Tag Archives: echofon

Twitter is missing out on the app up sell

April 13th, 2010

Twitter has rolled out its advertising platform called Promoted Tweets. It takes actual tweets from participating brands and pushes them onto the top of relevant search results and shoves them into the stream within third party applications.

Inclusion of this ad system into third party applications is not mandatory but is certainly welcomed by developers that were striving to make a buck on free, ad-supported applications. But, Twitter is missing out on the app up sell.

I use Echofon for both iPhone and Mac. I paid $2.99 for the iPhone application (very much worth it). The Mac application is $20 for the paid, no ads, application and free for the ad-supported application. So far the only ads I’ve seen inside of Echofon for Mac has been these new Promoted Tweets from Twitter’s new ad platform.

Here is where I think Twitter loses. When and if I pay Echofon $20 to remove the ads from the application Twitter doesn’t see a lick of it. They also lose ad impressions because Echofon will not display these Promoted Tweets anymore.

I’m not so sure that Twitter needs to care about this because the number of impressions they can count on from their site, search and stream injection is probably much higher than I could guess and growing steadily. But, I still feel they are leaving a bunch of money on the table somehow.

My Top Sites in Safari

April 12th, 2010

I’m back to Safari. I still love Chrome but Safari’s latest update made it edge out Chrome for speed. Speed, it seems, is the killer feature for me in Web browsers.

Until this latest release the Top Sites page in Safari was too slow for me to find useful. Now, however, it is much faster and I’m liking it very much. I liked Chrome’s New Tab page a lot. However, unlike Safari it wasn’t really all that useful for more than giving you a clickable tile to go to your favorite sites. Safari’s Top Sites page does a bit more.

First, it shows a ‘page-curl white star on blue’ icon to show which pages have been updated since you visited them last. This makes is quick and easy to go to the pages that have been updated rather than checking them yourself. Second, Safari allows you to choose how many sites show up on this page. Chrome does not. Depending on your screen size you can choose between Small, Medium and Large tiles for each site. Small is more, large is less.

Third, but not necessarily specific to the Top Sites page, Safari allows you to search your history in a visual way right from the Top Sites page itself. As you type in your search query a coverflow like window shows you a thumbnail of the Web sites that match it. It makes finding pages you’ve been to in the past much, much easier than in Chrome.

So, for now I’m back to Safari.

My Top Sites in Safari are (from left to right and down) this site, my WordPress admin, Twitter (although I rarely use this because I use Echofon so it may be replaced soon), Facebook, Gmail, Instapaper, Tumblr, 37Signals Launchpad, Flickr, Viddler’s Recently Uploaded page, GitHub and Google Reader.

Switching from Tweetie for Mac to Echofon

March 9th, 2010

This should come as no surprise to those of you that follow me on Twitter but I’ve switched from Tweetie for Mac, which hasn’t seen an update for months, to the oft updated Echofon.

Tweetie for Mac still has a few standout features that draw me to using it – but any software that runs on a public social service that isn’t updated in months tends to fall behind rather quickly. Echofon keeps up.