Category Archives: iPhone apps

Jan 24 Comments comments
advertising, iPhone apps, social media

Browsing websites - now there’s an app for that

Get Sticky iPhone app

Get Sticky iPhone app

My friends at Sticky Advertising have been busy launching Get Sticky iPhone app with a little help from the guys at MotherApp.

It’s basically the Get Sticky blogsite for your iPhone. It allows you to stay up to date with all the latest Inbound Marketing news and tips plus their weekly industry website ratings…all from your iPhone. You can download it here and its free. I like the feature where you can favourite the articles you thought were most important.

Get Sticky joins Mashable’s iPhone app , The Guardian’s iPhone apps and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s iPhone app - where the emphasis is on getting news in a simplified browsing format for the iPhone. With this blog, I cheat and use the WP-Touch Wordpress plugin to achieve the same type of iPhone app user experience. It also supports Blackberry, Android and Palm, and speeds up the load times. Check it out on your iPhone/smartphone to see for yourself.

I’m interested to hear from iPhone users which  iPhone apps you use to browse specific websites - and whether you stop accessing those sites in Safari browser when there’s an app available.

Jul 22 Comments comments
blogs, collaboration, iPhone apps, social media

What’s so great about Tumblr?

we love tumblr

we love tumblr

Tumblr, the NY based, mini blogging or micro blogging service, seems to be reaching critical mass, now hosting more than a million blogs. It’s been described as “the easiest way to share yourself” It’s the essence of the social web - Tumblr has had some high profile blogs get book deals based on popularity along, such as LATFH, and This is Why Your Fat. Smart copy and ideas get a lot of traction, like Wordboner, and Steal Our Ideas. Tumblr has created an entire sub-culture of categorized, sharable content, F***Yeah Tumblrs such as F***YeahBabyAnimals.

If you’re not familiar with it, its like a cross between Twitter and a more traditional blog such as Wordpress or Blogger. I fell in love with Tumblr a few months ago, because its so easy to use and intuitive. It became a way to keep the photos, conversations and links recorded in a timeline. I realised when I started using it that I’m a compulsive sharer, and it became a fun extension of the kinds of things I like in my personal life, a more aesthetic focus than my Wordpress blog where I write about work related subjects

What’s so great about Tumblr then?

  • Simplified user interface based on content type means that you can choose the type of content click on an icon, upload and its done
  • Sharability is the key to Tumblr - the “reblog” button is like a re-tweet or share on Facebook.
  • Twitter integration. You can sign into your Twitter account and reblog tweets as conversations, as a bonus it keeps all your original Twitter status links. You can have all your Tumblr posts go directly to Twitter too.
  • You can choose to have people comment on your posts, or they can express how they like what you’ve posted by the “like” button or by reblogging.
  • Disqus comments. Disqus comment system assigns comments to users rather than leaving them isolated on blogs. Its the most social of all the commenting systems, with Twitter logins and Twitter tracking built in. Disqus is built into Tumblr so if you have comments enabled, it just works.
  • Your “Tumblarity”, a social popularity scale made up by Tumblr, is calculated by a mixture of what you post, how much others have liked it, shared it and how many people follow your Tumblr blog. Sure its a popularity contest - isn’t everything on the social web?
  • Your readers can submit content. If you enable the “Enable Audience Submissions” in Advanced features, your readers can help you create content and you have a truly collaborative social content tool at your disposal
  • See popular, recently popular and upcoming content as people are interacting with it and increasing its popularity.
  • Follow other Tumblr’s based on common interests, your friends or subject matter, all at the click of a button
  • Customizable themes, and a simple to use API make Tumblr popular with developers. There is a wide variety of themes, and they’re easy to change.
  • Minimalism and simplicity are Tumblr mantras. Less laden with links and clutter than the regular wordy blog.
  • Add your other blogs via RSS feed. Post now or schedule them. Many regular blogs such as PostSecret now also have Tumblr extensions.
  • Choose to promote you Tumblr blog via Tumblr or not. The choice is yours. Google & Technorati classify Tumblr as a blog, so you can reap the benefits
  • Create one Tumblr or create one for each of your subject or interest areas. One Tumblr user I know creates new ones like “folders” on the web for the different types of content he likes to share.
  • Tumblr matches content you share with others, and makes suggestions of other people to follow.
  • With a Directory based on tags, and geographical areas, you can even explore Tumblrs via the country they come from. More than a million blogs live on Tumblr, and Japan is the second most popular country, with Australia number four.
  • Its got an iPhone app, with all the same features so you can update on the go. Again, seamless, device independent sharing wins. I tend to use mine instead of the Twitpic and YFrog Twitter image posting services because of the higher resolution of the images posted.
  • Tagging and categorizing. You can tag your posts and depending on your theme they become clickable links. You can categorize your entire Tumblr blog so others can find and follow you.

Update: a couple more key features

  • Custom URLs. Have a Tumblr URL e.g. something.tumblr.com or just move an existing domain name to your Tumblr. Couldn’t be easier.
  • A relatively new feature is the photoset. An animated photo album with tags.

