I just got up from bed and wanted to Write à Blog post via the wordpress iPhone App. Why? Because i like Typing on the iPhone Keyboard very much. In fact, I Must Object to the critisizers of the iPhone virtual Keyboard that they’re plain wring about this. Typing goes fast in landscape Mode, you get haptic, Visual and Audio feedback from your keystrokes, which is Way more than à Hardware Keyboard would get You and you get à Typing correction that Works just Fine when You’re writing the correct Language, which isn’t what I’m doing now and therefore I put the uncorrected Version here As à document of what Happens when You write an english post on à German iPhone.

Uuhm. Back to the Point: my wordpress Blog wasn’t updated Forever, As they didn’t have that nice upgrading stuff in there when I First used and installed it on my server some Years ago. I didn’t think it would Be necessary to Ever update, As my Blog wasn’t à Center of reader’s attentions anyways. But Not being able to post directly from an iPhone without using e-Mail ( which is what I’m doing right now) is Kinda sad, as the wordpress app only works with blogs of version 2.7 and higher. Therefore i Hope I can Be doing an update or à Complete reinstallation of my Blog soon, in Case i find some hours during my easter holidays. A new major version of wordpress is ahead anyways. And especially, I Hope that wordpress got à Bit faster since Version 2.5 or whatever I used there. Cause loading Times here on ithoughts are à pain, and I’m Aware of that. Sorry for that. See you Next time. Oh, you can keep all the typos you find here.

In retrospect, the english stuff didn’t make too many errors, right? It took about double the time to write this than on an actual (laptop)-keyboard.

Just read through some articles on the iPad, Apples new touch-tablet-device. These are my thoughts.

CON: I don’t want Apple’s iPad for the following reasons:

- I got a laptop, an iPhone and an e-book reader.

- The diplay is not e-ink - reading books on it therefore just doesn’t do it.

- It doesn’t fit in my pocket. Its not a phone nor a MP3-device.

- It uses the iPhone’s OS. But when I use a computer, I want multitasking. And I won’t want to have no mouse.

PRO:

- It has a decent resolution for games. The iPod touch / iPhone is already very sucessful, but it has enough space to make complex input fields possible. The iPad can do that. It will be a game machine, I hereby predict.

- It has the “I could buy it my mother, and she’d use a computer for the first time”-effect. It will be a great gift. This is maybe the most impressive factor.

- The programs Apple delivers with it are touch-optimized. But that won’t mean they’re better.

Summary:

Who needs an iPod touch that won’t fit into your pocket? Who needs a touch laptop without multitasking? Nuff said, lets wait for the iPhone OS 4 and what it brings to the iPad, because after all they’re running a standard iPhone OS without iPad optimizations. I guess there will be more usecases after the update, but at the time being I won’t buy one even if the price was 100$. Well, maybe as a present for my mom. Here are some more interesting links by Zemanta …

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This is a small answer to the hate that comes over from heise.de to iPhone users.

Okay three people forwarding me this article brings it to an end. WTF. Heise always was kinda “professional”, but this officially NOT SPONSORED by Microsoft, Samsung, Nokia & Co. “objective” study really tries to tell us that we iPhone users are CRAZY as we’re taken hostage by our telephone and defend its really bad existence due to some irritational psychological damage?

Well, I’m sure I’m not the only iPhone user getting forwarded all those silly news about “iPhone Worms Ripping Apples Product Apart”, “Security Issues with jailbroken devices (and their stupid users)” or this newest headline. What’s your problem?  I’m sure you’re thinking “Oh again one of those iPhone users held hostage by its smartphone, trying to defend its weak points”. Right. Thats the point. Its not about the malicious joy of people’s envy of a phone that does, what their similarly priced smartphone with much better hardware just doesn’t do: it works, its easy to use and you don’t need days to configure it.

But back to this silly study. There is one smart thing about it: if you critisize it, they seem to be correct. Well. So smart. The following could also be found out by someone without an iPhone. I’m disqualifying 80% of their points made.

