Great lessons, too bad I won’t be able to try lesson #10.

Photo copyright iluvpepero

Since Twitter went global, I joined the translator program, helping Twitter to translate its content (not the tweets obviously) in Italian.
Last night while I was translating, one of the strings in my queue caught my attention:

World Cup 2010 Match Report – %{team_a} versus %{team_b}

Of course, the page it pointed to isn’t active yet, so we will need to wait another week to see it. It’s definitely going to be an interesting tool to enrich the game-watching experience.

The Twitter client situation for iPad is still kinda sad. Not a lot of players and not a lot of quality, mostly because not many developers grasped the best way to visualize Twitter on this device.

While waiting for Tweetie Twitter for iPad, I decided to use Twitterrific for iPad, gorgeous design, simple and free. But there is a “but.” It doesn’t come with native support for my favorite picture sharing service: Pikchur. Luckily they offer a way to add your own custom services for media uploads, you just need the end point of the media service URL endpoint and you’ll be good to go.

If you’d like to add Pikchur as well, here is their endpoint:
http://api.pikchur.com/twitterrific

Launch the application and tap on the Compose button in the upper-right corner of the screen. In the window that appears, tap on the camera icon and select “Change Upload Service”. At the bottom of the list that’s displayed, you’ll see “Other…”. Tap that and you see a text field where you can specify the “Media Service URL Endpoint”. Enter “http://api.pikchur.com/twitterrific” and then tap outside the popover window to dismiss it. Done!
Another good thing is that this media end point already supports twitters new echo oAuth, so no need to change any settings when they switch over to oAuth only authentication.

Now I can finally share my pictures and videos on Pikchur, the only problem is that at the moment media are uploaded without a title. It would be nice if Twitterrific passed the parameter “message” so that media services could use it as caption for the picture.

Just updated Tweetie 2 to the new version simply called Twitter. In order to update it I needed to use “update all” from iTunes and sync my iPhone. At first glance you can see they changed the icon (I liked the old one much better) and when you first open the application, it shows you trending topic and suggested users even without logging in.
The same interface is used for the search page as well. I also noticed you can updated your account informations (bio and such) but I’m not 100% sure that this wasn’t possible before.

Last Friday, Atebits launched the new version of their popular iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie 2, which in just one day dominated the Top Paid and Top Grossing charts in the App Store. What can we learn from this?

Keep your interface clean and simple.
Tweetie 2′s interface is really clean and simple, almost as if Apple themself may have had a hand in designing it. Everything is easy to access and erroneous clicks are pretty rare.

Offer what users need, not everything.
For sure, Tweetie 2 doesn’t offer as many options as other clients. Twittelator, just to name one, offers a full array of integrations and functions, but this may only serve to confuse a new user.

Keep it open.
On the other hand, Tweetie 2 gives you the option of using whatever service you want for posting pictures and shortening URLs, which is great!  Now I can use my own URL shortener, and I’m not forced to use Twittelator in order to use, in my opinion, the best picture service around: Pikchur. Actually, if you want to use Pikchur as well, here’s the API ending point you need to insert in Tweetie: http://api.pikchur.com/tweetie

Create good products and people will throw money at you.
Tweetie was a great product, but Tweetie 2 is even better. And when you create such great products, people won’t mind spending $3 for your application. Of course, that doesn’t come without work. You still need great PR, and you have to ensure that your product gets in front of the right eyes (like that of a Mashable or Techcrunch writer). I must say that this doesn’t happen too often; there are several great applications buried in the App Store, but the best ones hardly stay buried forever.

Tweetmeme is a great plugin that makes it easier for your reader to retweet your posts. But, if you don’t have a high number of retweets, especially in the beginning, it might look a little sad seeing all those zeros on your page.

While working on a friend’s WordPress blog, I was asked to remove the number from the Tweetmeme button (in the compact version). Of course this can’t be accomplished from the settings page, so it required little bit of CSS work.

Here’s the code generated by the Tweetmeme WordPress plugin in your post:

<div class="tweetmeme_button" style="float: left; margin-right: 0;"><iframe src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/button.js?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fdavidedicillo.com%2F%3Fp%3D1160&source=
DavideDiCillo&style=compact" height="20" width="90" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe></div>

And here’s the code you need to add to your stylesheet in order to remove the number from the Tweetmeme button:

.tweetmeme_button { overflow: hidden; width: 70px; }
.tweetmeme_button iframe { position: relative; left: -10px; }

For those of you not familiar with CSS, what we’re doing is simply telling the container of the IFRAME (which contains the actual button) to hide everything that goes beyond its borders. We then forced the IFRAME to move 10px to the left, pushing the number outside the container’s borders.

There are several things that I never did like about the URL shortener business.

First of all, you never know how long these services will last. Tr.im’s surrender may lead to the If Tr.im kept their decision to shut down their service, we could have lost millions of links, unless some other company were to buy them out. You could try to use only extremely successful services like Bit.ly, but it will defeat its own purpose in the long run: Bit.ly is already using 5 characters after their URL, not making it that short anymore. If you go with less used services you might have shorter urls but you could end up using a service that, in few months, may be out of business.

On top of that, you are really wasting a lot of “link juice,” vital for ranking better on search engines. Even when you are linking to your own site, if you use these services, you are linking to them. And they can do whatever they want with that link. They can even decide to place your whole site into a frame, adding ugly ads at the top, or their own “toolbar,” like Digg did, without asking your permission; and there won’t be anything you can do about it.

The best solution to all these problems is to have your own shortener. You don’t need to be an expert developer to do it, you don’t even have to be a developer at all. There are several open source scripts and plugins to accomplish URL shortening. Here’s a short list of services I found:

• YOURLS – It’s probably my favorite and the one that will, very soon, power my own URL shortener. It supports custom keywords URLs, it has basic stats and an API. It also has its own WordPress plugin, which can automatically shorten your posts and links.
• Shorty – This URL shortener had a nice-looking admin interface, where you can edit and delete your URLs. It offers simple stats as well.
• PHPurl – Super simple PHP & MySQL script, it offers the option of choosing a custom keyword.
• phurl – If you are thinking of offering your shortener to the public, this script features CAPTCHA and re-CAPTCHA, just in case you fear bots.
• TightURL – This script offers some public protection as well. It checks submitted and accepted URLs against spam databases to prevent abuse by the Bad People of the Internet.

To help those people whose offices blocked search.twitter.com I made this page where they can follow live twitter updates about WWDC and iPhone. I hope it helps.

Update:
Thanks to everybody who visited this post during the WWDC keynote! Time to shut down the Twitter tracker now.