Its a long list of reasons to love Tumblr, so if you like sharing content, give it a try. My Tumblr is Tiphereth - follow it if you feel the urge. If you’re already using it, what do you like about Tumblr? Share your Tumblr experiences.

Jun 24 Comments comments
iPhone apps, social media, social networking

iPhone, AFL and social media

Being a big Australian Football League fan, (and Sydney Swans member), I was chuffed when the ultimate AFL application Aussie Rules Live was released. It has pretty much everything you need to follow your team and all the others, including live scores when the games are on.

AFL is a social game, with footy tipping giving you a reason to have a competition between your friends to see who gets through to the top of the ladder. You can extend your network outside of your immediate network to others who are also passionate about sport. It adds another dimension to use a tool such as Twitter to keep in touch with your favourite team for me its @sydneyswans, and your real and online friends live while the game is on. You can also use hashtags in Twitter Search to find conversations going on (often across the country as AFL fans have a higher representation in the southern states). So you can easily identify other AFL fans to follow on Twitter through their tweets.

Twitpic and YFrog are image posting services services accessible via web or through iPhone Twitter applications such as Tweetie, Tweet Deck and Twitterfon. My current favourite image posting for Twitter iPhone is Tumblr - another blogging platform but with a great little interface. You can even tag the photos before you upload them, or later on via the we. I love Tumblr because you end up with a photo blog, a collection of your favourite photos you can re-visit anytime. And you can sort the photos via tags too.

iPhone Sport & Social Media

Jun 14 Comments comments
iPhone apps, social media, social networking

How iPhone shapes social media

This wonderful video shows the incredible infographics at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference WWDC 2009 - it showed the “live” download of the top 20,000 apps from iTunes App store. It’s generated a lot of buzz - and for good reason. While not quite a by-the-second recreation of what’s happening at the App Store — as the results are delayed by five minutes — the “live” mural has each iPhone app’s icon pulse light outwards in a ripple whenever someone downloads that app.

What’s really interesting is what it represents:

  • There are now 50,000 + iPhone (and iPod Touch, so iPhone OS) applications less than a year since release of iPhone 3G.
  • The displays are representing 20,000 of the most downloaded applications
  • More than 1 billion apps downloaded, the milestone was reached in April 2009, again less than a year since iPhone 3G
  • 3,000 apps are downloaded every minute
  • New iPhone 3G S is faster, with video capabilities & even edit your video on the phone and share it straight to YouTube

I am an unashamed iPhone champion, I got one the day it was released in Australia. However, there are loads of detractors who keep looking for an iPhone killer, lauding Android, Blackberry and various Palm and Windows OS devices.

The figures from Apple are significant enough to keep the competition at bay at least for the moment:

During the first quarter of iPhone 3G availability ended September 27, 2008, 6.9 million units were sold, exceeding the 6.1 million first-generation iPhone units sold in the prior five quarters combined. Unit sales of iPhone 3G continued to be significant in the quarter ended March 28, 2009, with 3.79 million iPhones sold.

So how does iPhone shape social media?

Let’s look at popular iPhone apps and stats on content generation.

Twitter

Back in May 2008, I felt Twitter combined with GPS was going to explode on iPhone. It was scarily accurate, and my Twitter use increased thousandfold after getting iPhone Twitter apps and enjoying the experience of social on the go. It seems I’m not the only one posting mobile status updates, looking at Mashable and TechCrunch lists of the most popular Twitter apps:

Mashable has Tweetie, Twitteriffic and Twitterfon (all iPhone Twitter clients) in the top 10

TechCrunch has Tweetie as number 5 and Twitterfon as number 13 in the top 21

Facebook

The iPhone Facebook app was the number one free app downloaded in 2008 on the iTunes store. There are currently more than 8.6 million active monthly users of the iPhone Facebook application worldwide.  That’s quite a lot of mobile status updating, sure its not huge compared to the hundreds of millions of Facbook users, but my guess is the Facebook iPhone app users are probably an actively updating bunch.

Flickr

Flickr has a mobile version of its site that looks great on iphone. But the most compelling story is in content creation. Just look at this chart of the most popular cameraphones by Flickr members. What’s even more significant, out of all the cameras on Flickr, the iPhone is the second most popular after a”real” digital SLR cameras Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi. It’s outstripped 3 other popular digital SLRs since its launch. Read: pro-sumer digital SLR photographers and iPhone users are the most prolific sharers on Flickr

iPhone the most popular to take Flickr photos

iPhone the most popular to take Flickr photos

YouTube

It’s really hard to find usage stats on iPhone YouTube access, probably because its built into the iPhone OS. From early 2008, the figures were iPhone users were 30 times more likely to access YouTube compared to regular mobile web users. From 2009, it jumps to 37% of iPhone users watched online video, but the rest of mobile world has caught up, (iPhone users 6x more likely to watch video compared to regular mobile users)

My next prediction is going to be the explosion of YouTube videos being filmed edited and uploaded from new iPhone 3G S

MySpace

The MySpace iPhone app is number 5 of the social networking free apps on the Australian iTunes store. No readily available data on how many active users are accessing from the iPhone, but given its download popularity, it would be high.

