First thing’s first

Twitter’s a micro-blogging site. Which means that instead of maintaining a full blog as I’m doing at the moment, with full articles, posts with detailed content or unedited ramblings, you’re limited to a scant 140 characters to express yourself. If the stuff you tweet (which is what we call these 140 char posts) is interesting or fun, people will follow you to keep on reading what it is you have to say. Similarly you may follow other people who interest you and read whatever it is they have to say. Pretty simple concept, and not too impressive when described so plainly, but it’s become a veritable force of nature.

Why it’s cool

The recent hype has revolved around celebrities twittering their every move basically skipping over the paparazzi and letting the public scrutinize their lives straight from the horse’s mouth. If you’re into celebrity gossip well that’s pretty much where twitter begins and ends for you. For those of us looking for something more, the involvement needs to go a bit deeper. See, the one thing newbies don’t get about twitter is that if you don’t tweet and don’t follow anyone, you have a site full of nothing. So if following celebs isn’t your thing it might be a bit harder to find good people to follow, but once you do you will have opened a door into the collective hive mind: Developers with new techniques, advertisers sharing research, industry experts talking about their “secrets”, and in general excellent people putting up amazing content that most of us would have probably not found otherwise.
It’s also the absolute best place to get breaking news. Michael Jackson’s death might be the most recent example, wherein those of us on twitter had gotten the news about 2 hours earlier than everywhere else, but it can be much more practical.
Since I’m followed by a lot of locals, and most people with a smart phone and a twitter account use a mobile app to tweet from the road, I’ve found myself asking my followers for traffic reports, for the state of a line at the movies, for reviews on all sorts of things, and many times I’ve gotten an answer, sometimes with pictures, seldom with live video.
Further it’s a fantastic place to meet like minded individuals. I follow clients, suppliers, competition, friends, and people I don’t know and will probably never meet. It’s been a particularly useful tool for organizing the local web industry. What started as a bunch of tweets amongst a group of pros very impressed with each other, is now coalescing into the Web Professionals Group of Puerto Rico, including various development, design, and e-marketing firms in the island.

Who should I follow?

First forget about hoarding followers. Too many businesses and individuals come to twitter with a half-baked idea involving a million followers and some harebrained advertising scheme. The best way to get eyes is by generating good content. This is truer on twitter than it is anywhere on the internet as most of the time you’ll be expected to converse casually with both your followers and those you follow. Also a lot people will follow you for following them as a common courtesy.  If you or your company (or your client) is looking to become a productive member of the twitter community instead of looking for followers (they’ll come in time) focus on following good interesting people. A good place to start might be twitter’s own search. Write in a word or phrase and you’ll instantly find hundreds (if not thousands) of individuals tackling that particular topic. Find a couple of twitterers who say something interesting about said topic and follow them, odds are they’ll keep saying interesting stuff. You can also follow people you actually know, just ask around and you’ll find out a couple of your friends or contacts tweet as well. Once you have a decent base you can look at the people they’re following and cherry-pick those you like best. Finally, every Friday is Follow Friday. This fun little trend started a long while back and has become a staple of the Twitter community. Every friday people send out recommendations on who to follow from the list of people they themselves follow. Just look for the #followfriday  tag and you’ll find a lot of good ones as well as some bad ones but you can always unfollow if someone gets too annoying.

Final tips

Congrats! You should now be a productive twitterer. If you’ve no idea what to write about just take a sec to think about what you’re doing and write about that, odds are someone somewhere will find it interesting. Also there’s some lingo you’ll need to know to fit in here’s a decent primer straight from twitter. You’ll probably also want to use a good url shortener. Since you only have 140 characters to write your thoughts you don’t want to waste most of them on a long dynamically generated URL. So if for example you wanted to link to a beautiful 3 bedroom home on ClasificadosMejores.com, the best classifieds site on the web, you’d be better off using this URL:http://bit.ly/2m6R3A than this URL: http://www.clasificadosmejores.com/bienes-raices-clasificados-470.html.
My favorite shortener is http://bit.ly as it’s the least amount of characters allowed for a domain and it’s really easy to type and remember.
Also there’s ways to tweet without going to twitter.com, tweetdeck is my favorite solution for the desktop with tiny twitter on my phone for keeping everyone up to date from the road.
Finally here’s a list of great twitterers to follow so you can get started:
@pabloiv, @torlanco, @alantaveras, @robetoell, @albizu, @gcollazo, @jpadilla_, @fritzo, @redod, @mercedesnegron, @kolapse, @dhowell, @garyvee, @jasoncalacanis, @wiltonv, @lbenitez

If you already twitter and would like to leave some suggestions put them right there in the comments.

