The world as frankps sees it!
Posts tagged Twitter
Official Twitter client finally Windows Phone 7 Mango ready
02 months ago
One of the applications that I have been missing when upgrading to Mango and starting to use my primary Live account (the one registered with an address in Norway). The Twitter client, along with Flickr and GoWalla, was not available in the Norwegian Marketplace. As of yesterday, Twitter is updated to support Mango and now available worldwide in Marketplace.
Other then fast-app switching, I have not find any new features (no Live Tile or push notifications). The version number has only gone from 1.13944.31667 to version 1.14329.14900.
Seesmic for Windows
0This week I installed a preview version of the native Twitter application, Seesmic for Windows. It combines a fully functional Twitter integration directly in the Windows environment.
It was funny to see how much attention a simple Twitter application still can get. I felt it to be overhyped! It got presented on Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC), during Ray Ozzie’s opening keynote. What? It’s a Twitter application, nothing more. It is a more or less feature complete application, I’ll give the developers that much. First of all, I don’t like that the installer bypasses the UAC. No administrator password is needed to install the Seesmic. First I thought that this could be yet another AIR application, but it’s not. There excists an AIR version of the Twitter client as well. By bypassing UAC, the application gets installed in user profiles instead of under Program Files. A nightmare for system administrators.
I find it almost unbelievable to read:
Microsoft has provided great support to help us get started on the Microsoft platform. I would just like to thank the team who has been working with us to make it possible for us to deliver a product in such a short period of time
I hope they will help you to work with UAC and not against it, as you have done so far.
Another problem I have with the client, is the horrible “font rendering” this preview release has. This is not a sleek and smooth user interface. I have tried it both on my 12″ laptop and my desktop computer with a 24″ screen. Both computers running Windows 7. I guess the tweets are rendered as images, and therefor the text is blur. For the same reason you can’t cut and paste text from tweets. The Seesmic preview is someting I simply don’t want to use or recommend to my readers.
The idea of having social services as native desktop application is great. This let you use drag and drop to add user lists, and gives you an increased performance, with easier and faster navigation through tab views. Native applications compared to AIR applications use less memory, and they utilize more Windows 7 features (e.g. location sensor).
I realize that this is a quite negative review, I have only written about the things that I find bad in this client. For a more positive review, please read WEB WORKER DAILY’s Seesmic for Windows: An AIR-less Twitter Client.
Can Expono battle with Flickr and Picasa?
0I have had access to Expono for a while, but never gotten around to use it. Before you read this review, know this: I have been using Flickr 3-4 years already, and have all my pictures there. I have only briefly tested Picasa. It is difficult to review Expono as a start-up company, as it is competing directly with two of Internet’s biggest players, Google and Yahoo. Both Google’s Picasa and Yahoo’s Flickr are popular services and just about feature complete. So the questions for this review are: Is there space for Expono and what extra does Expono give, that should make established users of Picasa and Flickr consider to move. I consider it wrong to ask the question: If I was to start sharing pictures today, what would I choose?
There are a fair number of photo sharing sites available, and it was therefore strange to see the announcement of Expono opening for the public on the very same day as Fox Interactive Media lays off one third of the staff (of 120) at the competing photo-sharing site Photobucket. I hope Expono makes it.
Expono is fairly easy to use and comes with a clean and simple user interface for most of it’s functionality. I found the connections to Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed a mess. The uploads have an ok speed, but miss not having the possibility to upload directly from Adobe Lightroom and Windows Live Photo Gallery. Perhaps someone will make a plugin in the future? Expono has all the features you expect to find on a media sharing site: Online backup, easy sharing, albums and tagging (also face and geo tagging), find duplicates and iPhoto photocast support. It also comes with a fine-grained access control, actually quite a bit better then the one in Flickr. Just take a look at Expono’s feature list, and you will be convinced. There are a lot of people that has not chosen a photo sharing solution yet, and Expono has timed there launch well, opening their service to the public in July. Just in time for people to upload and share their holiday memories.
Launching after Flickr and Picasa gives them the advantage of knowing what functionality users want, and also an opportunity to implement the features in better ways! Expono is for instance far easier/better on creating a new album and then adding photos to the album. And these functions are key functionalities in any photo sharing solution!
Expono is also one of the best examples I have seen of cloud computing so far. The company does not have their own server park, but have rather based their service on Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Services) combined with RightScale Cloud Computing Management Platform.
Don’t Twitter about your holiday!
0
One of today’s big stories on the news was that people published information about their upcoming holidays on social medias, like Facebook and Twitter. Several countries are considering twitring about your holiday so careless that it can provide lower insurance. Don’t say that you will leave for a two weeks holiday to Spain in a week. Also try not to twitter about what you do on your holiday, when not at home. Don’t publish holiday picture publicly before coming home (for instance on Flickr or on your blog). Also, I recommend people not using tripnote on their e-mails accounts either.
Thiefs have gone digital by now as well, and know just as much about computers and the Internet as you do. They use Twitter and other social medias (Web 2.0) as well, not in the same way as you, but in a smarter way!
Be smart, be quiet…
There is now a link between my blog and my Twitter account
02 years ago
I have  just enabled the web service Twitterfeed. What is does, is as simple as it’s brilliant. It feeds my blog posts in to my microblog on Twitter, so that each blog post also appears on Twitter with a link to my blog. It’s all done with the help of RSS.
Hopefully this will give my blog more readers. I enabled the service after Henrik, a friend and a reader of my blog, suggested this on Twitter. So thank you Henrik!
The logo of the web service Twitterfeed