Lets look at the points this study proves its view with:

1. “The first iPhone was not a 3G phone: What do you need 3G for? You can easily use the iPhone without using a 3G network and anyway, 3G is not particularly widespread, so this is not a problem.”

Nonexistant problem. When was this study made? Three years ago? Who cares?

2. “The phone cannot send MMS: There is no need to send MMSs, hardly anybody sends MMSs.”

Nonexistant problem now. BTW, I just sent one MMS so far with my iPhone, just to try it out - guess what? The receiving nokia device (XPress 5800, a pretty new device) couldn’t display MMS.

3. “You cannot forward a SMS: This is a function that hardly anybody uses and was therefore not included in the first iPhones.”

Nonexistant problem now. Needed to check that, as the crazy iPhone-users statements seems to be true to the bone.

4. “The phone has a poor camera: The built-in camera is perfectly adequate and the iPhone takes fantastic photos with its camera.”

Nonexistant problem. 3.2 MP is standard nowadays and in each iteration the cam gets an upgrade. Sorry for not using 10MP cams, but storage capacity scarce and the device 100€ more expensive. Oh and today we have the knowledge that MPs don’t translate into picture quality.

5. “It is not a real Smartphone, it cannot multitask: The phone has all the necessary functions and the OS is technically superior compared to other Smartphone OSs currently on the mobile market.”

This is a real limitation, but not as worse as described. The iPhone CAN do multitasking, but only some Apple services (like music, mail, timers, etc.) can do that. But technically, I’ll count this as a real point made. Even if noone ever has defined a smartphone to be a multitasking-monster. Well, Real Problem anyways.

6. “The iPhone cannot multitask, resulting in a great number of applications being unusable: The absence of multitasking is a deliberate design decision resulting in a faster UI.”

Nonexistant problem: Nothing is “unusable” because of missing multitasking. And this is technically the same point as 5.

7. “You can not change battery on the iPhone: How many customers run around with spare batteries? None or very few.”

My battery keeps up 2 days, so if I could change it, I wouldn’t do it. But this is of course a limit. If my battery gets broken, I can’t easily change it. Shame on Apple here! Real problem.

8. “Apple decides which applications you can install on the phone: This is good, because Apple thereby ensures that you do not get inferior programs on your phone.”

This is also a real limitation, but I wouldn’t say nobody mournes about this. This is in fact the most critisized part of the AppStore, and I hardly see iPhone-Fanboys defend that process. Real problem.

9. “The app store is a closed universe: Apple knows what is best for end users, which is good for the many iPhone users.”

Nonexistant problem for end-users. Besides, everyone else is copying the appstore for their own software world. It makes it easier for developers to give out their products. Oh, BTW this is the same as point 8.

10. “The phone does not support Java, so games need to be developed especially for the iPhone: Java is slow and not properly integrated with mobile phones, games for the iPhone are much better because they are directly developed for the iPhone.”

Well and other Phones might not support Fortan, or another favourite language of mine. Totally nonexistant problem.

11. “The app store contains numerous small trivial commercial programs: The app store’s large selection gives users the freedom of choice and the many small programs help make the end users daily lives more fun.”

Nonexistant problem. If you don’t want it, don’t use it. Or go to the Ovi store, hahaha. You won’t find more than a handful of reaaaly bad games in there.

12. “It is difficult to use the touchscreen for fast SMS messaging: The touchscreen makes the phone easier to use and you quickly get used to it.”

Nonexistant problem: since 3.0 you can type emails and SMS in landscape mode, and I’m nearly as fast on that as on a real desktop keyboard. The non-landscape-mode is not that good, but so far I didn’t see a better virtual keyboard.

13. “The iPhone is a low technology phone packaged in a sleek design: Apple has taken the combination of the design and UI to the next level, therefore the technological specifications don’t really matter.”

If you want faster hardware, go for it. As long as the hardware supports a fluently working OS, this is a nonexistant problem. Especially if you have 1Ghz and your windows mobile interface still is unresponsive.