1. Opera Mobile 9.5 Beta

Recently available OEM with a lot of phones, this browser is easily the best one available for WinMo by leaps and bounds. The current Internet Explorer Mobile bundled with the 6.1 release, falls short of delivering a usable browsing experience by ignoring the site developer’s intentions and instead over-imposing standardized style and formatting rules to arguably deliver a better mobile experience. Most of the time it fails miserably.

Opera saw this opportunity to deliver a much better user experience. Pages load as they would in a regular browser following style rules and even loading many javascript solutions. Zooming in and out of a page is as simple as double clicking the area to zoom in on and double clicking again to zoom back out. This version brought tab functionality to WinMo through a handy pop-up toolbar at the bottom of the screen also used for stop and back functionality. It is definitely a resource hog so don’t even try on older phones, loading sites takes up tons of memory and tabbed browsing doubles it with each new page.

It should be getting prompt competition as Microsoft has announced a new IE mobile with the upcoming WinMo 6.5 which brings many of the above mentioned innovations as well as Flash support and lower memory usage. Microsoft has big shoes to fill, and the current track record doesn’t favor it in the least. For now Opera is still king of this hill.

2. TinyTwitter

The twitter mobile page already does a great job of mobilizing their micro-blogging service, but for those of us who need additional functionality while twittering from the road Tiny Twitter is a must.

First, it loads all recent posts from people you’re following quickly and seamlessly, if you leave it open it’ll update in the background but if you’re a resources nut, as I am, you’ll probably tell it to shutdown completely when not in direct use. Easy menu tools let you post, reply, send direct messages, and look at a single user’s posts, within the same minute.  It is lightning fast and easy on the phone’s memory reserves. It even uses it’s own link shortener automatically in all posts which is a definite plus.

On the downside, you can’t search for and follow people, links from tweets are replaced by a footnote-like [1] which refers to a menu item, not clearly marked as something that would be assigned to that particular functionality, where the link actually resides. There is also no pasting into the posting field which particularly stinks when trying to link to urls with funky formatting. Otherwise it’s a fantastic app and by far the best for this platform.

3.Dashwire

This thing is both fantastic and a new discovery. What it does is backup your phone to a cloud server where you can retrieve or share that content as you see fit. This thing backs up EVERYTHING, well not everything but: call history, text messages, contacts, pictures and videos, ringtones, and browser bookmarks. The great thing is that should you lose your phone everything you might need is online and available from anywhere.

It also has little things that are greatly appealing. Should you have a Skype account you can call your contacts directly from the site. Did you have a pic associated with a contact? Already loaded. Continuous texts to one person are organized in a conversation format to which you can reply, from right there. Pics and video can be easily viewed, posted and shared through simple posting tools to third party sites like Facebook, twitter and Flickr. It’s very complete, really, check it out.

4.GoogleMaps

Where I live I rarely get lost, I’ve lived here my entire life and I have an uncanny sense of direction. Every once in a while though I’m forced to go to a spot with weird directions through badly labeled side roads. This app has merged perfectly with my phone’s GPS to deliver some of the best directions I have ever gotten, coupled with Google search for restaurants and points of interest it’s the only GPS I’ll need for most situations. Only 2 things I’d like to add to it are voice recognition and spoken directions.

Oh also with location services you can broadcast your location to the web for later viewing. If you’re the type that loses phones, updating your location frequently might help the search in future situations.

5. Qik

Ever needed to share something quickly with an inordinate number of people? Qik let’s you stream whatever it is that’s going on around you LIVE straight from your phone. Friends, family or anyone can then log onto http://qik.com/YOURUSERNAME and take a look at whatever you phone is looking at. Streaming usually has 4 or 5 seconds of delay depending on your connection, which considering what you’re doing is amazing. Two additional things that really set this thing apart for me are the live chat, which you can see on your phone screen and respond to real time, and the fact that it stores the video as you’re streaming it, which is fantastic as evidence of anything noteworthy that might happen randomly while you’re out in the world.

That’s it for WinMo, there’s a couple of also rans such as moBlog which has been previously reviewed here, and Pocket Podcasts, but for integration, features, and general awesomeness, these top 5 are my top 5.  What are yours?