There’s been a lot of talk lately about how Twitter has changed the corporate culture for Comcast.  In  fact, the chatter first started back in January with a big to-do in Business Week. So, is Twitter actually helping provide real customer service?  Is this just a Public Relations gimick, or is it truly — um — Comcastic?

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Twitter has started to offer the ability to create lists of contacts within your Twitter account. This feature is being rolled out to a few users right now so if you don’t see the feature in your account when you log in then you’ll likely have to wait for it to be added. What do Twitter lists add? Well for one it’s an opportunity to quickly view similar types of contacts. For example I’ve set one list to display my company contacts and another list displays all the Gear Diary team writers.

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Just in case you missed it two exciting new applications hit the iTunes App Store a few days ago.

Tweetie 2 and Adobe Photoshop Mobile have both only been out a few days but have both been receiving high praise from iPhone users everywhere.

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Twitter, the social networking site which allows individuals to update their followers with short 140 characters messages on what they’re up to seems to be experiencing some sort of outage.

Many users across Twitter are reporting their Twitter feeds not being updated over the last few hours.  I’m seeing all my own tweets (messages) post to my time line but none of the tweets from the people I’m following appear.

Tweets are getting posted to the Twitter servers though.  Just check out the time line of one of the people you follow and you’ll see their recent tweets, they just don’t show in your personal time line.  The problem seems to be related to followers.  I’ve read a few reports of people seeing their list of followers disappear and then come back and same for the list of people they’re following.

Let’s hope Twitter hasn’t fallen victim to another DOS attack and that this is just a temporary glitch.

UPDATE:  The phrase “Twitter is Frozen” is number 2 on the list of trends.  Twitter says The Twitter status blog has been updated to reflect a known issue with time line delays.

UPDATE:  Twitter is back.   All is right in the world again.

One of my favorite YouTubers, “AppStoreReviewer” launched his very own iPhone OS application a few weeks ago.  And best of all it’s now free in the iTunes App Store.

ChillTwit is a simple and elegant Twitter client for the iPhone and iPod Touch.  The application has two features which seem to separate it from the other Twitter clients in the App Store.

First, you have the ability to change the background the appears behind tweets  and second, you can change the bubble colors from nine different options.

It may not be the most robust Twitter client around, but it includes all the basic features and functions you’d expect from a free Twitter client.  The layout makes Tweets very easy to read and the colors are a nice way to customize your viewing experience.

You can watch a video demo of the application here.

ChillTwit is available in the iTunes App Store.  Get it now while it’s still free.

I wrote about the Mac application EventBox back in July. It’s a nice little application that allows you gather together a number of your different social media and keep it in one place. For example, I use it for my Google Reader feeds, and to keep track of both Twitter and Facebook. At the time the application was described in this way

Do you use many social services? Annoyed that you have to run 6 different applications? Enter the new revolutionary social app, EventBox. All your services in one place, integrated.
When you are busy doing your work, you don’t want anything to disrupt your focus. But you still want to read that message which just came in. This is where the HUD window comes in handy.

Well, it turns out I wasn’t the only one who was keeping an eye on application. The folks at RealMac, the people behind RapidWeaver and LittleSnapper (two of my most frequently used Mac applications) were as well. They liked it so much, in fact, that they purchased it and are renaming it Socialite. Continue Reading

Twitter, the social networking site that allows you to let your “followers” know what you’re doing, has been officially banned from the Texas Tech football program.

This action comes after one of the team’s players tweeted an unflattering message about the team’s coach while the player was in a team meeting.  The player, a linebacker, voiced his displeasure over the team’s head coach being late for meetings.

The team’s head coach Mike Leach says his team does not need distractions like Twitter or Facebook and called the services “stupid.”  He stated that players of college football get enough attention and called those who use such services  “a bunch of narcissists that want to sit and type stuff about themselves all the time.”

So the question around Gear Diary is how long before our own Coach bans Twitter from his team?

There’s a new version of the popular Twitter iPhone client Tweetie coming soon. Instead of updating the old Tweetie program, the developer atebits has opted to create a newly named Tweetie 2 which will be sold as a separate program complete with a separate $2.99 fee. That’s totally within the developer’s rights to price their current and future releases in any manner that they like. I don’t dispute that. However does this pricing usher in a new era of abandonware for the iPhone. Where original apps aren’t updated but instead are left for dead while the new 2.0 (or 3.x, 4,x, etc) are sold for full price to existing users. This is one of the first times that we’ve seen the issue of a major iPhone App upgrade not being free. Patrick over at Justanotheriphoneblog has capture my thoughts perfectly – especially the part about “utter BS”. Yes on the surface it’s only $3 – until you think about it. I have well over 50 apps on my iPhone. Am I soon going to be hit up for $3 a piece to upgrade? If so, how many times per year will I be forced to upgrade? Patrick’s post raises some interesting questions. I suggest you read more at the link below.

