I have 880 followers at the time I’m writing this; a very small number for some, but more than a lot and close to what I find to be a useful number of people to have receive my updates and to receive the updates from. This number is growing by ~30 people a day so in a week or so I’ll have over a thousand and in two months at this rate I’ll have over 2000 people; at which stage I may have to look at changing my policy of following back those who follow me.

I love twitter; it took me a while but I now find it to be an incredibly useful tool for answering random questions and getting advice. It was through Twitter I decided to see Transformers today instead of ‘The Hangover’; that yesterday I discovered why all Americans refer to the ‘#’ sign as ‘pound’ and how I arranged to how dinner with a fellow technology-entrepreneur in London last week.

This isn’t because I have 880 followers; this is because I have 880 english-speaking, non-bot, interesting, like-minded followers who are on Twitter for the same reasons as I am; to enrich, and be enriched. I have friends with thousands of followers who have a very poor twitter experience filled with repeats of bot posts, spam invites to increase twitter followers and hash-tag spamming. (e.g. Software MP3 DVD Movie and many more http://ow.ly/h47O +++#ihavetoadmit Mark Webber Chuck Norris Michael Jackson Pirates Bruno Iran) – can you guess what the trending topics were at the time?

So, I have tried various Twitter tools. Twollow is actually very effective; if you leave even 5 keywords on the ‘15 followers per batch’ setting, you will get new targeted followers, quickly. Or at least they appeared targeted; but there were a number of problems.

1. At the beginning all Twitter users spoke English. Twitter is now a worldwide phenomenon that spans many countries and languages however it offers no translation features. Mix that with the fact that Apple iPhone is spelt the same way around the world, as is Microsoft Windows, ASP .Net etc… and they keywords you’re hitting match up, but their posts are in Spanish, French, German, Chinese etc… this isn’t useful!
2. Keywords are spammed; iPhone is mentioned in lots of inappropriate tweets because it’s one of the most searched words, as is start-up and many social media terms.
3. A post can be totally misrepresentative. For example I had one user that said “Just returned my iPhone, was awful” in a tweet. The rest of her tweets were about Makeup. In every sense she is someone who I probably have very little to say to (although she did seem to know a lot about Makeup!!).

So I’ve now stopped using most automated tools; I still auto-follow people who follow me, and hit a few very specific keywords, but I monitor that list and evaluate them. I also have a script that I’ll be releasing soon that matches trending topics at the time of tweets with the content of tweets. If all someone hits is Trending Topics then they’re probably a spammer, but even if not, then I can get it elsewhere; it is ‘Trending’ after all!

How do I gather followers? I write interesting tweets that often link to blog posts, interesting articles or images. It actually isn’t hard to gain Twitter followers; follow anyone that you are even vaguely interested in, and @reply to people who say interesting things and have lots of followers. For example, if I @reply to leolaporte, and someone searches for leolaporte they will see my tweet and if I’m saying interesting sensible things, they may follow me.

But why can’t this all be done automatically?

I believe that it can, but that none of the tools are there yet. I’m talking to a few people who are already in the ‘automating twitter’ space and am adding some things of my own and trying to build a tool that will completely automatically and sensibly manage your twitter followers.

There are a few points I want to hit:

• Keywords
• Number of followers they have (safety can usually be taken in the fact lots of other people follow them)
• Language  (not just in one tweet, but in many)
• Context – a basic idea of the context of tweets – positivity, negativity (i.e. I hate my iPhone wouldn’t necessarily keyword match to iPhone)
• Groups – i.e. Social groups could have auto-follow groups that will add a user to everyone’s followers / followees every time a new user joins. e.g. a forum; all users could want to join a ‘Neowin’ twitter group, that will then link up all members.
• Recommendations – recommend users to follow to a user from those whom people they follow are following and on keywords they’re monitoring.

Obviously this is a complex problem and Twitter Karma and Twollow are doing a lot of good work; the main feature that I would like to see added quickly is language awareness so that will be the first additional feature offered by this service when it goes live in the next month or so. The others will follow soon after.

I’ll post again once I have a name and domain set up, looking for beta testers, or email ahead if you’re interested at chris@blogitech.co.uk.