14. “The quality of the phone is poor, calls are often interrupted and network coverage is poor: It is a good phone, these problems are due to the operators’ networks and not the phone.”

Nonexistant problem. At least I’ve never had a problem, and I doubt I got the single super-iPhone they built just for me while every other is broken.

15. “You can only purchase the iPhone from operators chosen by Apple: Apple has spent a great deal of time and energy selecting the best operators for customers.”

Real Problem: This is a real issue of course. But none that customers don’t whine about!

16. “The iPhone is targeted at a niche segment and will not be able to develop further: Apple has succeeded in designing a phone for people that appreciate design and user friendliness.”

“The iPhone is targeted at a niche segment and will not be able to develop further”? Did you read the numbers? Did you read the news? The iPhone IS 50% OF THE SMARTPHONE WORLD because it steadily develops!!111elevenone!

17. “The iPhone does not support memory cards: Iphones already offer the necessary memory people require and end users can choose between two models, one with a little memory and one with a great deal of memory.”

Well, thats Apple’s philosophy. I took the 16 GB version. But where is the difference to the many smartphones out there giving you a 8GB-memory-card and that are extendable up to 16GB? None. Well, okay, acutally if I had bought an 8GB version I couldn’t have upgraded it later on. Well. But its just stupid to count this as a problem of the device, its a problem of the user. And therefore a nonexistant problem.

18. “You can not install your own browser: The browser Apple has designed is so superior that you do not need any other browser on your phone.”

This is a real problem too. Its the same as points 8 and 9, but I’m in a good mood so this could be called another real problem.

19. “You cannot use the iPhone as a modem for your portable PC: People that have an iPhone do not need their portable when on the move.”

Nonexistant problem today. And Hello! There’s the jailbreak! And jailbreaking is easier than sticking a new battery in your phone!

20. “There is no radio in the phone: You do not need a radio in your iPhone because the iPhone supports iTunes that offers almost unlimited music.”

Nonexistant problem. I use Last.fm and there’re a lot more radioservices. Sure, they don’t use century-old technology for this, so you need to stream the stuff. Could be called a problem, but I’m not willing to count it. After all you have an integrated iPod too.

Conculsion: Again, the Apple-haters had food for their selfmade problems, but please keep away with such totally stupid studies. THAT SURELY HAS NOT BEEN SPONSORED BY (put name of big phone company in here) AND WAS MADE BY VERY SCIENTIFIC MEANS. If you see the logic in there, please drop a note. Other comments are appreciated too.

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(This is kindof a double post, as I’ve not posted real stuff for some time)

Its very impressive how our life shapes with all the little things we learn. And its all those little things we change in our lives that makes everything a whole new experience. You think I’m on drugs? Nope, I ain’t!

The most time of my life, I’ve been a logical person who had difficulties in understanding human nature and human behaviour. As a logical person, I advocated that no man should ever lie in no situation, and the world would be a better place. Teachers laughted, schoolmates laughted, some tried to persuade me that this just isn’t true. I only trusted upon my logical view of things and nobody could change my perception. Guess what? The human race would be long eradicated by a nuclear war if no man could lie.

These were the times when I trusted my own beliefs most, even when people told me something else. It was a very long stage of my life, but I finally made the next level: trying to understand, why people have another opinion, “try out” for some time if this opinion works for me and then accepting or rejecting that opinion/position/view.

For example: I have always had long hair and split ends. Guess that I didn’t understand that I need to use conditioner to make that go away. My opinion was: chemical stuff can’t help my health or the health of my hair. And I was wrong. When I began using conditioner, the split ends were getting better.

So many things just seem like utter nonsense when you see how people behave sometimes. Like watching casting shows in TV. Like smoking. Like going drinking and dancing in a discotheque. Like making music. I even thought listening to music was a strange behaviour when I was about 14 years old. But after some time, you try things out, and some work for you while others don’t. I began liking music and going out to parties for example, but I never liked smoking even if I tried. Well and then after some time, you even try to understand women - a hopeless attempt, some men might think - but even there you can make progress if you really try to understand their point of view.

