Rihanna is on Twitter for real: “no more corny label tweets”

Rihanna’s presence in social media is nothing short of massive, with nearly eight million Facebook fans and more than a million Twitter followers. But the singer hasn’t really been on Twitter – until now. Earlier today, Rihanna used her Twitter account, which had until now essentially been just a series of promotional posts, to announce that’s she “finally took over my Twitter page” and that we can expect, in her words, “no more corny label tweets.” Her announcement tweet was promptly retweeted by, at last count, more than four hundred followers, with her name currently being mentioned on Twitter more than once per second. The singer is enjoying chart success with her new collaboration “Love The Way You Lie” with Eminem.

Smashing Pumpkins Billy Corgan lets loose on light and darkness in rock music

Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan has let loose on the state of rock music this evening via his Twitter account, sharing a prolonged stream of thought which touched on everything from music critics to the concept of light and darkness in rock music, and where he thinks it’s headed. Tweeting from a Pumpkins tour stop in Japan, here’s what Corgan had to say in its entirety:

“Critic Robert Hilburn once said of me that I had the talent, but didn’t have the disposition to lead. Wrong. I cannot lead darkness to light … Point being no one can lead darkness to light. Darkness only begets more pain. See current state of Rock and Roll for dire confirmation. … The days of death and destruction being prima matter for the rock and roll machine are over. No one is gonna do it better than the Crue! … The new Age has come, and music will serve as a standard bearer for a new way to connect in Love and Respect. I am happy to lead from Love. … Goodbye to the generations that are more happy to write about you if you are beautiful and dead…or dead of Spirit.”

Billy Corgan recently spoke with Beatweek about Smashing Pumpkins and more in our cover story interview.

iPad Twitter client Twittelator now supports channels

Nevermind that Twitter is set to release its own (Tweetie-based) official Twitter iPad app later this year, the makers of Twittelator are pushing forward with development of their own iPad Twitter client in the mean time. The new Twittelator update (version 1.1) now supports channels, which the developer describes as allowing users to “find cool tweeters and content on any subject” via topics and subtopics. The company has also temporarily reduced the price of its iPad app to $1.99 for a brief two day sale to mark the occasion.

Twittelator is currently ranked number one in sales of iPad-specific social networking apps in the App Store (not counting free apps), making it the most popular pay-for iPad Twitter app. A separate version of the app is also available for iPhone and iPod touch users.

Justin Bieber concert canceled by police

Justin Bieber saw his only public performance in Australia canceled by the police due to “safety concerns” which left the teen pop star taking to Twitter to apologize to fans and state that he had no role in the cancelation. According to the television network hosting the sunrise performance, which was canceled during pre-dawn hours, advance overcrowding on the part of fans was to blame. Bieber was clearly unhappy with the move, tweeting “I love my fans….and I am just as disappointed as everyone else with the news from this morning. I want to sing for my fans.” A short time later he took to Twitter again, this time in a frustrated all caps, to drive his point home to his audience: “I want to make this clear…I don’t cancel.”

The cancelation came just two hours ago, as it’s still early morning in Australia.

Justin Bieber on the back of a milk carton

Teen pop star Justin Bieber may be all the way in Japan and soon on his way to Australia now that his native Canadian Juno awards are over, but last we checked he hasn’t gone missing entirely – you know, as in back of a milk carton missing. And yet one of Bieber’s followers on Twitter (whose own last name is also strangely listed as “Bieber”) claims to have spotted him on the back of a milk carton.

While she hasn’t provided proof, she swears to Bieber that it’s true: “OMG ure on our milk cartons at school…just thought u mite wanna kno…lol i have one sitting in my room LEGIT.”

Bieber’s response on Twitter to, uh Ms. Bieber, seems appropriate: “Am I Missing??”

Katy Perry twerks Coachellla

We’ll be up front with you: we’re not sure what the word means either. But sometime around the time of her Coachella performance, Katy Perry posted a one-word tweet proclaiming simply that: “Twerk.” According to Urban Dictionary, the term can mean anything from dancing to “watching someone else make nachos” so we’ll refrain from guessing. However it’s possible that she’s added a new word – or perhaps a new meaning for an existing slang term that’s never crossed our desks – to the lexicon.