Mobile Web

AdMob metrics from April 2009 gives us the perspective of how much iPhone punches above its weight.  AdMob report shows  iPhone OS had 8% of smartphone market share globally, but generated 43% of mobile web requests and 65% of HTML usage. That’s 8% of iPhones generating 65% of mobile web traffic.

Nielsen says 88% of iPhone users in the US are regular users of the web (making them 4x as likely as the typical subscriber)

Mobile advertising

Ogilvy blogs reported that iPhone users are 23% more likely to respond to mobile advertising. Looking at the stats for mobile web traffic, it makes sense given the amount of mobile web traffic generated from iPhone OS.

Its a pretty compelling story of how iPhone OS feeds users and content to major social media and social networking sites, and helps keep users connected, anywhere 3G access is available.

Feb 11 Comments comments
advertising, iPhone apps, social media

Social media douchebags a.k.a. New Media douchebags

I found this gem -  just replace New Media with Social Media.

New Media Douchebags in plain English

Dec 18 Comments comments
iPhone apps

branded iphone applications

Style.com main menu

Style.com main menu

I’m not averse to a little branding on my user experience especially if you can give me an interactive reason to engage with your brand. So which branded apps are still on my iPhone?
Style.com iphone app helps me get my fashion fix on the go. With great content images, videos from  all the major fashion shows in the fashion capitals of the world (NY, London and Paris), combined with a fashion blog, with  editorial posts fed directly from Style.com the online home of US Vogue, this little app is a heavy hitter punching way above it’s weight. So why is it so compelling?

  1. It has an iphone specific interface, so text is the right size (no zooming required) images go full screen at the tap of a finger, and with the same finger tapping interface you can navigate through the images really easily. Intuitive! Easy!
  2. Great content - the same reason users go to Style.com, lots of drool worthy high fashion content, beautifully shot and presented, superb editorial commentary to help you discover the right trends to invest in
  3. Regular updates - the Style File Blog is continuously updated with all the fashion goss from around the world so there is always something new to look at.

Other users rate this app very highly, even to the extent of getting people into fashion when they weren’t before. So the power of the decent application is to engage users with the content, and create new users. This app does both in spades.

Oct 11 Comments comments
iPhone apps, social networking

iPhone apps continue to rock my world

Thanks to Wordpress app for iphone I can now update my blog through my iPhone. Which is really handy considering I am sans computer at home at the moment. And also continues to show the iphone is more a palm top computer than anything else.

A few months on, and my most used apps are:

  • Twinkle - the most fun Twitter client with GPS and now with built in browser
  • NetNewsWire - RSS reader with a web version where you subscribe to feeds and a nifty interface on the phone which makes it easy to read on the go
  • Facebook 2.0 - sooo much better and more stable it almost beats the web “new Facebook”
  • Palringo - instant messaging on every platform
  • Delicious - my bookmarks are always with me in the bundles I save them into, it’s so organized I feel virtuous
  • Omnifocus - one of the few paid for apps, my GTD task manager created by the original GTD master
  • LinkedIn - handy for a referral on the run
  • Showtimes - movie sessions, reviews and trailers, uses GPS to show you which cinemas are closest to your current location or you can set a preferred home
  • iTransit - Sydney train timetables live from any station. I’ve created one home link for outbound, one for inbound trains. This is where to get iTransit as I haven’t seen it on App store

These are just the ones I can’t live without - will go through some branded apps next time.

Mobile Blogging from here.
Aug 01 Comments comments
iPhone apps, mash-ups, social networking

iPhone 3G and the killer apps

I got an iPhone 3G on the first day it was released and its been a love affair ever since. It’s replaced more than my old 3G phone - it’s all about the iPhone applications which makes it more like a mini mobile computer.

Fun stuff like Twinkle - which delivers on my wish list from my previous blog post - Twitter + photos + gps so you know who is Twittering around you. So fabulously seamlessly integrated that it becomes an insta-hit with the iPhone in-crowd.

Shazam - you can do a party trick hold the phone to the speaker and Shazam tells you the song and the artist and tags it for you in case you want to buy it later.

I got Palringo yesterday and I can use IM and stay in touch with all the MSN crew.

Omnifocus is one I have barely started using yet - it needs a little time and love to get the contexts working with the GPS.
So the things I find cool:

  • Apps with GPS integration e.g. Twinkle
  • Apps that let iPhone talk to every platform e.g. Palringo
  • Apps that organise you e.g. Evernote
  • Apps that keep you on top of your online life e.g. Wordpress (where is Blogger for iPhone?)
  • Apps that behave like super techno geniuses e.g. Shazam
  • Meaningless fun stuff using the accelerometer e.g. iPint, Cube Runner
  • Syncing seamlessly between desktop and iPhone e.g. Mobile Me, Evernote, Omnifocus

Hours of entertainment and time wasting even under the pretence of being busy and organised. Crackberry - your days are numbered - long live the iPhone!