Twitter Tiptoes Into Advertising

For what seems like eons, people have been asking Twitter how and when it’s going to start making money, and the company’s executives have always said that they’ll move to monetize the site only when they can do it right. Today, Twitter is announcing its first big money-making idea. It’s a form of advertising called Promoted Tweets, and it’s no big whoop–basically, brands with presences on Twitter will be able to pay to put (clearly-labeled) tweets about their products at the top of search results. I can’t imagine anyone but the most adphobic among us hating the idea, but it also seems unlikely that Promoted Tweets alone will pay to keep Twitter free forever. They’re clearly a first step rather than the final answer.

Twitter will talk more about Promoted Tweets–and the future of Twitter in general–tomorrow at Chirp, the first official Twitter conference. I’ll be there, and will let you know what we learn…

Cuil Me Once, Shame On You…

Remember Cuil? Back in 2008, The search engine gained brief notoriety back in 2008 by claiming to be better than Google when it was in fact laughably, bizarrely bad. Then it mostly disappeared, except when bloggers need a synonym for “failed launch” or “unbridled hubris.”

Now Cuil is back with a new project I learned about in a GigaOM post by Matthew Ingram: Cpedia, an algorithmic encyclopedia with more than 384 million “automated articles.” Cuil founder and CEO Tom Costello explains:

Cpedia returns an automatically written article in response to a query, rather than a list of hits. It can be very compelling; it is especially good at surfacing facts that I didn’t know before. At other times it is weird — it does reflect the web after all.

[section explaining that Cpedia censors offensive matter snipped]

I find Cpedia best on topics that I thought I knew about. I find out things I should have known but didn’t. I’ve noticed productivity has slowed in the company since we have had it up for internal testing, as people ask each other about stranger and stranger trivia, or exclaim, “I didn’t know your middle name was Hector?”

Cpedia is very different from a traditional search engine, and not at all like Wikipedia, but that is its strength; it is something new and different. I hope you like it. I certainly do.

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Opera Mini for iPhone, Finally!

Three weeks ago, Opera submitted the iPhone version of its Opera Mini browser to Apple for approval, and I cheerfully predicted it would show up on the App Store within a couple of weeks. I was off by one week: Mini is now available as a free download.

I figured the app would make it because…well, I couldn’t think of a reason why it wouldn’t. Apple isn’t involved in epic battle with Opera (unlike, say, Google). It can be pretty confident that Safari will remain by far the iPhone’s dominant browser even if Opera Mini does quite well. And hey, making trouble for browser companies that wish to run on your operating system is demonstrably bad juju.

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Microsoft’s Kin Phones: Very Social, Zune on Board, No Apps

Rumors of Microsoft phones that pack Zune software and are essentially next-generation versions of the Sidekick platform it acquired have been around forever–or at least since 2008.  This morning, Microsoft made it all official at an event in San Francisco by announcing two phones it’s calling Kin.  There’s a Kin One and a Kin Tw0–the models that have been floating around the blogosphere for months–and the Sharp-manufacturered handsets will be available next month on Verizon Wireless at prices yet to be announced.

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Google Docs Gets Ready to Face Office 2010

Microsoft plans to ship Office 2010–and the suite’s complementary Office Web Apps–in June. Among the many companies getting ready for the upgrade is…Google. Today, it’s launching an update to its Google Docs online suite that’s clearly meant to help get its applications into the best possible shape to compete with Office 2010 and the Web apps once they’re available. The new version is available to all users, but most of it is an optional preview version for now.

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The T-Grid: Handheld PC Pro vs. the iPad

When you compare the iPad to gizmos past, the most obvious frame of reference is a multitude of unsuccessful tablets. But as I’ve been using my iPad over the past week, it’s reminded me even more of another much-hyped platform which landed with a thud: Microsoft’s Handheld PC Pro–code-named “Jupiter”–which, like the iPad, put a mobile OS (Windows CE 2.11 in this case) inside a device that looked like a small personal touchscreen computer.

Let’s compare the iPad against an especially iPaddish Handheld PC, Sharp’s Mobilon Pro, a convertible model that could be used in notebook- or tablet-like configurations.

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Live Coverage of Microsoft’s “It’s Time to Share” Event

Quick reminder: I’ll be at Microsoft’s probably-about-new-phones event today starting at 10am–and will live blog all the news. Join me at technologizer.com/timetoshare.

Palm 4 Sale?

Bloomberg says that Palm wants to sell itself and Lenovo and HTC are interested. As a bystander who’s fond of both Palm’s current products and its immense legacy, my preferred outcome is still that Palm figure out how to stay independent and successful. If that’s not possible, I’m rooting for a buyer who can figure out how to make WebOS into the major mobile-OS player it deserves to be–and I’m fretting about scenarios in which its gets bought and withers away.