Chris

The truth is, they’ve just branched the code base this week; checking out build 7076, and relabelling it as 7106, ready to work on towards the RTM build, while 7076, 7077 onwards, will be polished to ultimately be released as the RC (probably at build 7100?).

So.. 7106 is actually 1 day older than 7077. Anyone thinking about rushing out and sourcing a chinese iso and a language pack can probably hold out for either the RC or a later RTM branch build; possibly with some of these exciting new surprises??

Chris

3.0 is great. It’s a considerable step forward, there are lots of wonderful new features (I’m not going to document them; google iPhone 3.0 beta walkthrough ), instead I’m going to focus on the issues in these features, what I think they’re going to fix, and what they’re in danger of leaving in place!

Copy and Paste: Wonderful feature that’s been missing for a *very* long time. The implimentation is excellent, except that it activates far too often. For example single clicking almost anywhere in the SMS text box will invoke the Select, Select All, Paste bar. It’s often broken in safari and seems to cause you to loose the ability to move the cursor using the single finger hold in multi-line text boxes.

iPod: In podcasting, I am incapable of selecting the top item in any ‘listview’. This is rediculous and actually makes it impossible to listen to my most recent podcasts without going through other ones and track skipping. The alphabetically first podcast is inaccessible. Full Stop.

iPod: iPod will often freeze the playing progress bar while listening to music. It can also get stuck on play while not playing when using the controls on the ‘locked’ screen.

Send Contact Details: I’m happy to see the inclusion of sending contact details via MMS and Email. There is no reason that you can’t SMS someone somebody else’s phone number. Default layout being First Name Last Name Phone Number Email (if available). You can then ofcourse delete anything you don’t want, or select which phone number (if there are many) to send.

Safari: Besides the issues listed above under copy and paste, Safari now seems to randomly crash and close relatively often. I’m sure this will be sorted.

Safari: Copy/Paste seems to want to grab ‘elements’ as opposed to

The ‘Network’ pane in Settings takes an ‘age’ to load. Interestingly this is the pane that purportedly includes the tethering settings.

Phone: Phone would often freeze when beginning calls – prompting it to appear that it wasn’t calling, but actually be ringing. It also frequently crashes and closes when going to the ‘recent’ tab of the application.

Spotlight: Very excited about this one. I’m not sure that the UI is final; I for one would certainly like it to change. It’s a little sluggish getting accross to it, but I’m sure that’s for the reason above. It doesn’t index / search SMS. No SMS. Why no SMS? That would be one of my key items that I’d like to search! Hopefully they’ll add that!

Voice Notes: This is one of the slowest, and most horrid to use applications ever. Pressing the record button has quite a pause before it records, it doesn’t fit the iPhone UI at all… the meter looks stupid. It’s just really bad. The syncing is very good though! :)

Okay.. and just completed my downgrade to 2.2.1. It works and is easy; I’ll post a guide for that too!

Chris

On OS X you can use XCODE’s iPhone browser window to get the UDID. On Window’s it almost as easy:

Windows XP: Browse to C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\Apple Computer\Lockdown

Windows Vista: Browse to C:\Users\%username%\AppData\roaming\Apple Computer\Lockdown

The file found in that folder is entitled with your UDID. Enjoy 3.0 :D

Chris

Update: This can be found on OS X in the following directory: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backups

You can drag a tab off of a window… and it creates a new window, seemingly keeping the process that the tab was running in consistent! …

Change the http:// at the beginning to https:// and the pages will load and provided you have an Apple Developer Membership you can d/l the SDK / Beta :)

so…. https://developer.apple.com/iphone/

Chris

update: this is now going a little slowly too!

update: ‘humbertog’ just posted on Twitter: “By installing iPhone 3.0 beta on your Test Devices, these devices are permanently “locked” into testing mode and cannot be restored!”

Does anyone know if this is true?!

Okay, so the Windows 7 Beta is out and it’s good. Great in fact! So I figured that I would migrate all of my systems to use Windows 7; and document the process while I’m at it!

So in the next couple days I’ll be publishing a quick guide and outlining my thoughts on installing Windows 7 on:

- Macbook Air – 32 bit build through BootCamp.

- Desktop – 64 bit build on a system designed as a Media PC

- Workstation – 64 bit build on a top end workstation machine. :)

All systems are up and running in good order, but occasionally the process wasn’t obvious.

Stay tuned….

Chris