What I changed this year

Its just that I have a little bit of free time for the first time in about one year - therefore I’m writing this post. And I’m reflecting on what I changed this very year. Change is usually something people don’t like, because their instincts tell them that change is dangerous and that they should just keep everything as it is, because it won’t get worse that way - that is good for survival, the instinct implies. This instinct is called fear. A small interlude from Dune:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

If you understand that you can choose what you want to change, if you conquer this instinct, you’ll recognize that every change that you do is a positive change in the end. Otherwise you wouldn’t have accepted it … or you just undo it and change back.

And I changed a lot of little things this year. My dear. I hope you my dear reader can reflect the changes you went through this year too. If you want, you should also make a small blog post about what happend this year in your life, because I’d really like to read that. I came to the point where I can say that I love changes - and hearing about them. So this year:

• I began my diploma thesis on 01.01.2009 and over the course of the year, I needed to unclutter my life to be able to get it done. Some would call this lifehacking. I just stopped playing computer games. Boom. 30% more time. I stopped organizing my week and began organizing my day. Boom. 100% more things got done. I began struturing my online information-digestion through feeds and twitter. Boom. Learning stuff while keeping yourself informed in the shortest time possible. All impressive changes, and needed ones, if you want to use time more effectively.
• I found a job at the local software company Abelssoft. My salary is fine and didn’t need a car to get to work - again a lot of money saved. My colleagues are very nice and I like working with them - and I also like the work itself, which is a very important matter in being happy, I believe. I also just learned a new programming language (C# .NET) and Abelssoft paid a certificate that measures this skill. Thanks again! You can follow @Abelssoft on Twitter, and this is the website (german verison here).
• I bought a flat with my girlfriend. A big one. In the times of economic crisis and a drop in (bank) interests, it seemed the smartest thing from a economic perspective. But if you think about the non-economic perspective, its a way more binding statement towards my girlfriend, than a marriage would be. And I’m very happy about my decision. Believe me, the flat is completely new, big and I feel superb when I’m there.
• I left the church. That means approximately +400€ per year. Nice. I never really believes in god anyways, and if I did, I don’t think Jesus would love me more if I paid the church’s fees.
• Now for some more little things which changed in my information-digestion: Feedly. After learning what feeds are and how to use them via the Firefox-addon Brief, I just switched to Google Reader to be able to synchronize my feeds (and mainly let those that I have already read not show up anymore) with my iPhone feed-reader. Now that I use Google Reader which in my opinion has a cluttered and unintuitive interface, I found the Feedly-firefox plugin, that lets my feeds look like a newspaper. Hooray, the times of dead paper are gone - and with this kind of interface, maybe I can teach my girlfriend to use feeds someday too.
• I began listening to podcasts on the bike. Used music before, but riding bike is pretty boring, and I more like listening to music while I’m cleaning up or doing the dishes or something. Fould the following podcasts (both german) to be very interesting: Z and Bitsundso.
• Another small thing that impact my personal life more than I would have ever imagined: the iPhone. I learned how to use this device as personal organizer (respectively main calendar), ToDo-list, shopping list, feedreader, client for all social networks I use (Twitter, Facebook, Xing, StudiVZ), TV-guide, online-banking-client (damn, I can do bank transfers everywhere with this thing!), (video) camera, instant messenger, radio, podcast-player, music player, navigation-device, pdf-document-reader, voice recorder, gaming device (did you know we have Command and Conquer, Duke Nukem, Need for Speed and many more really good things?), weather information service, eBay-client (which works better and more intuitive than the actual ebay-website), wireless USB-stick, translator, YouTube-client and even TV-reciever (okay, I don’t get too many channels with it). And I can use it as telephone too. You wouldn’t believe it! In one tiny device. All very usable. Thats definitely an upgrade for my personal management.

