Social Media Leaps Ahead With iOS 5

And now, Apple has announced iOS 5 will be out to the public this fall. I couldn’t be more excited! If social media wasn’t already deeply engrained in your every move, iOS 5 is about to make socializing bigger, better, and easier than ever. Faster, too. With iOS 5, your Apple product (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) integrates your Twitter account information into multiple applications, enabling you to tweet whatever you’d like, from whichever app you’re engaged with (Photo, Safari, Google, Maps).

Remember all those pesty push notifications, interrupting your work and play?

With iOS 5, the pop-ups will be replaced. Instead, notifications will appear subtly in your top banner. Also, with the new Notifications Center you can view all of your notifications in list form.

Notes will now be Reminders, integrated with iCal and Outlook, providing location-based reminders. That means when you’re at the grocery store, the list you wrote yesterday in Reminders will notify you to remember the milk & eggs.

Notifications just got polite, smart, and worth reading - all of the time. From the locked screen, the notifications you care about will now show in list form, providing access to one at a time or all at once. With a slide to the right, you can select to view a single notification and open that app directly from the locked screen.

That same locked screen can open up Photo for you, too. Access your iPhone’s camera directly from the locked screen. Take a photo, edit the image, and post it to Twitter without leaving the Photo app. Easy.

Consider the current route used to share photos with friends:

• Tap 1: open your camera app on your phone
• Tap 2: snap a photo
• Tap 3: save the photo
• Tap 4: select where to send the photo
• Tap 5: get ‘outta’ that app, you want to post this photo on Twitter!
• Tap 6: open your Twitter app
• Tap 7: create message
• Tap 8: select to upload photo
• Tap 9: choose photo
• Tap 10: upload photo
• Tap 11: thumbs hurt. Relax.

Now, consider the iOS 5 route:

• Click 1: take photo from your iPhone’s locked screen
• Click 2: edit photo
• Click 3: share photo
• Click 4: send to Twitter

More integration means fewer clicks. Fewer clicks mean more time. More time means more sharing. My smart phone just got smarter, and could probably even get me a few more friends.

What are you excited about with iOS 5?

Jason Douglas
Spyder Trap Online Marketing

Recently, Echofon came out with an update to their iPhone app. As the only iPhone user at Spyder Trap, I am the lucky person who gets to test out everything iPhone related.

I have used Echofon as my main Twitter application since it was called Twitterfon. The latest update only enhances the application and in my opinion, if Echofon was not at the top before, officially puts itself at the top out of all Twitter applications.

I tweet for numerous accounts, both personal and professional. Before, you could only have one account registered for the application. If I wanted to tweet from another account, I had to download another app. Now, you are able to hold multiple Twitter accounts on Echofon. Switching accounts is easy to do. Go to your ‘Accounts’ page and tap on the profile you want to tweet from, and it will instantly switch.

Another nice feature is the multiple re-tweet option. This allows the user to re-tweet with or without adding a message and editing the original tweet. This is a significant upgrade compared to the web version of Twitter, where re-tweeting functionality is far behind the capabilities of this application.

Arguably, the most impressive new feature is the ‘Nearby Tweets, Map or List View’. By using the iPhone’s built-in GPS, it’s able to locate your near-exact location and load tweets either by using Google Maps and placing pins from where the tweet happened, or in the traditional list view.  This brings in some of the functionality possessed in Foursquare, where you can view who is also at a place you checked in to, but minus the checking in feature.

Many other Echofon upgrades were introduced, such as:

• Attaching photos using TwitPic or Flickr
• Attaching videos (for 3GS only)
• Landscape keyboard
• Dedicated lists tab
• In-App web, maps, mail, YouTube, and full screen photo viewing
• User authenticated bit.ly
• Shake to reload (exactly like Urbanspoon)

For anyone with an iPhone and using Twitter, this is the application to go with. The free version, which is what I have always used, is great. The ads are never in the way of your tweet stream and never annoying in any other way. For clients, especially with companies who are focused in one area, with the ‘Nearby Tweets, Map or List View’, this can help you interact with your following, or anyone talking about your brand/product.

Example: if you’re a restaurant in the Uptown area, and you can see people within a certain radius of your location talking about lunch plans, you can connect with these people directly and try to get new people to your restaurant.

The next step of Echofon is to be able to search for specific terms within the ‘Nearby Tweets’ to weed out non-relevant conversation.

Now that I have shared my favorite Twitter app, what’s your favorite Twitter application for the iPhone? What features do you want to see from your iPhone app?

Jason Douglas
Spyder Trap Online Marketing

Earlier this summer, I purchased the iPhone 3g[s]. Once in the App Store, I downloaded as many applications as I could at once; I felt like a kid in a candy store. Google App, Weather Channel App, Facebook app, TwitterFon; the options of apps that were just a click away was overwhelming. The best part: all were free. I still have yet to pay for a single app.

When I got to searching for a Twitter app, I noticed there were free versions, and ‘Pro’ versions that cost anywhere from $0.99 to $4.99. I went with the free TwitterFon application, partially because I am too cheap to spend even $0.99 on something I would use daily, and partially due to the fact that there was a fully-functioning free option.

What if free was not an option?

That day may come, and may come quickly. We, as social media and social networking participants and contributors, have been lucky to use and enjoy networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging platforms, etc. all for free. We all know that in this capitalistic world, there’s one thing we are all trying to do: make money. These social networks, along with all the others, are no different.

If tomorrow, an announcement came from all the above mentioned social networking channels that starting Monday, September 14, there would be a monthly fee to use their respective service, what would you do?

The question: social media: would you pay to play, or would you go away?

Google Analytics iPhone App

Web geeks on the go can now keep tabs on their websites through a new Google Analytics iPhone app now available at the Apple App Store. The $5.99 app developed by http://analyticsapp.com provides 29 standard reports including overview reports, visitor reports, traffic reports, content reports, event tracking reports and custom reports. I have not used the app personally (I’m a BlackBerry user), but they appear to be getting some rave revews. Some notable ones are as follow.

“Now that Google Analytics is available for the iPhone, that addiction is only going to get worse.”
“Woohoo! Now I’ll finally be able to obsessively check my traffic stats from the palm of my hand.”
“Absolutely sublime! This is a ‘must-have’ for anyone running websites with GA. I can’t believe how well it works!”

If you have used this app before or one like it please comment and let us know what you think. Love it? Hate it? I am trying to convince myself to make the switch, and applications such as the Google Analytics app is making the switch that much more tempting.

Since we are on the iPhone topic, Apple announced today the App Store has reached over 1 billion downloads in nine months. Not surprising but quite a feat to say the least. Congratuations Apple!