Ruling out the possibility that it may have been a typo, when Katy was asked by someone if the Twitter account was really her (it’s her – the account is verified), Katy responded “I think so? But… After twerking so much @ coachella who knows.”

By all accounts the Coachella festival (named after the middle of nowhere town in inland Southern California in which the annual event takes place) was a success this year despite the fact that a few of the scheduled acts couldn’t make it there due to planes being grounded all across Europe after last week’s volcanoes (we almost typed “earthquakes” out of muscle memory, after the sheer number of those so far in 2010).

So someone please remind us to ask Katy Perry what on earth “twerk” means (we doubt she’ll be shy in telling us) the next time interview cycle comes around. But in the mean time, if you want to way back into the archives, here’s our first interview with Katy Perry from back before her debut album was even released.

Alyssa Milano, Neil Patrick Harris on The View today

Alyssa Milano, who’s turned out to be have of the most thoughtful and useful celebrity presences on all of Twitter, will appear on The View today to talk about her new TV series “Romantically Challenged” which debuts on ABC tonight. Milano plays a single mother in a small town (if Pittsburgh qualifies as a “small town”) whose life is summed up by the title of the show.

The actress, who has more than three quarters of a million followers on Twitter despite the fact that she tweets several times per hour, often tweets about technology, humanity, and baseball. We’d put her on our “Follow Friday” list if, you know, today were a Friday.

The other guest on The View today is Neil Patrick Harris, who’s a fun follow on Twitter as well. You might know him from Dr. Horrible or a little show called – what is it? – oh, right. How I Met Your Mother.

Fun fact: we really had to stop and think for a moment before it occurred to us that both Neil and Alyssa are former child actors.

Vaguely related Beatweek interview: in late 2009 we spoke with Neil’s Dr. Horrible co-star Felicia Day (come to think of it, maybe she’s the queen of Twitter). In any case, you can check our Felicia interview right here.

Justin Bieber promises “big surprises”

On his way to making a pitstop at the Juno awards (his native Canada’s equivalent of the U.S. Grammy awards) before making his first trip to Japan and Australia, Justin Bieber was vague but boastful after entering the awards show via the red carpet. His latest Twitter posting simply reads, apparently in reference to the awards show:

oh yeah…and I got some big surprises tonight for you

To our mind this means a major on stage collaboration. Who could it be? Ludacris obviously comes to mind, but he’s tagged himself as being in Atlanta today.

Any other guesses, Bieber Nation?

Lady GaGa to perform on American Idol on May 5th

Continuing the streak of musicians performing on American Idol who’ve previously appeared on the cover of Beatweek Magazine (see Adam Lambert and Brooke White), none other than Lady GaGa has announced via Twitter this evening that she’ll be performing on the show on May 5th. No official word on what song she’ll be performing, but smart money is on her current hit “Telephone” from The Fame Monster. It’s not clear whether she’ll also be the contestant mentor, or simply performing.

In typically esoteric GaGa fashion, she included a link with her announcement, not to more information about her impending Idol performance, but instead to a YouTube clip of a Japanese-language performance of Telephone.

By the time she takes the Idol stage on May 5th, our math says she’ll be giving a front row seat performance for five remaining contestants (or even fewer). If you can’t wait that long to get your GaGa on, feel free to check out our January 2009 cover story interview with Lady GaGa in the mean time.

Twitter vows to make the world even shorter

If Twitter has taught the art of brevity to the world 140 characters at a time, the company will soon be taking the next step by finally rolling out its own official link-shortening service for use within its own official apps for devices like the iPhone and iPad (formerly known as Tweetie). Third party link-shortening services, which are handy for ensuring that including a link in your tweet doesn’t take up the entire tweet, have been around for awhile – but users have generally faced an overabundant sea of choices, and even with bit.ly currently the most popular choice, it’s still a sea of confusion. There has also been the fear that if a third party link shortening service were to go out of business, the links you’ve posted would become permanently broken.

