Since the rise of Twitter and the associated “real-time web”, much attention has been paid to how real-time search could perhaps pass conventional search results in usability and relativity.  I’ll leave this debate to the blogosphere and social media anthropologists, but I do want point out one fact: searching Twitter on the mobile platform leaves a lot to be desired.

That is, until Taptu embraced Twitter as a search type.  Using our mobile search engine crawlers and search algorithms, we index Twitter and therefore are the perfect solution for searching Twitter on the mobile web.  Also, in our upcoming iPhone/iPod Touch application you can narrow your search to Twitter content as well, making our iPhone app an ideal way to find Twitter search results on your iPhone.

Searching Twitter in Taptu Mobile Search

To find your Twitter search results in Taptu mobile search, go to Taptu.com on your mobile and search for any term you want.  Then, in the upper right, click “more>>” and chose Twitter to narrow down your search and only show Twitter search results.  The search page will refresh with the Tweets that contain the search term(s) you input.

As an added bonus, using our sharing methods, if you’d like to share your search results with your friends via Twitter, Facebook, SMS, or Email, you can do that the same way you always have.

Other Options Exist, But Lack

Yes, Google does some indexing of Twitter search results in their desktop search experience, but these Twitter search results on the Google mobile site are indiscernible from the other relevant search results and don’t show up in a few tests I tried on my Nokia devices and Apple iPhone.

Also, there is the conventional Twitter search (formerly Summize), but this page and the associated search results are not formatted or optimized for browsing on your mobile screen and over your mobile data connection.

Becoming Your Mobile Search Machine

We’re working hard to cover all the areas of search you want on your mobile.  We already cover photos, entertainment, sport, movies, travel guides, and Wikipedia, but we’re constantly looking out to become your mobile search machine.

What areas would you like us to go with our searching technology to make our service more useful?  Please connect with us on Twitter by messaging @taptu or leave a comment in the comments section.

It’s Spring, a time where flowers bloom and little baby rabbits run around on the grass outside our office. This time of rebirth also brings a fresh new look for Taptu!

We have only just launched a new desktop site and unveiled a new company logo.

As you can see from the desktop site, the iPhone application isn’t yet available for download, but we’ll let you know as soon as it’s ready when you sign up to our (very occasional) newsletter here. We’ll be giving the blog a lick of paint soon too to include the new “squid” logo and some more colour.

We have high hopes for the future and can’t wait to release the app for you to enjoy!

Having attended a number of events lately, I’ve been fascinated by watching how interaction during conferences – formal or informal – have evolved.

“People used to whisper to each other or pass hand-scribbled notes during presentations. Now these notes are going digital on Twitter or via conference-provided chat rooms.

Up until now, this back-channel has been mainly confined to the Internet industry and technology conferences. [...]

So the next time you present at a conference, instead of being confronted by a sea of faces looking at you, you may be phased by a sea of heads looking down at their laptops.”

Laura Fitton, otherwise known as Pistachio, goes on to give tips to public speakers to avoid feeling left out of the conversation.

At events I’ve attended recently, the speakers have encouraged conversation on services like Twitter by using a hashtag (eg. #taptu) which ensures that anyone who uses the tag will see their words on the big screen. Others have used Meebo and similar backchannel services to give people a chatroom in which to interact. It takes very little pre-planning and anyone with a phone in their pocket can usually contribute.

There are huge benefits in contributing to a panel or presentation in this way:

• You can give your two cents without having to wait at the microphone to ask a question
• You can say something fairly trivial, which might not justify putting your hand up to comment
• You have the power to give the presentation some direction – an intelligent presenter will use the feed to get a sense of what does and doesn’t interest the audience, shaping the presentation to focus on the best stuff
• You can hear what others think without whispering or passing notes across the room

While, as Laura suggests, it can be a bit disconcerting to get less eye contact than the presenter might be used to, it’s a wonderful way to communicate how you feel and share thoughts.

Next time you’re listening or giving a presentation, crack out your phone or laptop and interact!

[Image source: Keith Burtis on Flickr]

Earlier this week, I attended an excellent unconference event here in Cambridge called Amplified 09; the objective of the discussion is to encourage innovation, creativity and communication in the UK. One of the most interesting discussions was a review of the Digital Britain report published earlier by the UK government.

