TheBoyEllis Blog

Momento iPhone App

As a new decade chimes in, the unstoppable leviathan that is social networking continues to provide a vehicle for the millions of people who feel it necessary to inform us all of what they’re up to. Whether it be on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, an incomprehensible number of people are more than happy to provide an intimate (and nearly always hugely dull) account of their daily lives. This always makes me smile, bearing in mind the aforementioned sites’ roots as domains for the terminally geeky.

While I use both Facebook and Twitter regularly, I’m of the opinion that people don’t really give two hoots what I’m having for dinner or where I’m going at the weekend. I struggle to care myself, sometimes.

It was therefore with some delight that I discovered Momento, developed by d3i. This beautifully designed App allows you to create what it refers to as ‘moments’. Daily thoughts, an account of what you’ve been up to… whatever you like, basically.

Where it gets clever is with the way in which Moments are organised. They can be categorised via tags, places, people, events and even a star rating for you to hunt out and reminisce on those good days past.

Key to Momento’s inevitable popularity and the reason it takes pride of place on the first screen of my iPhone is its ability to make diary writing addictive. The simple process of being able to tag entries with the information described above makes it a joy to use and something that you’ll keep coming back to.

Integration with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Last.fm helps ensure that you have a complete, searchable record of your digital account of life.

I’ve never kept a diary, but being fond of writing and somewhat cautious over the publication of my private life on social media networks, Momento has got me right into it. I can jot down whatever I like without the fear of boring people and the handy password entry means no one can read my incompressible ramblings and thoughts.

Furthermore, photos taken are stored against their respective dates, undoubtedly making this App a very handy tool for Photographers.

So, here’s one of the few iPhone Apps that has a genuine longevity factor – Momento. In fact, it’ll probably hold that crown for life, as I suspect it is something that will accompany people for the majority of theirs.

10/10. Go check it out.

One of my biggest mistakes recently was to follow several producer/DJ types on Twitter. Every day, I’m bombarded with tweets informing me that, having woken up at a leisurely 9am, they’re going to ‘have a shower, grab some breakfast and head off to the studio for the day’.

I’m struggling to think of anything else I’d rather do for a living. I really am. Making music and being paid for doing so is about as good as it can get, as far as I’m concerned.

I love my current job, don’t get me wrong, and I’m one of the silent minority who enjoys coming to work; I don’t see it as a chore. That isn’t a disclaimer in case my boss is reading, either.

What depresses me slightly is the path the majority of these guys have taken to musical nirvana, as it is uncomfortably close to my past.

Like me, they have a parent who is a musician. Like me, they took the opportunity to bash around on said parent’s kit. Like me, they fell in love with midi and software such as Cubase at an early age. Like me, they spent an inordinate amount of their youth producing music for themselves.

Unlike me, they kept this up and went on to make a handsome living out of it.

In my late teens I made a very conscious (although difficult) decision to pursue a path in IT rather than music. The latter seemed a little too unattainable, if I’m honest, although that’s code for ‘I was too lazy to bother’. If I’d applied myself, I could have gone to university to study some form of music technology degree, or finance a college course off my own back. Instead, I ended up maintaining a computer network at a window and door component business in Daventry. Rock and roll.

Had I chosen my other path, there would have been significant differences in my personal life, which is worth bearing in mind. It’s unlikely I’d have met my girlfriend and I’d have a somewhat limited social life, as have the likes of Funkagenda, Dave Spoon and Chris Lake. So, perhaps I shouldn’t complain…

Makes you wonder what might have been though, doesn’t it…

Can we finally make Twitter work for business?

Some time ago, I blogged about our company Twitter account. We now have around 160 followers which sounds marginally interesting. Only, it’s not.

The biggest problem is perhaps our name, which includes the word ‘computers’. This has unfortunately invited scores of computer shops, assorted geeks and a plethora of ‘bots’ to follow us. From a business perspective, this is next to useless, as none of these people are potential or existing customers (of which we only have around 5 following us).

We’ve marketed the fact we’re on Twitter. It’s on every e-shot we send out, for example, but it simply hasn’t caught on. Several customers have signed up, only to leave their account untouched, no doubt somewhat bemused at the service’s insistence on asking what they’re up to. I don’t blame them; taking on Twitter from a commercial point of view isn’t an easy decision.

