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Twitter suspends UberTwitter, twidroyd, reinstates them again

February 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Last Friday, the 18th, Twitter suspended two applications for violations of their policies: UberSocial (formally known as UberTwitter) and twidroyd. It never really stated in public what the exact violations were.

In a thread on Quora the CEO of UberMedia (parent company of UberTwitter) Bill Gross states that the problems involved:

  • a third-party service (tmi.me), used to split tweets longer than 140 characters, was posting private messages on a public website
  • UberCurrent (another twitter client of UberMedia, for the iPhone) was changing links that were part of an affiliate program to their own
  • the name UberTwitter

UberMedia has remedied these problems and now is back in business.

I personally used UberTwitter until I started getting error messages that just said “Forbidden”. Switching to the “official” Blackberry client cured the issue. But I wasn’t the only one using UberTwitter. A lot of celebrities such as Lance Armstrong were using it, and went silent over the weekend.

I’m not sure if I’ll switch back to UberTwitter. That, and the fact that Twitter can suspend clients in a heart beat, shows once again the danger of building your business on another company’s platform. Whether that’s Twitter, or Apple, or Google, or Microsoft…

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Digg v.4 preview

July 13, 2010 By 2 Comments

I just got my invite to join in the alpha preview of Digg version 4. The new Digg is a huge improvement over the old version, in that you can now concentrate on what your friends digg, instead of what everybody in the world diggs. This is reflected in the new home page, which focuses much more on the social aspect of Digg.

The center of the page is taken up by the stories being dugg by your friends. The right side bar is showing the top stories as dugg by your friends. And your friends can also be people you have interest in or whose opinion you respect (think of for example the old Screen Savers cast – Leo LaPorte, Patrick Norton, Martin Sargent, and oh yes, Kevin Rose…).

It looks great, and hopefully I’m not breaking any non-disclosure agreements by posting about it. If you want to sign up for the new Digg, head over to new.digg.com and put your name on the list.

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Foursquare starting with private beta for Blackberry

January 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment

foursquare_logoChristmas weekend Foursquare started with the private beta for their Blackberry client. There are about a 1000 beta testers at this time, according to Foursquare.

The current beta is geared towards trackball Blackberries – the Storm is working, but the app is not using all of the options a Storm has (touchscreen, tilt functionality, etc). The final version will be using the full Storm functionality according to Foursquare.

There are several enormous benefits for Blackberry users. I found the mobile site at times very frustrating:

  • I kept moving around between cities, even while I was checking in.
  • The login itself failed sometimes even though I was typing in correct username and password (I think it was related to which login I used – the normal one on the main page or the mobile one)
  • If the app knows what city I’m nearest, and it can show the location of my venue on a map, why can’t it determine the location of where I am automatically?

The mobile app will show you on check-in what venues are closest. If none match, you can search for a venue by name. I don’t think the beta has the option to add a venue yet.

When one of your friends checks in, you get an alert from the Foursquare app (provided it’s running in the background). It shows the venue name, friend and any shout, and allows you to pull up more info or close the alert.

The new app looks like it’s taking care of some of the problems (logging in!) and adds new functionality (the alert), but still needs to address some of the location check-in hassles. I’m looking forward to the final version, especially if that version has specific Storm support.

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