Filed under: Features, Social Software, web 2.0, Microblogging
Hey Twitter Tuesday true believers! It’s been a big week, with some of the Twitter crew down in Austin, TX for South by Southwest Interactive. As you may recall, Twitter initially launched at SXSW, and it’s been a huge part of the conference ever since. No surprise, then, that Twitter’s @Ev chose this event to launch a big new Twitter feature. Read on for that announcement, plus apps and add-ons — there’s even some Tweetie news!
Let’s do this thing!
The big news in Twitter this week is the announcement of “@anywhere” during Evan Williams’ SXSW keynote. @anywhere means that Twitter won’t just be limited to Twitter.com and all of the lovely third-party apps and sites I cover in this column. Nope, Twitter will really be … anywhere. Twitter usernames will be popping up all over huge sites like Amazon, eBay, MSNBC and Digg. You’ll eventually be able to bring @anywhere to your own site, too, with just a little bit of Javascript magic.
Twitter also finally turned on its geolocation service for the web this week, just in time for SXSW. You can now tag your tweets by location via Twitter’s website, not just through third-party apps and the API.
Folks who were lucky enough to jump on the MacHeist bundle that was released last week got a little surprise bonus from Atebits software: a license for the upcoming Mac version of Tweetie 2, and access to the forthcoming pre-beta version. There have been some updates to the iPhone version of Tweetie lately, too. What this tells me is that although developer Loren Brichter may be the type to keep his lip zipped about new developments, he’s been hard at work behind the scenes. I’m already itching to try this pre-beta, which is supposedly due soon.
And, speaking of awesome iPhone Twitter clients, one of our favorites was recently purchased! Birdfeed, the pretty, lightweight client with the very useful caching feature for offline reading, has been purchased by Brizzly and turned into Brizzly for iPhone. Brizzly’s a pretty handy web-based Twitter client, so I’m hopeful that the iPhone version will be worthy of Birdfeed’s legacy. Brizzly for iPhone is free, but requires a Brizzly account.
Ever wonder what your tweets would look like, illustrated? Well, you don’t have to have any art skills to find out. A service called Funtweet converts tweets into a sort of mini-postcard format, adding an appropriate background image related to the topic of the tweet. Well, “appropriate” is relative, I suppose. For one of my posts, Funtweet apparently seized upon the word “okay” and gave me Borat in Speedo with two thumbs up. Thanks, Funtweet … I guess.
Need to pick a random contest winner or “Twitterer of the Day” from your followers list? Tweetrandomizer can help. It requires no login or signup, and it makes the process of selecting a random user quite simple. Hey, better than having to write a custom script, eh?
Well, that’s what I’ve got for you this week. Thanks for reading Twitter Tuesday, and don’t forget to come back for next week’s recap of what the Twitter team does during the inevitable post-SXSW hangover.
Twitter Tuesday – this week’s Twitter news, apps and more originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Brizzly – Twitter – iPhone – Evan Williams – Loren Brichter
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