Pixelated Opinions

Add Twitter Profiles To Your iPhone Contacts

Posted on the 24th of June, 2010 - http://tmblr.co/Zy5xKyhaXEN

I posted a note about this on Twitter and it seems I wasn’t the only one who had not seen it before. My instructions weren’t too clear either as I only had 140 characters at a time. Basically, I noticed an option to add Twitter profile information to your iPhone contacts and it can be done a couple of ways.

The first of those is through the Twitter iPhone app. Look up the profile you wish to add to a contact and you should have a screen similar to this:

Tapping the contact card icon in the top right will take you to the following info screen:

You can then tap ‘Create New Contact’ or ‘Add to Existing Contact’ which will bring up your iPhone contacts. You would then choose the corresponding contact if one already exists and there you go. Their Twitter username along with their avatar will now be visible on the contact screen for that person:

The benefit of this technique is that tapping the Twitter username on a contact like that would open up their Twitter profile within the Twitter app. A possible downside of this though, is that it will also pull in their Twitter ‘short bio’ information too and add that as a note.

The other method of adding the information just involves adding a label to the URL field when editing a contact. You want to choose to edit a contact, then tap the label on the URL field. This will take you to the following page:

You can then tap ‘twitter’ at the bottom if it exists or choose ‘Add Custom Label’ and enter it there. After that, you want to add the Twitter username into the URL field. You should use the following convention so that it links the profile with the Twitter app and will open it when tapped:

“twitter:@yourtwitterusernamehere”

Enter that into the URL field and save your contact. The info will now link to the Twitter app but note that doing it manually, you won’t have their avatar or bio pulled in.

That’s about it. A nice, simple feature that it seems not everybody knows about!

My Follow Yearly Decision

Posted on the 14th of May, 2010 - http://tmblr.co/Zy5xKyZhlwk

Earlier on, I recommended a group of people to follow on Twitter. This is typical and happens mostly on each Friday of the week.

The difference with my recommendation is that it was for the year, not the week.

At first glance, this may seem like a long time to limit my recommendations to, especially based on the immediacy of Twitter but my choices were not based on a weeks worth of content. Publishing a list of names for other people to follow isn’t something I take too lightly and so picking people weekly seems pretty pointless. Somebody could post a couple of decent links one week and a load of useless rants the next - Not something I want to endorse to my followers.

Basically, it takes a while to build up a relationship with people and it’s only those people I would recommend to others. I have plenty of acquaintances online but only a few that I would refer to as ‘friends’.

That list is a selection of the few.