According to Twitter CEO Evan Williams, the company’s own in-house link shortener will be the only option included in Twitter’s official apps, suggesting that Twitter may have learned something from Apple when it comes to scaling back the cacophony of choices that can often turn off or overwhelm all but the geekiest of users. Based on past history, the move is likely to cause backlash among geeks, who will then uniformly all flee to the same third party app at the same time, in the name of maintaining their right to individuality. Sorry – are we being too hard on geeks this week? After all, they did get their browser.

Add your iPhone’s music to Twitter

For those who wish to fill their Twitter timeline with automated updates about various aspects of their day without even having to type the 140 characters themselves will now have an even easier task of it thanks to Jingle, an app for iPhone and iPod touch which automatically tweets about the song, podcast, or audiobook you’re listening to on your device, along with whatever star rating you’ve assigned to it. Or as the developer Arbutus puts it, “In most cases a person can Tweet whatever they are listening to without typing.”

So much for using Twitter being good for building up finger muscles.

Learn more about Jingle 1.1 for iPhone and iPod touch in the iTunes.

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app review: Osfoora for Twitter

March 8, 2010 by Christine Chan · 3 Comments 

While Twitter and the iPhone go hand-in-hand together, lately it seems that making a Twitter app on the iPhone is the new ‘Hello World!” app that everyone is doing to get their feet into the waters of iPhone app development. The App Store is currently overpopulated with many Twitter apps, much more than any sane person would really need. There are the ones that everyone already uses or at least heard of, the ‘cream of the crop’ apps, like Tweetie, Twitterrific, Twittelator, and Echofon. Then there are the dozens that wash up on the shore like unwanted trash. And then there’s something like Osfoora.

Osfoora is a unique Twitter iPhone app that is a strong contender against the apps that are already well known. It provides a unique experience to Twitter and the iPhone, mainly with the main screen of the app and provides full landscape support for all areas. The usual suspects for a main screen in a Twitter app is just your timeline. Yes, this is how it always is, but this can be boring after a while. Osfoora has decided to spice things up and present the user with a main screen that reminiscent of the iPhone home screen – a black backgrounded page that has a 4×3 icon grid layout, along with a nifty feature at the bottom to manage your various Twitter accounts, should you need it. The icons consist of: Timeline, Profile, Compose, Trends, Search, Nearby, Favorites, Drafts, Lists, Settings, Public Timeline (will be removed soon due to Twitter themselves getting rid of it), and Find User.

The Timeline is what you’ve come to expect from any good looking and functional Twitter iPhone app – your friend’s tweets appear in a stream, complete with user pic and either Username or Full Name (depending on what you set in the Settings section, more on that in a bit). You can load up 50, 100, or 200 of the latest tweets, depending on personal settings. In Osfoora, new and unread tweets are marked with a blue top right corner, which is great if you’re going through a lot of friends. With Twitter’s new Retweet system, the retweets are easily visible in your stream as well, marked with the official Retweet symbol, and even informs you of who retweeted this person. A great feature of Osfoora’s is that it will also show you when a tweet is actually in response to someone else, with the little blue chat icon next to the timestamp. If such a tweet is selected, the bottom will display ‘In reply’, in which the user can tap again to see the entire threaded conversation. Geolocated tweets are also easy to recognize, due to the red pin next to the timestamp on such tweets.

If all of the current tweets on the page are read, but you want to catch up on older tweets, Osfoora has you covered there too. Scrolling all the way to the bottom of the timeline will automatically bring up older tweets that are timestamped earlier than the current last one. This can be done infinite amount of times, so the user can go as far back as they please, although they only bring up a limited number of tweets. Need to get back to the top to refresh? Just tap the device status bar.

