Author Archive

CAL Fire was recently featured on Fire Department Network News for the addition of their Public Information Officer marked SUV. View the video report below, and pay special attention to what PIO Mike Mohler says about his role and activities regarding Social Media:

From the associated article with my own added emphasis:

CAL FIRE’s PIO vehicles are outfitted with Tough Books. Not only can they get information on the call that they are going to, but they can update their Twitter site, blogs and other websites.

Social media plays a large part in the distribution of public information. Many of CAL FIRE’s followers are gathering information from social media before they turn on the news channel or look in their newspapers.

It’s great seeing agencies understand where information distribution is going. Taking the initiative to serve their communities where they are gathering and to use the community as an asset instead of a liability is the direction we all should be headed.

You can read the CAL Fire San Diego Blog, follow them on Twitter, or check out their Flickr Sets which are quite compelling

Recently Twitter made some announcements that are meant to better shape the development focus of its future. One of those announcements was posted on their blog where they made it clear that Twitter is no longer just a micro-blogging service, but rather a communication platform. One result of this change was their internal development of applications, including a mobile client that is available for both iPhone and Android OS smart phones. Besides the fact that this is now the “official” Twitter client for Android, you’re probably wondering what could make it so different from the TwiDroid or Seesmic mobile clients. The truth is, there are quite a few differences!

Functionality & Usability

The home screen is absolutely incredible, and animated! The top level menu breaks the app into the six primary components of the Twitter service: Tweets, Mentions, Direct Messages, Lists, Retweets, and your Profile. Additionally, the home screen animation gives you a glimpse into the Trending Topics list that is easily accessible with an onscreen page flip motion, or for the specific topic a simple tap on it will bring you to a results page.

Sending a tweet is extremely easy, with the input box designed specifically to sit atop the onscreen keyboard without covering over any functionality. This is a small but often overlooked detail that Twitter has addressed, and it’s that type of extra effort spent on the details of the user interface that really sets this app apart as you’ll see from the next feature I’m about to talk about…

Share It All & Push It Good

Twitter has seemingly always played host in a semi-symbiotic relationship with Facebook. Over the years Facebook has adopted many of Twitter’s practices such as the News Feed that was derived from the Twitter Timeline, vanity URLs for their user profiles to mimic Twitter’s user profiles, and of course using the at sign (@) to initiate user tagging in Status Updates similar to Twitter’s user inspired Reply feature.

In the Android app, Twitter finally has the opportunity to “borrow” back with the cornerstone Facebook tenet of sharing. Depending on the other apps installed on your phone, the Twitter app will allow you to share a tweet via G-Mail, Facebook, SMS Messaging, Google Buzz, and ironically itself. Sharing a tweet via the application provides a message formatted like this:

David Konig (@davidkonig) has shared a Tweet with you:

“cnnbrk: Severe weather kills 4 in Ohio. http://on.cnn.com/cEC33d”
–http://www.twitter.com/cnnbrk/status/15561566108

In addition to this sharing capability, the Twitter app also provides built in push notifications. You can set the refresh interval and whether you want to be notified of all tweets, replies, and/or direct messages. Push notification is really a must have in todays communication applications, and surprisingly the Twitter app does not provide this feature on its iPhone version.

Not For The Power User

The one drawback of the Twitter app for Android is that it only allows you to use the application with one account. While this may not seem like a huge drawback to personal users, it does severely limit its use for the power user who is a member of a Social Media Team. Power users will probably still find Seesmic the best app for managing multiple Twitter accounts, but still have the option of using the Twitter app functionality for the account that would benefit most from it.

In Conclusion

The Twitter built application for Android is feature packed and blinged out beyond any other third party developed app. This is an example of building on a vision by merging the gamut of their features into a usable mobile extension of their core service. We can only hope that other services will follow suit for ALL the mobile platforms.