Adobe’s Creative Suite 5 Revealed

Adobe is unveiling the new version of its design ubersuite on Monday, and a couple of the new features in Photoshop look not merely cool but extraordinary–especially for a 20-year-old piece of software that’s theoretically already very, very mature.

iPhone OS 4 Developer Beta: What Works, What Doesn’t

Most iPhone OS applications should work on the iPhone OS 4 Developer Beta. But as with any major revision of n operating system, there are sure to be some problems.

After the jump, a report on common applications I’ve run on my iPhone 3GS and the issues (if any) I encountered. I’ve had a fairly good success rate in running applications without a hitch, but there are a few that don’t do so well.

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iPhone OS 4 Developer Beta: The Bug List

Like any beta, the iPhone OS 4 Developer preview is buggy. Below is a running list of issues that I have run into, or which have been reported by other sources. I’ll cross them out when I find them fixed in future builds. The initial list contains all known bugs from the first beta, build 8A230M.

If I didn’t find the bug myself, credit is given in parentheses.

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iPhone OS 4 Developer Beta: First Impressions

As soon as Apple announced iPhone OS 4 last Thursday, I was itching to get my hands on it–and it wasn’t long before I installed the Developer beta on my iPhone 3GS.

The beta is categorized as a major release, but most of the obvious new features are minor. It’s definitely buggy, with a few minor issues–although no real showstoppers–and there are applications I’ve come across that don’t function properly, or refuse to run at all.

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Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

Must be a quiet weekend in the blogosphere: One of the major topics of discussion is how Apple chooses the times shown in stock images of its products–which happen to be 9:41am in photos of the iPad and 9:42am in ones of the iPhone 3GS.

As Network World and Fast Company noticed, Secret Lab developer Jon Manning blogged that he ran into iPhone software honcho Scott Forstall at the Palo Alto Apple Store, and Forstall said that the times are chosen to sync as closely as possible with the moment in Apple press events when the product is shown for the first time:

We design the keynotes so that the big reveal of the product happens around 40 minutes into the presentation. When the big image of the product appears on screen, we want the time shown to be close to the actual time on the audience’s watches. But we know we won’t hit 40 minutes exactly…for the iPhone, we made it 42 minutes. It turned out we were pretty accurate with that estimate, so for the iPad, we made it 41 minutes. And there you are – the secret of the magic time.

Mystery solved! What revealing proof of Apple’s perfectionism! Betcha that Microsoft doesn’t sweat details like that!

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The Masters in 3D at Sony Style

With a Sony Style store around the corner, I headed out on Thursday for a peek at the Masters Tournament in 3D. It was just me, one avid golf fan, and a Sony Style staffer. In other words, the viewing event clearly wasn’t a big draw for the store. Nonetheless, Sony sucked me in, and I have to say I came away more impressed by the demo than I expected.

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Ten Unusually Useful Web Sites

I spend lots of time patrolling the Net for sites that can help me with my life. Some are pinpointed to something I might need right away, like a way to get the phone number of a company. Others are spots I know I’ll need someday, such as instructions for recovering a ring from a drainpipe or how to wrap an extension cord like a pro.

I’ve got a stack of these places for you; some may hit your nail on the head, so to speak; others won’t do a thing for you.

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Twitter Gobbles Up Tweetie

Twitter has acquired Atebits, the very small company that makes Tweetie, the truly exceptional Twitter client for the iPhone. Tweetie is being renamed Twitter for iPhone, the price is going from $2.99 to $0, and it sounds like creator Loren Brichter will be working on an iPad version and maybe ones for other mobile devices.

The move is controversial, since it–along with the release of an official Twitter client for BlackBerry–puts Twitter in direct competition with the third-party developers who have built much of the Twitter ecosystem. Will Twitter still help to promote Tweetie rivals such as Twitterific? Will Tweetie Twitter for iPhone grab monopolistic market share among iPhone Twitter apps? Will any developer even bother to try and make money from Twitter apps when Twitter is giving them away? We’ll see.

For me, there’s one overriding factor here: Tweetie Twitter for iPhone is not merely a nice piece of software but one of the best pieces of smartphone software–for any purpose–I’ve ever seen. And I believe that Loren Brichter is among the most talented developers of user interfaces who’s ever worked on any platform. I expected that a larger company would acquire Atebits to get Brichter on board, and kind of feel that if a company was capable of convincing Brichter to join it, it would be irresponsible not to do so.

I’ve also thought that Tweetie Twitter for iPhone was compelling evidence that one gifted programmer can make better software than an army of people. Let’s hope that Brichter’s creation stays great, and that Twitter lets him loose to do equally amazing work on other platforms.