Twitter Takes You Shopping with @Earlybird
Twitter recently announced a new service that will deliver information on exclusive offers, previews, and events from select advertising partners to Twitter users. Called, @earlybird, the advertising project is simply a Twitter stream operated by the microblog that will send out exclusive, limited-time offers and deals every day.
Twitter has not announced any official partners yet, and at the time of this writing @earlybird had only one tweet announcing the new service.
If you want to take advantage of the exclusive deals, all you have to do is start following @earlybird from your Twitter account, and the daily deals will appear in your update stream. If you’re not interested in using Twitter, you could also check to see what’s been announced by visiting twitter.com/earlybird. However, it’s unclear if you’ll have to use your Twitter account to receive the special offers, as terms and conditions for each offer will be set by the advertising partners and not Twitter.
New Twitter Client Highlights Android’s Fragmentation
Twitter’s unveiled its first official application for the mobile Android operating system and, a boon to developers everywhere, Google is planning to open-source the application’s code. The move will allow interested parties to develop their own augmentations to the app that tap into Twitter’s various APIs, giving rise to new features for keeping tabs on everyone’s up-to-the-minute updates.
Or, at least, almost everyone. The Twitter application only works on version 2.1 of the Android OS or higher. According to eWeek, that restricts the application to three mobile devices: the Motorola Droid, Google Nexus One, and the HTC Incredible.
If you take a look at Google’s Platform Versions chart for Android—based on a 14-day period ending April 12, 2010—the fragmented picture of the various Android versions gets a little crazier. As it stands, only 27.3 percent of all Android users would even be able to install Twitter for Android to begin with.
We’ve reported on the fragmentation in the Android market previously, based on advertising served across Admob’s network. Whereas previously, Android 1.5—or Cupcake—ruled the scene, the emergence of versions 1.6 and 2.x of the operating system have split the user base into three competing sections.
Android at Home on Twitter
Analysis: Twitter arrives on Android phones and winningly delivers the goods.
A couple of weeks ago, when Twitter announced that it would soon release an official Twitter app for Android phones, I fantasized that the company was going to port Loren Brichter’s miraculous Tweetie Twitter for iPhone to Android. It didn’t. But it’s done something pretty pleasing on its own terms: It’s released a really nice original (and fre) Twitter app for Android. For now, it’s replacing the very-respectable-but-not-spectacular Seesmic as my Android Twitter client of choice.
The best thing about Twitter for Android is the user interface. It’s arguably a little on the twee side: the Twitter bird is everywhere, there are animated clouds, and trending topics joggle up and down. But overall, it looks really attractive, it’s nicely intuitive, and everything’s legible — virtues which are never a given on the Android platform. (Twidroid Pro and TweetCaster are powerful Twitter clients for Android, but they make my eyeballs hurt.)
Twitter for Android’s most interesting feature is its contact syncing: You can meld your Twitterfriends with your Android contact list, merging photos and other information and putting links to tweets in Android’s contact list. (The program lets you choose between bringing all the people you’re following on Twitter into the Android contact list, or just syncing the people who are already there.) The client also supports geolocation and lists, has a widget, and is generally pretty full-featured with one notable exception: It doesn’t support multiple accounts.
Twitter Acquires Tweetie
Twitter has just announced that it acquired Tweetie, the very popular and highly polished Twitter application for the iPhone . The application will now be called “Twitter for iPhone” and will drop from $2.99 to free, with developer Loren Brichter (who makes up the one-man startup Atebits) joining the Twitter mobile team. Twitter also plans to launch Twitter for the iPad, which Brichter will be involved with.It’s a move that manages to be both jarring and unsurprising at the same time. Unsurprising, because Twitter investor Fred Wilson recently wrote that Twitter developers needed to stop “filling holes” in Twitter’s product and instead build entirely separate businesses. And just this morning, Twitter launched an official Twitter for BlackBerry application, so another mobile application shouldn’t come as much of a shock. And yet, the iPhone is the platform with the most robust Twitter presence, and Twitter has no doubt been benefiting from the contributions of these developers.