Gregory Harbin, Foreigner

If you’ve been following me on Twitter tonight, you’ll know that I’ve been TwitPiccing a few features I found in iPhone OS 3.0 that I’ve not seen mentioned in the press or by Apple. I’ll just present those same tweets here, with some expansion:

When you click the home button to bring up controls on the lock screen, iPhone shows more information. Very helpful!

When you play an audiobook or podcast, iPhone gives two new options. Press the ‘1x,’ and it switches to 2x, and plays at double speed. Press again, it becomes .5x, and plays at half speed. Press again, and it’s back to 1x. The button in the middle quickly skips back 30 seconds, a helpful feature when you’re distracted.

Clicking the mail button currently does nothing. I assume when the final version of 3.0 ships, you’ll be able to send a link to the podcast or audiobook to a friend.

This is not completely unsung, but a little undercovered. You can now have finer control over scrubbing through audio or video files. Press down on the timeline, and then the further your finger is towards the bottom of the screen, the finer is your control.

The new Voice Recorder app (which works fantastically, by the way—here’s my first recording) lets you play back your audio over the speaker, even if you have headphones plugged in, as does the voicemail app.

Not really a feature, but Update has been moved out of the toolbar in the App Store app, in favor of a More button, which brings up a screen with Updates and Redeem on it. Redeem can be used to redeem iTunes gift cards. Update can be moved back into the toolbar with the screen found below, after hitting Edit.

My favorite new feature: clicking the microphone from a dead stop (as when a podcast finishes, or you first unlock your phone, now actives Shuffle play, rather than the horrible practice before of playing Alphabetically from the As. If I’d heard The Abduction of Margaret one more freaking time….

The camera app has been slightly revamped with some different UI. I find the camera much, much faster. It was a little slow when activated from an app such as Tweetie before, but no longer.

This is not a feature at all, but in fact a petty gripe. The Twitter application Tweetie needs to be update to work with OS 3.0. The copy function is quite broken, making it almost impossible to use to select less than an entire tweet. I’m sure this will be fixed, but it goes to show that copy/paste isn’t as easy to implement as you may have assumed.

Gregory Entertainment, Twitter, apple, iPhone apple, iPhone, Tweetie, Twitter

The (relatively) new social network phenomenon Twitter is gaining users faster than ever. Certainly, there’s no lack of usage guides, but as one of the older users of the service (I was a user back when there were fewer than 100k of us), I’d like to throw a few tips of my own into the ether.

First, I will define a few terms:

Tweet (n) A message, no more than 140 characters, sent over the Twitter system. (v) To send a tweet.
Tweeter (n) A user of Twitter.
Twitterfeed (n) The incoming tweets from the tweeters you follow. syn. stream
Follower (n) Someone who has subscribed to see your tweets in their Twitterfeed.
Followeds (n) The tweeters you see in your Twitterfeed.
@reply (n) A tweet including with the character @ followed by your username, which shows up in your “@[yourname]” directory on the main page. (v) To send an @reply.
Twitterfriend (n) A person with whom you regularly correspond using @replies.
Retweet (n) A tweet beginning with RT, which contains a tweet tweeted by another tweeter than the one tweeting. (v) To repurpose someone else’s tweet into a tweet of your own by tweeting it, beginning with RT and including the name of the original tweeter.
Spammer (n) A tweeter who posts ‘junk’ tweets similar to spam e-mail.
Hash Tag (n) A mark at the end of a tweet, beginning with # and then a topic number, which is used to mark a post for aiding search-ability.
Twitterverse (n) All the tweets of all the tweeters
Twitter Search (n) http://search.twitter.com, a service which allows anyone to search the entire Twitterverse.

Now for the tips:

Tip #1: Manage your follow list with an iron fist
Because you see all the tweets coming down the stream, you can quickly become overloaded with information if you’re not careful. Follow your real friends, first and foremost. Don’t follow every celebrity you see, only the ones with tweets that specifically interest you. Keep your Twitterfeed personal. Don’t feel obligated to follow the same people as your friends. The best tweets will be retweeted, and you’ll see them anyway.

If one of your followeds starts crowding your stream, immediately unfollow them. Typically, that line for me is when the same user has more than three tweets in a row on my stream. If they can’t fit ten minutes of thought into 140 characters, they need to find a different medium than Twitter.

Tip #2: Check your replies and new followers constantly
One of the best ways to find new Twitterfriends is to look into your Replies directory, which shows you all tweets that are addressed to you, even those from outside your follow list. Maybe they saw your tweet from the main page, maybe they searched for a topic you mentioned, or maybe one of your tweets was retweeted. Either way, if someone thought enough of one of your tweets to reply, you should do them the service of reading it, and, more often than not, replying back.

Also, stay on top of your followers list. Unless you’re a bigtime celeb, you’re probably not getting more than a few new followers a week, and therefore it’s easy enough to pop in and see what’s up. If a new follower is a spammer, block them to keep your numbers from inflating. If they’re a friend, go ahead and automatically follow them. The grey list is Tweeters who you don’t yet know. Usually if one is in my geographical location, or the last page of tweets show topics I might be interested in, I’ll follow.

The key is to easily follow or unfollow. Don’t feel obligated to do either, but remember that you never know the gems until you see how their tweets fit into your stream. Think of Twitter as an open IM system. There are billions of conversations going on in the world, and you’re tapped into only the ones that (might) interest you. If you aren’t interested, stop following.

Tip #3: Use hash tags regularly
Hash tags are a fantastic way to find and be found by other tweeters. The one I use most often is #bsg, which taps me into a community of tweeters who are discussing Battlestar Galactica. If I say something interesting, a large group has seen it (through Twitter Search), and can reply. Often, you can find new tweetfriends this way. If you’re unsure if a particular hash is in use, plug it into Twitter Search and see if many tweets pop up. If not, try a few synonymous terms. If you can’t find anything, start using your own new hash tag. You never know, perhaps it will spread into wide use.

It’s good to have some of the hash tags you tweet often bookmarked for easy perusal. Wondering what the twitterverse thought of last night’s ‘Office’ episode? Just have ‘#office’ in Twitter Search bookmarked on your bar. Click it, and you’ll instantly see the thoughts of tweeters around the world.

P.S. you can follow me at http://twitter.com/gregoryharbin

Gregory Twitter Battlestar Galactica, guide, social networking, Twitter

First Patrick Wilson, drummer from Weezer, Twitters:

Then I Twitter in response:

To which he Twitters back:

Awesome. Yes, Pat, we want a well-mixed Maladroit! Please!

(For the record, the apparent discrepancy in the time data is due to that Pat is on the West Coast, whilst I am nearer the Atlantic.)

On a related topic, apparently the new Weezer album is titled Weezer, and will be ‘The Red Album.’ Works for me. It’s dropping June 17, but hopefully it’ll leak some time in early April.

Gregory Music, Patrick Wilson, Twitter, Weezer Music, Patrick Wilson, Twitter, Weezer