It all started earlier today, as a part of my morning routine, I was checking my websites for updated content. And lo, I noticed something particularly odd while refreshing my Twitter feed via iPhone. The site seemed to time out. Repeatedly. Thinking it just a API glitch or something of the sort, I moved on to the Facebook app. Oddly, this would not refresh either.

It seemed a bit strange that both sites would be in-operational simultaneously, so I reset the phone. This did not help. Clearly, I deduced, this must be the fault of AT&T’s, for we all already hate them. Yes, to them must go the blame.

No. All the other sites I tried worked fine. What? How could this be? I checked my home’s WiFi connection. It was operational. And I began to realize the serious, and disastrous reality befallen us this 6th day of August in the year of our Lord, 2009.

Twitter was down. Facebook was down. Together. But how? How could this happen? And I realized… the Internet Apocalypse has commenced.

The sad irony of this tragedy is that we are unable to share the news of the sites being down with the rest of the world due to the sites being down. It is a vicious circle of grief and sadness and evil.

What shall become of us? Without our precious social networking sites available to us society may revert back to its archaic primitiveness pre-dating the Web 2.0 book. It will be like we’re back in 1999! Or worse – we may have to start using MySpace again! ::cue terrifying music::

Let us hope and pray to the Internet gods that they restore our beloved Web 2.0 sites, and with haste. Until then, MG Siegler has compiled a list over at TechCrunch of 15 Alternative Things to Do while Twitter is down.

See you soon. (I hope).

For the uninitiated, Twitter is a microbloggish social network website-mobile phone combo thingamajigger…. Yeah. Basically, it’s a communication tool that connects you with people down the street or across the globe, asking one simple question: “What are you doing?” Of course, as Twitter has exploded with popularity over the past few months, no one feels bound to just that one question. All kinds of conversations happen 24 hours a day spanning countries, races, creeds, religious beliefs, and languages.

The beauty of Twitter is that it has maintained it’s simplicity over the years. There have been a few feature additions to the website, but it is a very few overall. Every day, however, other third-party applications and websites create new, amazing little feature-rich twitter add-ons, plug-ins, and programs to add functionality. And this is what brings us here today.

I’ve been playing around with different Twitter applications for my iPhone. I’ve gone through many of them and settled (as of right now) on two that I’ve seriously been looking at: TwitterFON and Tweetie. Both offer great features: search, profile viewing, easy following and favoriting, easy shortcuts to @replying and DMing, TwitPic integration, etc, etc, etc. They equally provide your basic Twitter functionality that you’d expect quite well.

Each app has it’s own individual pros and cons, though, including:

- Tweetie is slightly more feature-rich it seems. You have the ability to have multiple accounts all within the one app and there is an ability to watch trends and keywords, to name a few.
- TwitterFON, at least from my perspective, is a bit easier to navigate and also presents your content better.
- I like how TwitterFON present the little notification bubbles on your different type of tweets so you know where your new information is. Tweetie does the same thing… kind of. It feels like you have to hunt more in Tweetie for new tweets, and you never know exactly where the old ones end and new ones begin. TwitterFON highlights everything unread for you.
- Tweetie has a superior TwitPic integration, allowing you to view the image alone on the screen when a link is clicked. In TwitterFON, it launches a mini-browser and you have to wait for the TwitPic page to load completely to see the image.
- Tweetie has a “nearby” feature where you can see who’s tweeting geographically close to you using the phone’s GPS.

So what is my decision after playing with them? I think I like TwitterFON more. It just feels better in my hand compared to Tweetie. The screen flows better displaying the content, I feel like I don’t miss anything because you know exactly what’s new and what isn’t. It has all the real features I need for the most part. In fact there is only one thing I think they should really add to seal the deal as the premiere Twitter app for iPhone… multiple accounts. I manage 3 Twitter accounts, and if I could host them all in one TwitterFON app I’d be super happy. I mean, the nearby feature and a TwitPic integration more like Tweetie’s would be nice, but I’d be quite content with justmultiple account access.

Why don’t you try them yourself? You can get TwitterFON for free in the iTunes App Store by clicking this link, or try out Tweetie by clicking here. Tweetie costs only $2.99.

Happy tweeting!

So it’s almost here. We’re leaving Wednesday night for Youth Specialites’ National Youth Worker’s Convention in Pittsburgh. Every year we gather a team from The Bridge and head out to one of the three conventions for a long weekend of training, encouragement, and rest in order to recharge or batteries as we prepare for another year of working with the kids in our program. It’s an amazing event.

This year is a little different for me because I have the privilege of helping YS do some new stuff while there. They tried, for the first time, liveblogging their Sacramento convention earlier this month, and it seems to have been a huge success. Well, during the Pittsburgh convention, I will be part of the liveblogging team helping to cover the event. Think of it as a real-time conversation somewhere between Twitter and a full-fledged blog, with an up-to-date stream of what’s happening that those at home can follow along with. The liveblog host, CoverItNow.com also supports photo and video uploads into the stream.

You’ll be able to follow the liveblog stream at http://nywc.com/live.

I’ll be joining an entourage of fine and talented bloggers from across the country. I don’t actually know who else will be covering the event, but trust me, they are youth workers of the highest quality and caliber.

My goal for the weekend is to also update my own blog, conveniently located right here in this very location, every day, or almost every day. In addition I will, as I have always done, take an obscene amount of photographs. I’d also like to take a lot of HD video there and put together a daily, or semi-daily recap of what is going on… maybe even a convention video when all is said and done. It really depends on how much time I have and where I am located in proximity to the action. And how quickly I can get the high-quality content out. I do also have my Flip Video camera for super quick film to upload, most likely while liveblogging.

Anyway, the convention starts on Thursday (for those taking a Critical Concern Course), of which I am one. We leave Elizabeth at 6pm Wednesday to make the 7-hour trek across Pennsylvania.

More to come soon.

sharing a cell with a twitter addict.

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