The bottom toolbar of the Timeline view has the usual suspects: Mentions and Messages, along with some variation from other Twitter apps. There is a shortcut to do a search, and the More button will bring up Favorites, Drafts, User Lookup, My Profile on a separate screen, as well as all of the Twitter lists that you have made and/or follow. It seems that Osfoora’s Timeline section of the app is pretty much what we are already accustomed to, so there isn’t anything drastically new, although the developers have put it in a slick interface.

There is one thing that Osfoora does differently than all other apps I have used – to refresh the timeline, the user drags the screen down to reveal a toolbar at the top. This toolbar contains a refresh button, as well as a ‘jump to oldest’ button, along with a button to view your own profile. Unsure if the profile thing was necessary, since there are already two various ways to get to that (going to the main screen and then the profile section, or viewing one of your own tweets), and how often does one need to see their own profile? This is a copy of Loren Brichter’s ‘pull to refresh’ mechanic in Tweetie 2, except that this adds a bit of redundancy and seems to get in the way more often than help. I personally think the app should do without the profile button, simply refresh when pulled down, and have the ‘jump to oldest’ button always displayed on the Timeline screen. Other apps have already copied the Tweetie 2 refresh, Osfoora should join the fray – it would be much more convenient on the users.

When you view a profile with Osfoora, be it yours or someone else’s, you get a screen with what you’d normally expect from a Twitter client. Profile picture, bio, location, and web address (all optional, of course, depending on the user). There’s also a table that includes how many friends the person has, how many people follow them, how many total tweets they have posted, and the number of favorites. Beneath these four cells is a button to allow the user to view all the @ replies someone has. Beneath this is the Lists, where you can see the user’s lists, the ones that they follow, and the ones that they are on. There’s even an option to create a new list if you’re looking at your own profile. Underneath the Lists will be the Retweets, which include the retweets the user has made, their tweets that have been retweeted, and if you’re looking at your own, the ability to view all the other retweets that your friends have done.

The best thing about Osfoora and profiles though, is that you have the ability to edit your own profile, yes, including your avatar, from within the app itself. This is a feature that not every other Twitter iPhone app has, and it’s a great new thing. When you hit the ‘Edit’ button in the top right corner of your own profile, you get to update your profile image with a picture from your Photo Library or take a new one with the camera (if you have an iPhone). You can also change your Name, Bio, URL, and Location.
The Compose screen on Osfoora is pleasant and slick. Plenty of writing space, and a small, simple toolbar beneath this space to allow you to add a photo (using yFrog or Twitpic, choose from the Settings), currently playing song or one from your iPod library, or your location using the new geolocation features on Twitter. If there are long links, they can be shortened (using either bit.ly or TinyURL, or a customized bit.ly account) to save you space in your tweet. There’s also a special button to insert a hashtag but doesn’t let you search hashtags, and a button to allow you to @ someone. It doesn’t bring up a list of all your followers like in Twittelator Pro, but hopefully we can see that in a future update. Currently, the hashtag and @ button seem a bit useless the way they are now

If you care about Trending Topics on Twitter, then Osfoora has that covered pretty well too. In the Trends button from the main screen, you can view the current top 10 trends, the top 20 trends for the day, and the week’s top 30 trends. Tapping on any of these trends will give you a current search of tweets containing the word or phrase.

The Search function of Osfoora is pretty nice, which features a basic text search as well as a location-based search (which can also be accessed via the ‘Nearby’ button on the main screen). The location-based search will display all nearby tweets on a map, indicated by a blue speech bubble. If you don’t like this map view, you can also switch to a basic list view. The Trends tab in the Search screen will just take you back to previously discussed Trends page. You can also save a search for later, by simply doing a search and hitting the ‘Save search’ button in the bottom right. This will allow you to easily access the exact same search later on without having to re-enter the word or phrase again.

Osfoora saves your drafted tweets. Did you type out something and was about to hit Send but then decided not to, because you don’t think it’s good enough to be sent out yet? To save a draft of a tweet, just hit ‘Close’ when in the compose screen – this will bring up a prompt, asking if you want to save it as a draft or don’t save it. If you save it as a draft, it will be accessible through the Drafts button on the main screen. Select a draft to edit it, and then send it if you desire. It doesn’t appear to save any changes to your draft though, because if you select it again, it will just show the original draft. This is because it will save each new change as a new draft, which will appear when you go back into the Drafts. It’s not like the dedicated tweet draft managing app, Birdhouse, but it’s good enough if you really just want to think about a tweet more, or it’s handy in those no-signal areas (knowing AT&T).

