The update to Twitterfon on the iPhone (and iPod touch) which fixes the “crashing” behaviour has been posted and is now available from the iTunes Store.
Yay!
Fixing Twitterfon
Twitterfon is one of my favourite applications for the iPhone (and iPod touch) however recently it has been crashing consistently everytime I start it up.
According to the Twitterfon website blog, the problem lies with Twitter.
Some users have been reporting me that TwitterFon crashes on launch. This has been happening since this afternoon. The root cause is that twitter has changed their JSON response which favorite status value is null instead of bool unexpectedly and randomly.
Not quite sure that that means as I am not really a techie, honestly!
However all is not lost.
If you apply this patch (and you may have to do it more than once) then it should fix the Twitterfon application until an update is released.
Are you on Twitter?
Are you on Twitter?
From the Handheld Learning 2008 Conference.
Academic uses of Twitter
Nice article on some of the academic uses of Twitter which I found out about after reading a blog entry on Twitter from Lindsay Jordan.
The article by Dave Parry says:
I thought I would explain how I use it, specifically for academic related uses, and teaching.
Includes a really interesting observation on the way that learners used Twitter for classroom chatter.
The first thing I noticed when the class started using Twitter was how conversations continued inside and outside of class. Most of these conversations were not directly related to class material, but many were tangentially related. Because the students had the shared classroom experience when something came up outside of class that reminded them of material from class time it often got twittered. This served as a reinforcement/connection between the material and the “real world.”
The whole article is well worth reading if you are wondering about the academic benefits of Twitter.
In case you are still wondering what Twitter is…
One thing about Twitter is that you need to “do it” to really understand it.
Many of these ideas would also work for Jaiku (and in some cases with the threaded commenting could work better).
This article first appeared on e-Learning Stuff.
Web 2.0
I thought I would use this Hood 2.0 blog to mention and blog about various Web 2.0 sites and services that can be used for learning (or for just plain fun).
I will mention the classics such as Flickr, Facebook and Twitter, but also want to cover the less familar sites such as Wakoopa, Jaiku amongst others.
Watch this space.
Bill on Twitter
BBC News’ Bill Thompson gives a nice overview of Twitter and the impact it had for him with SxSW.
Unlike many of my friends and colleagues I wasn’t able to make it to Austin, Texas for this year’s SXSW interactive, the four-day technology conference and festival that is currently firing the imagination of the technology world.
So I wasn’t in the ballroom when the keynote address by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg went awry under the less-than-forensic questioning of technology journalist Sarah Lacy.
I didn’t see the crowd start to get restless and heckle Zuckerberg about the deeply-unpopular Beacon advertising system, or get a chance to grab the microphone and ask questions when Lacy threw the conversation open to the floor.
And yet I was there in another way, listening to and even interacting with some of my friends in the audience, picking up on the vibe in the room and even tuning in later as Sarah Lacy loudly defended herself.
I was there because I was plugged into Twitter, the instant messaging service that lets users send short text messages to anyone who cares to tune in, online or on their mobile phone.
Really nice article which demonstrates how Twitter is changing the face of communication and the web (to be honest mainly in the geek/tech world, but still causing change).
I do Twitter however I much prefer Jaiku, in the main as there is more of a community with Jaiku and Twitter is much more about the audience.
Twitter though is simple and tidy, whilst Jaiku has the functionality that allows much deeper discussion and the integration of RSS feeds.
They are similar, but they are also different. Though I use both I generally do not post exactly the same stuff to both. I do feed my Twitter feed into Jaiku, but my friends can choose to ignore it if they so wish
“Think Jaiku is losing to Twitter? Wait till Android Devices Start Shipping”
Excellent blog article on though Twitter is winning the battle in the numbers game, Jaiku will win the war once Android starts shipping.
What if Google where to build Jaiku into Android as the standard phone Address Book? As soon as Android devices started to ship, Jaiku (whatever form it takes in the future) would gain hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of users rapidly. This isn’t as crazy an idea as it sounds. As I’ve posted before, Jaiku was originally conceived as a location and status aware address book; many Nokia users who have the Jaiku S60 client application installed already use the service in this way.
Read the full blog entry, makes for interesting reading.
Personally I much prefer Jaiku over Twitter, the RSS and the comments allow for me a much deeper richer experience, more importantly as well it allows for interactivity much more easily than Twitter.
Of course I don’t like the 504 errors (who does) and that bird, but hopefully with a day off tomorrow (what am I going to do) Jaiku will get better and we’ll see less of them.
Follow me on Jaiku.