Hasta La Gadget!

A new iPhone Twitter application, called Qweeter, offers a pretty radical new way to work. It is always ready, without having to launch the app. Instead, you slide your finger down from the top of the iPhone’s screen and you drag down a translucent HUD, and at the same time up slides a keyboard. It looks fantastic. The problem is that, because it runs in the background, you need a hacked, or jailbroken, iPhone to run it.

The video shows the other features, although really you should probably stop it after the first 40 seconds if you don’t want to take and early siesta. Qweeter taps into the application which is already running and can then add that information to your tweet. For instance, drag down the HUD while listening to music in the iPod application and hit the menu button. You can choose to insert the current playing song title into the tweet.

This works with Safari, too, adding a link, and with YouTube to share the URL of the current video. Qweeter is focused on posting. To read tweets, you keep using your current favorite client, which can be launched from within Qweeter.

Qweeter also works to update your Facebook status, if anyone out there actually still uses the Facebook. Qweeter is donationware and is available for the Cydia application directory on jailbroken iPhones.

Product page [Efiko. Thanks, Tunji!]

The blogs are buzzing over some tweets from a Twitter account run by the Office 2010 team, noting what looks like the outright announcement of a Zune phone. Something doesn’t feel right.

First, the tweets:

June 2009 will be an important month for Zune lovers.

Naturally, this got some other Twitterers a little excited. The followup:

New product launch, that’s all I’m allowed to say. Hold off from buying an iPhone/Pre. 🙂

Well, that’s a pretty clear statement: Don’t buy any of these popular phones, because we’re releasing a product soon. Wow?

Granting that this is a Microsoft-run Twitter and that the announcement is well-informed, here’s what it probably means: Microsoft could be offering up a combination of a Zune phone reference design and combination Windows Mobile/Zune software to device manufacturers, come June. But until these errant Tweets are addressed by someone who we know can speak authoritatively for MS (not some low-level marketing minion), this is about as convincing as any of the other countless Zunephone/Pink “reports” we’ve heard to date—that is to say, mildly.

Mainly, it’s the source of these rumors that bothers me. The info comes from a Twitter account that claims to be connected to Office 2010 The Movie, a Microsoft advertising page promoting the next version of MS Office. Thing is, I can’t find a link to this Twitter page anywhere on office2010themovie.com, nor can I find mentions of @officethemovie by any other notable Microsoft Twitter accounts. It is linked! Hmm.

There’s plenty more to be suspicious of. The Twitter account is brand-new, and their limited tweets regarding Office have been strange:

Office 2010 will include Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks integrated right into Word. That’s just a hint of what’s to come!

Social networking in Word? Not to mention that half of these Tweets were posted through Tweetie, a Mac client.

Beyond these superficial oddities, there’s a conceptual problem. Why would MS allow a Zune phone announcement to leak through a low-profile, unconnected Twitter account, especially when such an announcement runs directly counter to the company line?

UPDATE: This Twitter account is link to from the OfficetheMovie website, but at best that makes the Twitter account the official mouthpiece of a part of the marketing team for a Microsoft product with little-to-no relation to the Zune project, not an infallible voice of the Zune division, much less the company as a whole. It’ll be interesting to see how this is dealt with when Redmond wakes up. [Neowin]

Two London marathon runners documented their cardiovascular treks in real-time, and they didn’t need a camera crew to follow them.

CNN news producer Peter Wilkinson and Latitude Group CEO Alex Hoye stood out among 35,000 runners at Sunday’s London Marathon — in the digital world, at least, where they tweeted their progress with their cellphones.

“To you’se enjoying marathon w/ a beer, a) chers! b) cam u shield your beverage as I pass for 9 more mls? Mi 17 http://twitpic.com/4173o,” tweeted Hoye with his iPhone.

Launched in 2006, Twitter is quickly gaining momentum in the Web 2.0 universe. Though its core premise is simply to answer the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less, many Twitter users have thought outside the box when answering that question. One of the most significant incidents involved November’s deadly Mumbai attacks, which were documented tweet by tweet.

Wilkinson and Hoye’s “tweet-a-thon” is a light-hearted example of creative tweeting; the two even managed to raise money for charity via Twitter. Both runners’ tweets were ridden with typos and juvenile abbreviations, but could you do any better during a 26-mile marathon?

“Raising the pace now nearly there twittering really given me something to take mind off running feels more like a car journey are we there yet?” tweeted Wilkinson near the end of the race. “One mile to go”

Hoye, whom Twitter fans dubbed “the Twunning Man,” told Wired.com he wasn’t even planning to tweet his run; the idea occurred to him when he saw amusing spectacles from the race that he thought would be interesting to share, such as a runner dressed up as a rhino.

“My biggest fear was it would be boring —  mile 1: running; mile 2: still running,” Hoye said. “But I gave it a try and people were talking about it on mile 9, retweeting it, and I said fuck it. And the great thing is, every mile you have to get your milestone of what you’re going to tweet. You have to think of something mildly amusing every mile.”

Wilkinson completed the race first at 3 hours and 30 minutes, and Hoye finished at 5 hours and 12 minutes. However, it’s worth noting Hoye’s tweets were more entertaining thanks to his pictures — so at least he wins the “Twunning” race.

Photo: Alex Hoye/Twitpic

Via Susan MacTavish’s Best Tweets [Twitter]

We’ll be honest, we’re always on the lookout for faster and better ways to annoy our Twitter followers with hopelessly mundane status updates, and this brain-control interface from the University of Wisconsin’s Adam Wilson seems to be the perfect to get all Scoble on it with a minimum of effort — you think it, you tweet it. Okay okay, we kid — it’s actually just the usual brainwave-control setup you’ve seen everywhere, and the average user can only do ten characters a minute, but think of the potential, people. Soon everyone will know that you are “Walking on sidewalk, LOL” almost the second you think it, and all it will take is a mindreading cap paired with a sophisticated computers running an advanced signal processing algorithm connected to the massive infrastructure of the internet via a multibillion-dollar mobile broadband network. That’s progress. Video after the break.

[Via Hack A Day]

Continue reading Twitter-brain interface offers terrifying vision of the future

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Twitter-brain interface offers terrifying vision of the future originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Apr 2009 22:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When we got wind of Cisco’s $590 million acquisition of Flip Video-maker Pure Digital, we immediately came to grips with the fit. After all, Cisco’s been dying to pull another Linksys for some time now, and what better to expand its consumer electronics presence than with a cheap-o camcorder that’s ripe for the addition of WiFi. Bigwig (and Pure Digital founder) Jonathan Kaplan recently sat down to talk about the product’s future, and unsurprisingly, he definitely mentions the integration of Cisco’s “strengths” into the handheld camcorder. Furthermore, he’s hoping that an entity as large as Cisco can get the Flip Video line overseas, and he’s also quite big on “building the brand.” The takeaway? Don’t be alarmed when a WiFi-equipped, streaming-capable successor hits the scene at CES 2010, complete with automatic upload-to-YouTube functionality.

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Pure Digital founder talks of Flip Video’s future originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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