The Lists tab of the main screen will show your lists, the lists that you follow, and the lists that follow you. Underneath this, it will show ‘Fast Lists’ – which appear to be a list of the lists that you have created. Tapping on any specific list will take you to read the tweets that belong to all people in that particular group. The Favorites tab of the app will simply display all of your favorited tweets from the most recent. Simple, nothing special here. Much like Tweetie, Osfoora also has a ‘Find User’ feature that allows you to view Recent Contacts as well as search for any particular person, assuming you’ve spelled the name correctly.

Settings for Osfoora are located within the app and not in the general phone’s Settings.app. In Osfoora’s settings, you can turn off Auto Rotate, select how many tweets you want to load at launch (from 50 to 200), and set the refresh rate (less minutes means you go through your API faster). Choose from a light or dark theme, select font size to your preference, display usernames or full names (only works well if everyone is a personal contact), and change the home color icons (light tints of the various colors). Set image and video service, URL shorteners, as well as support for Reading Later with either Instapaper or Read It Later, and TextExpander support for those that use it.

Overall, this is a good and strong Twitter iPhone app and is becoming a daily part of my Twitter lifestyle. Some quirks are not understandable for the time being (drag-to-show-toolbar) but hopefully this app will just continue to improve upon future updates. If you want to try something new instead of sticking with Tweetie all the time, give Osfoora a shot. In some aspects, Osfoora is better than Tweetie and the same price. Plus the app icon looks lush and gorgeous, a welcome addition.

Learn more about Osfoora for iPhone and iPod touch in the App Store

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Filed Under: iPod, iPhone, iPad, and iTunes, Reviews
Tagged: App Store, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, iTunes, lists, multiple accounts, Tweet, Twitter

Conan O’Brien descends on Twitter

March 4, 2010 by Bill Palmer · 4 Comments 

Conan O’Brien may no longer have a late night talk show, but he does finally have a Twitter account – along with half a million followers, a beard, and a monkey. After having posted only eight tweets in the week since his account launched, several of which have mockingly complained of how difficult it is to be funny on Twitter or how bored he is without a show to host, he posted a photo of “Team Conan” which suggests that no fewer than fourteen assistants are hard are work helping him with his tweets.

Coincidentally (or not), Jay Leno reassumed hosting duties for the Tonight Show on NBC this week. This poses several questions: Can Conan effectively use Twitter as a medium for keeping his fans engaged while they wait for his return to late night television on another network? If Conan has so many fans on Twitter, how come so few of them tuned in for his Tonight Show run? Will Jay Leno ever come up with a punchline that most viewers won’t have already figured out in their heads before he delivers it? Will Conan pick up the pace of his current one-tweet-every-other-day regimen? How long is he going to stick with that beard? And seriously, a monkey?

@ConanOBrien on Twitter

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Tagged: Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno, Tonight Show, Tweet, Twitpic, Twitter

App review: Birdfeed

July 28, 2009 by Beatweek · 1 Comment 

Twitter. It’s the hot thing these days. Along with your iPhone (or iPod Touch), it seems that these two make a perfect couple. And that’s why there are countless Twitter apps in the App Store. However, a new one has come out recently that brings back the phrase K.I.S.S. – Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Enter Birdfeed, a new contender in the ever growing world of iPhone Twitter apps. What makes it different from most other apps though, is that it keeps everything simple (perhaps TOO simple, in some aspects).

Birdfeed does not follow the traditional twitter apps that feature a bar at the bottom that separate your regular stream, your mentions/replies, your DMs, and your favorites. Instead, all of these are featured on a separate screen that is labeled with your account name at the top. While this may not suit everyone, it certainly is a way to keep focused on what you want to look at without getting distracted with the other stuff. If you do have new mentions or DMs though, it will show the count on the main screen.

