George Chen

More on Twinkle – and why it’s a big deal

I think I’ve figure out an interesting use case for Twinkle (Twitter + location based meta tag). See my post on Nokia Point and Find and similar prototype. Twinkle, in a way, can be used in a very similar fashion – bridging the Real World with information from the cloud.

This example will illustrate the concept:

Last night, I was driving through downtown San Francisco. I created a simple Twinkle powered Tweet ( I said “I am here between Kearney and Broadway.”). No big deal right?

This morning, I drove through the nearby neighborhood, and looked up all the “Near Me” Twinkle Tweets. That Tweet I posted the night before (from a few blocks away) showed up.

The current Twinkle “Near Me” has a minimum radius of 1 mile, but in the future when you are able to drill down, say, 50 ft then you can start leaving very explicit tweets on a landmarks, stores, or restaurants.

There are many obvious features needed before this became truly powerful (i.e. filter by rating, messages’ “rate-of-decay”, or even private location based tweets that act like “invisible graffiti” that only your circle of friends can “see”). Things are getting very interesting indeed…

Twinkle – location + photo sharing for your jailbroked iPhone

There are at least 2-3 different native iPhone Twitter clients out there, and none of them are as interesting as Twinkle.

In short, Twinkle – the unofficial Twitter client for your jailbroked iPhone (that’s a mouth full) adds third party location meta data and photo sharing to your Twitter tweets. It also allows you to look for tweets by other (that are near by) with the same or similar location meta data.

Privacy note: the location meta data are submit to third party Twitter developer Tweetscan, and not officially part of Twitter, so just be aware of that…

The original Twitter has the concept of “location” “L:” as a short-hand for tagging location, but nobody really use it since it’s a pain to enter that by hand. Twinkle solves that problem by hooking into iPhone’s location api (?) and automatically generates that as you create your “Twinkle Tweets”.
With the “enhanced Twinkle Tweets”, you can look for the tweets that are physically around you, say, 5 miles from where you live or work. As an example, I’ve found a few twitters that are in my town (about 20 miles away from San Francisco) that are also testing out Twinkle – these are people I would not be able to look up in the past or would not have bordered with.

For extra credit, you can also attach photo (taken with your iPhone’s camera) to the Twinkle Tweets. To me, it’s like real-time Flickr photo sharing with people within your area. Again, another reminder, the photos are send to Tweetscan / Twinkle and not Twitter.
As I am writing this, Twitter is giving me 403, blank page, etc. Twinkle as a service that piggy back on top of Twitter of course had stopped working. >.>;
This whole “thing” is rather new, and there’s some serious potential… We will see how things are going to go another year from now….

Why They Hate China – by Justin Raimando

Extra credit to Justin since he actually border to research on the historic Mongolian, Han, and Tibetan territorial conflicts. Good stuff!