Here's Some Ads with Your Apps

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Twitter:

With our most recent app updates, Promoted Accounts are now in Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android. And in the coming weeks, we’ll begin introducing Promoted Tweets in the timeline on these mobile apps. Initially, a small number of users may see Promoted Tweets near the top of their timelines from brands they already follow.

This isn’t really a surprise. It was only a matter of time since promoted tweets started happening on the website.

My question is how long until third-party apps have to include promoted tweets?

'Missing the Surprise'

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Stephen Hackett on the 24/7 rumor cycle:

In the world of 24-hour news, Twitter accounts and blurrycam photos, it’s hard to be surprised by much anymore.

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Without these stories, the Apple new cycle would be much slower, and many sites would have far fewer page views.

But the events would be a lot more fun.

Mountain Lion’s announcement was a complete surprise, and I have to say, it really was fun.

With the iPad 3 announcement, I already know my twitter feed will be filled with “that’s it?” and “it doesn’t do [insert asinine feature]!”.

Sigh.

iPad Event Set for March 7

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iPad Event Invitation

Looks like we’ll be seeing a new iPad next week. An event has been scheduled for March 7 at 10:00 am Pacific in San Francisco.

I’d be shocked if the new iPad didn’t have a retina display.

'TV is Broken'

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Another great story by Patrick Rhone, this time about how Cable TV is utterly broken, especially in the mind of a young child:

When the commercials are over, it is some live action teen show. She is not impressed.

“Can I choose?”, Beatrix asks. She’s still confused. She thinks this is like home where one can choose from a selection of things to watch. A well organized list of suggestions and options with clear box cover shots of all of her favorites. I have to explain again that it does not work that way on television. That we have to watch whatever is on and, if there is nothing you want to watch that is on then you just have to turn it off. Which we do.

I then do what I should have simply done in the first place. I hook up the iPad to the free hotel wifi and hand it to her. She fires up the Netflix app, chooses a show, and she is happy.

This, she gets. This makes sense.

Read the whole thing. There’s a part about his daughter’s first exposure to ads and how frustrating it is for her (and as far as volume goes, frustrating for Patrick). This experience is part of why I ditched Cable TV nearly two years ago. My three year old has no idea what traditional television is like. His idea of television is the on-demand experience of using our Apple TV to stream from Netflix or iCloud.

iMessage Notification Overload

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Since the Messages for Mac beta came out, it’s become even more annoying when receiving a message sets off alerts on three devices.

Graham Spencer at MacStories has a great idea for handling iMessage overload with multiple devices:

Whilst the ability to change the text tone (and ringtone) on a per-contact basis is really cool (and can be used for a number of other purposes), perhaps there should be another way to control message notifications differently — especially now that iMessage is bundled in iChat, and may lead to an increased number of messages sent to iOS devices. Specifically I’m talking about muting specific message conversations. This would allow me to mute the message thread that has all of the MacStories members, but still receive notifications from Federico, in case he urgently wanted me to cover something.

Apple could easily implement the option inside the Messages app, simply displaying a mute icon next to each message thread when in the ‘Edit’ mode. Just like changing the text tone on a per-contact basis, this power-user option wouldn’t make the UI messy, because it would only appear in the ‘Edit’ screen. That way, users could choose between completely muting on a per-contact basis or on a per-message thread basis — all whilst still receiving notifications for your other messages.

Be sure to click through and check out his mock-up of what such a system would look like. It is simple and elegant. The only thing I would add is that muting a thread would push the mute setting to all devices via iCloud, so I don’t have to go around to all my devices to toggle it.

'Microsoft's Biggest Miss'

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Patrick Rhone shares a conversation between himself and his wife about Microsoft Office:

To my clients, Microsoft Office was a “must have” no matter how much I tried to convince them otherwise. And I tried very hard for a while before even I just finally gave up. If a client told me they had to have it I just nodded along and told them what to get and where. They were as sure as the sun rises that, without Office, they would not be able to work, open attachments, write letters, anything. They had to have it.

Then, she explained, the iPhone came. There was no Office. People got things done. Then the iPad came. There was no Office. People got things done. Android came. People got things done. All of those things that they, just a couple of years ago, were convinced they needed Office to do. They got them done without it. And thus, the truth was revealed.

I haven’t had Office installed on my Mac since graduating college in 2007. Even then, I rarely used it since iWork’s debut back in 2005. Today, I do nearly all my writing in plain text in Byword. Otherwise I reach for iWork.

¶ When Alliance Becomes Reliance

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When the iPhone was released, there was a lot of love between Apple and Google. They were like Batman and Robin, a dynamic duo.

Needless to say, since Google started down the path of Android, the alliance has been broken. And now, Apple has developed a reliance on Google for some of its core iOS apps — namely Maps and YouTube.

Of the two of those, Maps is the most prominent. To say iOS would be at a disadvantage without Google Maps would be an understatement. But what is the alternative? Form an uneasy alliance (and another reliance) on Microsoft’s Bing? I don’t think so.

Apple has acquired a couple mapping companies over the past few years. And we’ve seen a trend of Apple pulling things it considers essential a little closer under the umbrella. For instance, designing its own A4 and A5 chips, and iCloud, which is surely pulling some folks off of syncing their data through Google.

And then there are things that are inessential. When a service isn’t essential, Apple seems to have no problem integrating with other services that do something very well. Take the YouTube app, for instance. Sure, it is built-in, but that doesn’t mean it is permanent. That app could easily disappear entirely, be renamed and refocused on Vimeo, or be rolled into the Videos app and offer users a choice of YouTube or Vimeo. It isn’t like Google couldn’t roll out their own YouTube app or just direct people to their mobile site.

We saw more evidence of the breakdown of Apple’s reliance on Google with the OS X Mountain Lion developer preview. As I saw of Daring Fireball, Pocket-lint talked to Apple about the new Share Sheet:

Most interesting of the three is the inclusion of Vimeo over YouTube, a choice that is bound to give the professional video-sharing site a boost in awareness and audience numbers, but also leave users wondering why no Google support from day one?

When asked why there was no YouTube support at the moment in the developer preview, Apple told Pocket-lint: “We have Vimeo, and we don’t have YouTube.”

If you ask me, Vimeo has a much better experience anyway.

It is clear to me that Apple is slowly excising Google’s prominence from their two operating systems. I am confident one of the main features of iOS 6 will be an overhauled Maps app that no longer relies on Google. I expect Maps to become developed fully in-house by Apple.

Mountain Lion is embracing Vimeo over YouTube, and it wouldn’t surprise me if iOS went that way, too.

The alliance ended years ago. Soon, the reliance will be over.