One of the main things that Birdfeed does that most others do not is that it keeps a local cache, so it remembers your timeline spot and will allow you to catch up on tweets even when there is no network connection. Most of the other apps require a connection to load tweets, so this is a nice change.

The app also has an infinite timeline, where it will automatically load and display more tweets once you reach the bottom of the screen. So if you’re the kind that likes to completely catch up with all your friends and news, then this should attract you. There’s also the ability to go back all the way to the top of the screen by tapping the status bar at the top. But if you go to a different screen and then come back, you’ll have to load all the tweets again, since the app will only display the most recent ones.

Scrolling on the app is like butter, extremely smooth and not jerky like some other twitter apps on the iPhone. In fact, it is similar to that of Tweetie, which still seems to be one of the top apps for tweeting on the iPhone.

When composing a new tweet, the screen is also simple and not overcrowded with features that not everyone may need. Simply a trash icon to clear the tweet, a display of 140 [that goes down once you start typing along with a neat color-coded indicator of how close you are to the 140-character limit], and a camera icon for pictures (no video yet). The whole screen for composing a tweet is simple, just like the rest of the app.

When you view someone’s tweet, you will also see what app it originated from (sometimes missing in other apps), you can view each tweet in part of a conversation, and of course, reply/favorite/retweet (called “Forward” in the app, since you can post a link to the tweet or email a link of it as well).

If you tap anywhere at the top of the screen where it displays user info (avatar, name, etc) or just the blue arrow button, you will view that user’s profile. View how many following/followers (although you can’t view the users oddly enough), updates, bio, and can send a DM (if they are following you back). Amongst other stuff is the ability to view their most recent tweets, favorites, search results with their @username, and even some Services are integrated for fun: Twitter.com/Favrd/Follow Cost/DoesFollow. There’s even that awesome little follow/unfollow button if you need it, but be warned – as of this writing, there is no block/unblock.

If you get lost in the midst of viewing specific tweets, there’s a button in the top right that takes you right back where you started. Simple and convenient!

There is an in-app browser (although what twitter app doesn’t nowadays) that can support landscape viewing (but not landscape tweeting, if you’re one of those landscape fans). Unfortunately, the in-app browser is also the only way to view integrated image sharing services as well (yfrog and TwitPic). Even though these two services are supported by Birdfeed for uploads, when viewing images from these, you don’t get full-screen support; you get to view just the webpage. For shame, and hopefully this will be addressed at some point in the future in an update.

From the main screen, you can look at your own profile and tweets, although there is no point since you can’t view who you follow and who follows you. There is also a Search tab that will let you view results from All or Nearby, also allowing you to view saved searches, recent searches, or trends via the bookmark icon. Though it may just be me, but it seems like it’s quite a few taps to just view Trending Topics – it would do better as its own separate tab.
And many users will find this feature handy – View User, just like the Go To User option in Tweetie, allows you to quickly enter a username and jump to their profile page. Not all the twitter apps have this quick jump feature, so it’s very nice to see it included in Birdfeed.

Birdfeed also has options in Settings to integrate with Instapaper and tr.im if you use those services, and also lets you choose what site to upload photos to (yfrog and TwitPic) and what image quality.

Overall, this app is a great contender in the ring of iPhone Twitter clients. One of their mottos is “We’re as proud of the things we left out as we are of the things we put in,” which is nice to add to the simplicity, but taking some essentials out (fullscreen picture integration, viewing following/followers, etc) does knock it down a notch, despite it’s simplicity (EVERY Twitter app should have these things). If you want to have a simple but smooth Twitter client and don’t mind some missing things (that may be addressed in the future, who knows), then Birdfeed may be a good option to consider looking into.

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Birdfeed for iPhone and iPod touch in the App Store

review by Christine Chan

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Tagged: app, App Store, Birdfeed, Christine Chan, iPhone, iPod touch, iTunes, review, Tweet, Twitter