Justanotheriphoneblog: Tweetie 2- ‘New App’ – will spit on existing ‘old app’ users

OK, so the name alone makes me think of that mind numbing “Jitterbug” jingle (don’t even try to deny that you just blurted out that little tune!). But what we have is Twitterlerts for BlackBerry smart phones, and the app is for Berries running OS 4.3 or higher. Twitterlerts, by Electric Pocket, gives BlackBerry users the ability to receive notifications when any keyword is discussed on Twitter. I find it to be a great tool for marketing research, because you can use it to determine how often a product or company name is talked about on Twitter. For instance, I might set it to track anything Buckeyes or Cowboys, but that’s just me! Users can also easily tweet or share tweets directly from their phone.  For those of you that haven’t caught on to the Twitter craze yet, this app does not require you to have an account to track tweets!

Twitterlerts is available directly from the Developer for US$4.99, or you can get it for 15% off at the Gear Diary Store, with the code GDFallTweets.

Has anyone read the recently updated Twitter Terms of Service? Our own Thomas R. Hall has, and points you to compare the differences between the previous and current versions. Personally I think it is pretty cool that they have enough transparency to let you compare so easily. Early this year Twitter gained more popular notice due to Oprah and the CNN / Ashton Kutcher race for 1 million followers. After that, the already popular practice of pretending to be a celebrity exploded, and in response Twitter started ‘verified’ accounts. Continue Reading

qTweeter is one of the best reasons to jailbreak. Once installed via Cydia all you do is draw your finger down from the top of the screen and an input window appears and allows you to quickly update your Twitter or Facebook status. Now the app has been approved by Apple and released in the App Store for $.99. That’s the good news. The bad news?? The key drop down functionality that lets you launch the app from the status bar is missing.

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Remember how you would inevitably waste hours as you watched those old Pop-Up Videos on VH1?  Well this week Fox tried to rope in viewers by overlaying twitter onto a rerun of the series Fringe.   The result?  Those not-so-subtle twitter feeds took up half the screen.

Dave Zatz captured the image above while viewing Fox’s “experiment” and was not impressed.  Instead of setting it up to where the Twitter banter may engage the viewer, Fox successfully blocked viewers from actually seeing anything happening on the episode.   File under “how not to integrate Twitter onto Television.” Fox may want to take a few notes on how Verizon put Twitter and Facebook on TV for their FiOS users.

via Zatz Not Funny! and Mashable

OK, I am definitely a product of the 80’s & 90’s…nothing beats GI Joe (uh..the original!), Saved By the Bell, Alf (yeah that just happened), and Polaroid pictures! Unless you are able to track down one of these relics at a yard sale or flea market, what can you do?.

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If you spend any amount of time online with Twitter you’ll soon notice that the service is seemingly over-run with hypsters, spammers and shameless self-promotion. Because of this I seldom visit the web interface and instead post mostly from my iPhone. To me Twitter is just a convenient way to autopost updates to social sites I use more regularly like Facebook and Friendfeed. Sadly, until now, there hasn’t been a convenient way to weed out Twitter people who follow you but are doing nothing but sending out blatant advertising. Twitblock.com is a free site that does an admirable job of sorting through your Twitter followers. The site scores them based on how likely they are to be spammers and provides an easy interface to block those followers permanently. In my testing the top 100 results seemed very accurate though as I moved down the results list I saw a lot of inactive accounts from users who’d posted once and abandoned the service. If your Twitter account could use a little spammer weeding – check out TwitBlock.

TwitBlock via MediaMemo

Do you Twitter?  Are you a Twit with your Tweets?  I’ll be honest here and tell you that I really don’t Twitter.  Sure, I have an account, and have tried to understand it, but it just never did much for me.  That being said, I do understand that millions of people out there send what must be billions and billions (sorry, Carl Sagan) of Tweets on Twitter every day (does this make anyone else think of a little yellow canary from Looney Tunes?) Continue Reading