So I hope your lives got some upgrades too, I’m very pleased with mine this year. For the next year, I’ll have a small list of goals that I want to get done (and that I just entered in my ToDo’s goals section):

• Try getting more professional at my job.
• Buy some stuff, so the new flat isn’t all that empty.
• Write some more blog posts.
• Main point: I’ll try meeting more friends - I kinda lost sight of them this year and definitely have to change that. But from now on, I’ll have at least my weekends free to tackle that.
• Play more pen and paper role-playing-games. I miss that, was always fun.
• Go on vacation with my girl.
• Get a private server-machine running 24/7. Needs to be low-energy-comsuming and not too expensive. And needs to be silent.
• Set up a new blog. This wordpress thingy here is too slow, the design isn’t what I want now, and I plain hate PHP. Whats your pick for another blogging platform?
• Buy a playstation 3 - the Wii has too many bad games, I want more good stuff. And a blueray player too.
• Pay back the money my parents borrowed me.
• Upgrade iPhone when there’s time. If you’ll jailbreak, its more time investment, so you gotta plan wisely.

Feel free to answer with your own changes from this year or your plans for next year. Expect to hear more from me more regularly, like every week. Or something like that. Over and out for this week.

First things I wanna put straight:

• I sometimes have issues keeping track of what I’m supposed to do, when to do it and in which order.
• Sometimes I heard about GTD on twitter or in blogposts, but when I tried to read into it I thought that I don’t really feel like learning another complicated system for stuff that I can solve with small slips of paper.
• I always wanted to use my iPhone for ToDo-lists, as I use it for everything else in organisation: contacts, calendar … so why not todo-lists?
• I feel that I can be doing things faster if I used some kind of organised approach to my todo-listings, therefore I just thought: why not try out another fancy internet-solution? And synch it with an iPhone-app, so I always have my lists at hand?

Thats exactly what I’ve done. After all, these apps and internet solutions build on the same GTD-principles, and therefore learning GTD seems to be important for programmers of those tools, but not for the end user like me. But of course the solution to my problem wasn’t only to download some software, as you’ll have to think about what software solutions you use and for which set of tasks this works. After all, many things like appointments fall into the realm of calendars; and many “small tasks” should not be set on a todo-list at all, as those tasks are too small (”check todo list”; checking this item is superflous) or too large (”be happy”; falls into the realm of so called goals). Then some software has limitations about what you can do with your todo list (like outlook). So everything need to be planned a bit, so you get a solution you can use.t

And this is the main issue. Usability. I need a system that can remind me what I have to do for the day and that doesn’t take loads of time to configure. So far I can’t make a clear statement, but I see some issues and problems here and there - while other parts of my solution seem to work perfectly. I’ll tell you in my next post if the solution I try is usable or if its utter nonsense to try to use online & mobile applications to get yourself remebered and organised.

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This was meant to be a comment on the post touchscreens suck, but it became a bit long and therefore its own post here. The author basically talks about some main usability issues with touchscreens: having the fingers where you need to read (thus using up viewing space), missing or unnatural feedback (from virtual keyboards) and the missing ability to pick something up and put it somewhere else (that I’ll call “drag and drop“). Its also perfectly possible that some might think I sound like an Apple fanboy in this article, but I’m perfectly willing to use a better mobile phone when someone invents it. I’d love to see a Pre for example. Oh, and I use a PC.

Touchscreens are ALL about usability. The concept is called “direct manipulation“. Humans always try to use their hands to manipulate something they see. If you’d give a caveman a computer-monitor with some windows and items and a mouse and a keyboard and tell him to move one icon around, guess what the caveman would try to do to manipulate the objects on the screen? Touch them. Grab them. Squeeze them.

Direct manipulation feels more intuitive to humans - thats why the mouse was invented in the first place - as the next best replacement for a hand on the screen. Of course people could have gone on using keyboards and shells and being pretty effective with it. But Windows and the Mouse made computers usable for normal people for the first time.

Don’t forget mice and keyboards have been around for a really long time, so the concept is perfected now. As with all “new” technology, its not always nicely thought out well in the beginning. Apple is a bit ahead of the game as they already have Touchscreens on the market for over two years now and you could argue they were concepting on this long before - while other companies really began thinking about copying when the iPhone 3G became such a huge success one year ago.

