About a month ago, I attended a BarCamp-style conference in San Francisco all about social media, and at the beginning of the conference, everyone was asked to introduce themselves and share what their favorite social networking site was–by far, the most frequent response was Twitter. Indeed, Twitter may very likely become one of the great wonders of the world. Who would have thought that a service that dubs itself as nothing more than a way to answer the eternal question, “What are you doing?” would turn out to be as addictive as it has proven to be. As the proud owner of over 4500 tweets since the end of January 2007, I oughta know.

In my opinion, the real reason that Twitter has been successful (despite the fact that its reputation for reliability is the same as, if not worse than, that of MobileMe) is because it’s the first product that fills a real niche in our lives. All of us, particularly myself included, have an inner urge to share certain tidbits of our lives–just to get them out there, whether or not people are even going to care about them. Tweets don’t have to just be about things that we are doing, but often contain things that we are feeling at a particular time. They’re inspired by the moment. For example, a month ago, on July 14th, I pulled up to my local Apple Store to the point where I was surprised to find a long, snaking, around-the-block line for the iPhone 3G–a full three and a half days after the thing first became available! I thought that the situation was just visually hilarious, and I thought of just so many things that could be said to make fun of it, so just to get it out of my head, I sat myself on the park bench outside of the store, cracked open my laptop with the store’s free wifi, and churned away about a dozen tweets on how crazy the situation was.
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Tags: blog, Blogging, Personal, thoughts, tweets, Twitter

I’m currently writing this blog post on an iPod touch at my local Apple Store, thanks to the WordPress App for the iPhone/iPod touch. Writing on this onscreen keyboard is still a little bit clunky, but I’m certainly doing it faster now than I was doing when I first picked up an iPhone here a year ago.

As i’m sure many of my readers are aware, I’ve been a very longtime holdout when it comes to iPods and iPhones. In fact, as I described in a recent blog post (boy, I wish this thing had a way to let me copy and paste links), my opinion of the iPods (including the touch) has been that they pretty much didn’t do anything that I couldn’t already do on my laptop. True, these things ate more mobile, but just how many of the mobile features that these things offered did I really need to have with me when my laptop was not handy?

But now this darned thing called the App Store is out. Not only has it wowed certain influential tech reviewers like David Pogue (if you haven’t seen his latest video about the App Store, you’re missing out on something GREAT), but it’s even making me take another look at these pocket-sized wonders.

Twitterriffic is certainly one of those Mac apps that has ported over very nicely to the iPhone/iPod touch, but it actually extends the ability of Twitter to reflect what you are actually doing. After all, most if us certainly don’t spend every moment of the day doing things just in the computer, so for Twitter to realize its full potential, it has to be the kind of service that can go mobile. I’ve had the chance to try Twitterrific on the iPod touch, and it has really felt like a nice transformation from its beautifully-simplistic interface on the Mac to an equally beautiful and simplistic interface on the touch. I could easily see it making me 50% more active on Twitter.

WordPress, the app that I am using right now to write this blog post, is also a very interesting examplenof what’s possible. After downloading this app onto here, all I had to do was enter the URL of my blog along with the username and password for my WordPress admin panel and boom, I was in my admin via the app with the ability to edit my past posts or write a new one, like I’m doing now. I could totally see using this to write a brief blog post from somewhere, although maybe not a really long one like I’m doing now.

1Password has not yet gotten their iPhone version out yet, but after seeing the preview that they posted on their blog, it’s another app I’m quite interested in. One of it’s abilities is supposed to be allowing you to generate super-tough and super-safe passwords, but I’ve been a bit slow at getting many of my passwords safe because I wouldn’t remember them if I needed to login from somewhere else and didn’t have 1Password there to autofill the info for me. Between having 1Password on the iPhone/iPod touch and the my1Password service, however, both of which are coming up soon, I could really have a nice solution for keeping track of my passwords and keeping them secure.

OmniFocus for the iPhone/iPod touch, however, has GOT to be the deal-clincher for me. Since I bought the Mac version at Macworld in January, I’ve been working on adopting OmniFocus and getting used to using it to help me organize the various tasks surrounding my life (and try to reduce stress as well). The problem, however, is that it lives on my computer, which I don’t have with me at places like school and other places where I really need to have it handy to add actions to (as well as reminding me of what actions I need to get done). OmniFocus for iPhone/iPod touch, however, would eliminate that problem by letting me have my OmniFocus lists with me to get to, and let me sync them with the ones on my computer. Add in those awesome mobile-only features like location-aware contexts, and it’s about time to put the “Slippery With Drool” signs out.

While I’m still not interested in the iPhone (unless someone wants to donate the $70/month AT&T plan to me, since I doubt I’ll ever be able to afford that and don’t like AT&T anyway), I’m starting to show a bit of interest in the iPod touch for the first time. It may have just been a touchscreen wifi media player when it first came out, but now, thanks to the App Store, I’m convinced that it’s the best PDA out there, and one that I’m really getting interested in. However, I’ll keep waliting until Apple releases their next line of iPods (likely this fall) until I start saving.

P.S. Do yourself a favor to maintain your sanity. Don’t write a post as long as this on an iPhone or iPod touch. It takes too much patience.

Tags: 1Password, App Store, Apple, applications, iPhone, iPod touch, OmniFocus, Twitter, Twitterriffic, WordPress

It’s Wednesday, which means that the release of Mac OS X Leopard is now less than 60 hours away! Today, I continue with part 3 of my award-winning Tiger-to-Leopard series (well, okay, it hasn’t really won anything, yet), where I take a look at everything that has happened during the 130-week interim between the releases of Mac OS X Tiger and Mac OS X Leopard. Today, I begin my focus on the Web 2.0, which has grown and matured exponentially since early 2005. Now, don’t get confused with the whole “part within a part thing,” but since I have quite a bit of Web 2.0 coverage to, well, cover, I’ll be stretching my Web 2.0 TTL coverage over today and tomorrow. Shall we take a look? (And yes, I promise that this post won’t be the laundry list you saw yesterday.)
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Tags: Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Mac OS X Leopard, MySpace, phpBB, Tiger-to-Leopard, Twitter, Web 2.0, WordPress, YouTube