimate hope is that it will seamlessly plug into where the old one left off and further advance and enhance my life. 4 hours to go to know for sure.

This album King For a Day, Fool For a Lifetime by Faith No More is not only their best album in my opinion, but also tops on my all time list for many reasons. One interesting note is that it was the last album I purchased on cassette. I remember looking through the cassette liner notes so much that they fell apart at the perforations. I listened to the tape so many times, some parts of the album began to have distorted sound.

I used to listen to this album front to back, or side to side rather, since it was a tape. I would listen to it in a walkman while I rode my bike when I was a teenager. Something about these songs always struck a chord with me. Somehow, the different styles that FNM were messing with (jazz, funk, metal, and more) on this album work so well.

This is one of those albums that I have quoted lyrics from for the past ten years. Lyrics like "what a day when you can look it in the face and hold your vomit" or "it’s always fun until someone gets hurt and then it’s just hilarious". I can listen to the opening of "Last To Know" a million times. The opening part of that song is so powerful and memorable for me when Mike Patton sings:

"Where it grows on trees
But never blooms"

Did I mention the album art by Eric Drooker is just classic?

The most interesting part of this album is that it became a fan / cult favorite type of album. It’s such a complete album I am surprised that it isn’t more known and revered. There are no big FTN hits like "Epic", but every song is polished and solid. I’m still trying to figure out why it’s not available on iTunes or the Amazon music store.

This album and I have reconnected in a big way and I can’t stop listening to it.