The iPhone is therefore the touchscreen-device you need to look on when you try to talk about the usability of touchscreens. I held and tried to use A LOT of different other touchscreen smartphones and they plainly ALL SUCKED in some way. Most need too much pressing power to be usable (therefore if you pressed too lightly, the input may not have been recognized), are imprecise, have stupidly laid out virtual keyboards and have weird menus all over the place.

But now let me come to your main critisizm: using a touchscreen instead of a keyboard. Your view on touchscreens seems to be that they’ll replace keyboards. Touchscreens are SCREENS and nothing can stop you from using a keyboard anyways. They DO NOT take up more space. The keyboard is just not used in mobile phones sometimes, as it can be emulated by the touchscreens and you don’t type much on mobile phones anyways. And I must definitely say: yes, if you type a novel or some code, you’ll definitely not want to do that on a touchscreen.

Image via Wikipedia

Touchscreens are meant to be used with easy-to-use input elements like buttons and sliders. Press a button. Why grabbing a mouse, moving it to move the pointer on an icon and click the mouse if you can just touch the friggin’ icon itself? BUT virtual keyboards work better than expected - on the iPhone at least. If you and me type a 160-character message on our phones, I can guarantee you that I’ll be much faster - I can use my two thumbs on an accurate virtual keyboard with a well-working language-correction, zero response time and good feedback in landscape-mode. I never thought that it would work that well, but it does.

Ah here comes the feedback issue.

Apple also seems to think you’ll need keyboard-feedback, as everytime you type a key on the virtual keyboard you get a keyboard-like clicking sound (in fact I exchanged it via jailbreak because I didn’t like the clicking sound). The popping-up letter that tells you which button you just pressed is only there a millisecond - just long enough to be able to see it. It never interferes with your input. My girlfriend has vibrating feedback on her touchscreen-phone. And already asked me if I could turn that off. So much for haptic feedback. (Meanwhile haptic feedback for touchscreens is in development, the plastic screen can “bubble up” a bit, but I don’t think this will be a big breakthrough.)

Having the hand where you need to see the screen is bad. Therefore the visible area is made smaller, so you have room for the virtual keyboard. The keyboard is usually on the bottom for the screen, so your hands don’t interfere with the rest of the visible area that you need to see. This is a very good solution I think. If you argument that you can slide out your keyboard, I could say that this is not a touchscreen problem. The G1 showed that slideable keyboards can be combined well with touchscreens, an Apple-patent for a slideable touchscreen-device (say an iPhone with a slide-out touchscreen) shows that this is only a problem of miniaturization - not of touchscreens theirselves.

But all this was referring to mobile phones, where typing is not the main problem and novels don’t get written. What about touchscreens in computers? I also don’t think this is very usable. Think about how you sit in front of your PC doing work. Try (for 5 minutes) to click and drag-and-drop on your screen and then think about typing a text on your screen. This would clearly suck. The monitor is too lange to move everything around, go from here to there with your fingers 1:1, and usually a monitor is standing in front of you, so typing on it wouldn’t work well. In a usual computer, a touchscreen could only be an addition - and for an addition, I would be pretty expensive.

Apple again is leading the market here (they already build accelerators into macs so you can bump the screen from sidewards to close a window, but I consider this meaningless - just a funny fact). They’ll present a “Touchpad” soon, a tablet-mac with a touchscreen-only input - and this thing will be used to type on with a virtual keyboard. And this is the whole solution to the problem! A tablet PC. Small screen size. The monitor is on the table if you type a longer text, so its where the keyboard usually is. The screen is large enough so you could type conveniently. But will you be able to type fast on a screen with no haptics? Well, I don’t think so. Or at least, I can’t imagine it working as good as a traditional keyboard.

Conclusion: The smaller the device, the more a touchscreen makes sense and the more the touchscreen will work. Just try out an iPhone or iPod Touch for a day or two, and you’ll see that touchscreens work really good when the device and the system behind it are well laid out for this means of input. But the keyboard will not be replaced in the near future - as command-line-shells won’t be replaced too.