Or is it?

We had a brainwave recently which has transformed the way we use Twitter. As you may know, Twitter publishes RSS feeds for anyone that tweets. RSS feeds are highly useful as they can be incorporated into any website and, as we’ve discovered, locally-installed applications.

Without going into too much detail, we develop software for hotels. One element of this software has always been earmarked as a potential tool to distribute news to our customers. News and, of course, product promotion.

So, our clever technical team very quickly incorporated our Twitter RSS feed into said application. They’ve done it in such a way that the end user has no idea the text they are reading has come from Twitter. It wouldn’t matter if this wasn’t the case, of course, but it looks a little tidier and bespoke as a result. Clicking the links takes them directly the URL within the tweet, not the tweet itself, and we’ve even got a bit clever with dates and such so that only the last seven day’s worth of tweets is displayed and, if none are available, or the internet connection is down, the news section disappears altogether.

I’d encourage any software developer to consider this method of utilising Twitter. The alternative we had was to make our application display a web page, but updating this would be a much more arduous task. In comparison, Twitter can be updated with a couple of clicks and from anywhere, as long as we’ve got an internet connection.

Please get in touch or comment below if you’ve found similar ways of making Twitter work for your business. I’d love to hear from you.

Time for another update.  And there’s not much to update, really.  A colleague of mine has, however, pointed me in the direction of useful couple of sites which others in Twitterland (these Twitisms are getting very annoying, aren’t they) might find useful.  www.tweetburner.com is a very useful URL-shortening service which includes the ability to track clickthroughs and publish new links to users of the site via a short message.  Very handy, and it had an instant affect on the number of visits to the URLs I tested it on.

Secondly, www.twitterfeed.com allows you to Tweet RSS feeds which would be hugely useful for blog/news sections of websites.  I’ll certainly be looking at getting RSS feeds set up for ours to make use of this site.

So that’s it really.  No sales made yet and I have the distinct impression the majority of signs ups from our customers were just that.  Like millions of people out there, they were recommended a Twitter account, dutifully signed up, posted something a long the lines of ‘I’m signing up to Twitter’, spent a moment wondering what on earth it was all about and then got on with their lives.  Need to keep them interested somehow…

Well, it’s been a week or so since we opened our work twitter account and we have 8 followers. Admittedly, two of those are employees and another is a partner … but it’s progress, sort of.

The five followers that are genuine customers have all signed up as a result of an e-shot we sent out and, interestingly, seem to have been intrigued enough to sign up to Twitter to view our updates, as none of them appear to have been Twitter members before.

It’s early days, but I’m encouraged by this initial response. With a little more coaxing I’m sure we can get more on board, but the few that are there will at least benefit from the ease with which you can fire updates to Twitter land.

Whether or not it will become a genuine sales channel remains to be seen…

I’m still unsure as to what Twitter’s merits are for the average human being. “Mark is making a cup of tea”. I don’t think anyone cares what I’m doing. Even I struggle to care at times.

I do seem to have stumbled across a possible use for the networking site today, however. It appears to be a viable marketing channel, allowing businesses to quickly issue news ‘bites’ relating to new product releases and updates. This could prove perfect for our business which is software development. Rather than relying solely on e-shots and – the highly ineffectual – traditional mail shots, a quick ‘Twitter’ will inform any of our followers that we’ve just released a new version of product X. Think about it, what quicker way is there to release information en-masse? Twitter is growing massively by the day and the traffic it can generate is substantial.

It’s early days, but I’ve set up and account and will be informing customers of its existence soon. What is there to lose? Well, within five minutes of the account open we were being followed by Sarah, a girl seemingly content with brandishing the majority of her chest area to internet users and informing us that she is ‘bored and ready to chat’. I didn’t think she’d be particularly interested in the merits of a property management system, and therefore blocked her.

Someone in the office believes Sarah may simply have been a ‘bot’, a non-human entity terrorising cyberspace, as it were. If this is true, and if Twitter is subject to such pointless entities, it could prove to be one downfall.

Breast-brandishing bots aside, I think this could be an interesting experiment. Any ideas on how to make best use of Twitter at work would gladly be received!