This has been an eventful week in the Twitterverse. Last night I was surprised to be alerted to an upgrade to Tweetie for Mac that included, of all things, a new video tweet feature. "How cool is that!" was my first outburst. I couldn't wait to try it out. So I sent a few out to one of my Twitter followers who just happened to have a Mac or two. He responded by downloading it and sending me a couple video tweets. As far as I can tell, you don't have any video length limits. The upload times were short and if there is any conversion happening, it is quite quick. I will definitely be using this new feature. Tweetie for Mac OS and iPhone are one of my favorite and most used apps.
I also ran across an audio tweet app for my iPhone called TweetMic. I had been dabbling in a program for iPhone called AudioBoo which works very well but seems to be a closed network that doesn't share with other social media like Twitter. Now, with TweetMic I can post quick little audio messages on Twitter. The app is very clean and the audio is very high quality. It does seem to take a long time to upload the file even on a WiFi network. Hopefully that will improve in future updates.
Today I downloaded another Twitter app called Reportage by WhereCloud which changes the Twitter viewing paradigm to that of a radio. Imagine each twitter user you follow as a radio station. Like some radios, you can have your favorite stations saved in a preset of some kind or just tune the entire dial. With Reportage, you start viewing your friends as a grid of photos that indicate how many unread tweets they have since you last viewed them. Click on one and the images drop down to the bottom of the screen in what appears to be a linear radio dial with the selected friends tweets displayed above. Scroll the gallery of user images at the bottom of the screen until the one you want falls into the dial window and up pops their tweet stream. You also have the option to make a friend a favorite which is like having your favorite radio station in a preset. Tap on favorites and only those friends that you have marked as favorites show up in the radio dial. This app does the basic things that the other Twitter apps do but just with a different twist and fewer clicks. I do wish that they had a search feature that would create additional channel icons in the display to follow hashtag subjects or general search criteria. I wouldn't be surprised if something like that shows up somewhere down the dial.
All in all, this has been a pretty exciting week for developments around Twitter. What will it be next week. Things are changing so fast.
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