P. S.: Reviewing this post, I just realized that I didn’t talk about drag-and-drop. I must say that I also think that drag-and-drop still works best on a mouse, but I also saw some iPhone-games that really do a great job in this resort. Apple doesn’t use any drag-and-drop in the iPhone, aside from rearranging the icons. Touching an icon for one second makes all the icons wiggle so you know you’re in drag-and-drop-mode, but I don’t think this is the best solution. But they’ll have to make it work on their touchpad I think. Maybe they’ll use multitouch - I’d use two fingers moving from outwards towards the item, which would highlight the item (or make it bigger) and then drag it to its destination, releasing it with a click. We’ll see soon.

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Image via CrunchBase

Robert Scoble (who’s on Twitter about 24 hours a day) did an interesting post about how he uses Twitter today - after he unfollowing a whole lot of people and shutting down his autofollow-bot he still follows about 2k people (about 1300+ that he met and 600+ that he’s interested in). This is one of his accounts that he uses for the “filtered information flood” as I’d call it. All people he follows are from a certain area of expertise that he’s interested in most or people that he’s met and therefore might be interested in their tweets. These people he met are also followed by Scoble on another account.

Scoble tells us that he switches Twitter clients pretty often, and therefore can better filter information by following a certain target group with different accounts. And he also tells us that its pretty impossible to read the tweets of 90000 people anyways.

I must say that I think the same way. But I don’t have time to be on twitter everyminute of the day (as Scoble and some other “Social Media Guru Expert Evangelists”), so I even have to filter some more. First, I took my ithoughts_de account and only followed people I like to read and who tweet interesting stuff. As I don’t have too much time and don’t want to clutter my timeline with people who tweet way too often (like Scoble) or only tweet a lot of completely pointless stuff (like Ashton Kutcher or Tila Tequila), those get removed rapidly. Following 250+ people is pretty easy to keep up with, if you look for the filtered information of the day. This is the source of knowledge, that will always instantly tell you important stuff - much earlier than official magazines or websites. No matter what, I still get a lot of information in there, so I can’t always be on that account when I want to use my time effectively.

Therefore I set up a protected account for myself, where I only follow people I know personally (one exception). Here in germany Twitter STILL didn’t break through to the usual webuser, so these are only six people (if you leave out doubleaccounts). That I’m pretty sure that only friends can read it lets me also dump my own pointless stuff without much information value there AND I can use it for communication. I also use this account with my iPhone, so if I make a pointless TwitPic I won’t scare away my ithoughts_de followers (that I believe are there for the good links I find and share).

After all, I also set up a follower-bot thats nicely working in the background to build up followers slowly with 3.4k followers atm. You never know when you wanna have that audience around (that might mainly be bots, but who cares - sometimes also numbers count).

New Idea for Twitter.com

I think if you know about Twitter you could also drive this to the extreme and make different accounts even for different topics of interest. Every account could follow some special breed of people and you could tweet your links to the group of people who follow your account dedicated to that single topic. In facts, this is one of the features that twitter should integrate into (premium?) accounts: using their REST approach they could let you divide your stream into topics and also let you assign your friends (the people you follow are called ‘friends’ on twitter) to that topic. This topic-centered URL would look like http://twitter.com/ithoughts_de/topicjava/ instead of just http://twitter.com/ithoughts_de and you also wouldn’t have to set up 100 accounts then. A nice drag-and-drop webinterface could let you customize your topics and sort your friends in there and you could decide if you follow a person or only one (or more) of his or her topics. Some microsyntax like “§topicjava I found a nice Java-related article that I want to share” could work for older twitterclients while Twitter expands their API by one more parameter called ‘topic’, so updated clients could directly post messages into topics.

If you like this idea, please share it on Twitter … lets hope someone at Twitter sees it. They could also do this thingy for their premium accounts. *cough cough … I didn’t say that you must be mistaken*

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