Connecting Britain

The Digital Britain report outlines the action plan to get the UK more connected, and one strand in particular caught my interest. It has been criticised for lacking detail and vague commitment to make a difference, guaranteeing a “digital universal service commitment” of 2Mbits/s across the UK – half the current average speed of existing connections. While it’s noble to focus on giving remote areas access, which I assume is what they intend to do, 2Mbits isn’t exciting.

In the same way some countries are bypassing the traditional fixed line connection and jumping straight to mobile phones, could the answer in better broadband be with mobile connections? While we’re behind in countries like Japan where 92% of handsets sold in 2006 (yes two thousand and six) were 3G phones, the move towards faster mobile access is happening here too.

Granted, there are still hurdles to a fully-connected country – namely a need for a stronger infrastructure especially in non-central regions and improved speeds – before it becomes a serious alternative. I do wonder, however, whether the solution will come in the form of a small dongle or integrated SIM slot within a laptop, which can be used regardless of location. The theoretical speeds for mobile connections with HSDPA and HSDPA+ do get pretty sexy.

Free As A… Dongle?

Digital nomads already make heavy use of mobile connectivity, as T-Mobile’s figures show – it has seen its sales of mobile dongles and USB modems rise by 35% between 2nd and 3rd quarters in 2008. While some regions of the UK aren’t yet covered and may take a few years to get usable speeds, wouldn’t it make more sense to have a single provider for connectivity, regardless of whether it’s used in a handset or laptop and regardless of location? I do wonder how long it’ll take to get to this stage.

Personally, my limited experience of mobile broadband has been lukewarm to date but the idea and the opportunities excite me immensely. The freedom of sitting in the middle of a park with my speedy phone or laptop appeals much more than sitting in a cold office, doesn’t it? Would you drop landline connectivity if the quality was good enough? I think I just might.

Twitter, the very popular micro-messaging service, made an error that has been complained about in social media circles very heavily.  As announced on their blog, Twitter altered the way they handle @replies.  For those unaware, @replies are a mechanism for targeting a message at a person in a semi-public manner.

Don’t Piss Off Your User Base

What are @replies all about?  These messages allow you to see what others are saying about you, even if said Twitter isn’t a current follower of your tweets.  In their change, Twitter took away the inherent value @replies provided.

As Twitter got started, the community used @replies as a way to direct messages at specific users.  The popularity and use of @replies grew rapidly, and Twitter embraced the concept and rolled the idea into a supported service.  So, by supporting the community spawned-feature, Twitter embraced their community.

However, fast forward to recent days and the ’small settings update’, and Twitter has turned their back on the very community that helped build the popularity that carried Twitter to new heights.

The Community Responds

Since the change occurred, Twitter users have revolted.  A quick search on Twitter shows the #fixreplies tag and the associated dissenting messages against Twitter’s move.  Also, today Twitter posted a follow-up message on their blog and took a step backwards as a result of the community’s response.

Lesson Learned, Yet Not Quite Good Enough

However, the latest post and responsive move from Twitter is an olive branch that has not been warmly received.

What’s the lesson here?  If a company provides a service and it is considering making a change that will significantly alter the user experience of your community, engage them first and ask their opinion.   Especially with a conversational tool such as Twitter, where the community will then use the service to complain about the service.

In Cambridge, we recently had our Spring Party.

To celebrate the upcoming release of our iPhone application, we had a fantastic iPod Touch cake.

And in case you were wondering: yes, the cake was as good as it looks!

That is, of course, I was *told* it was really good.  As I’m in the US, I didn’t get to partake in the yummy iPhone baked goods

In the past 24 hours, I’ve had a flurry of new followers on FriendFeed, a network that focuses on aggregating all of your feeds from across the web. I wondered where the sudden influx had come from, and Paul Kane quickly pointed me to FriendFeed’s announcement.

This is their new signup: Three icons recognised universally by anyone who’s ever wasted time on the web. Simple, isn’t it?

While FriendFeed still isn’t a very active part of my daily diet, I can see that it’s gaining more of an audience with every day that goes past. By making both the signup process and the addition of new feeds mindblowingly easy, a new user can feel “at home” in the new network within minutes of joining.

On mobile, stabbing at a small mobile device, using the small gaps of time between getting from location A to B, the importance of the simple signup process is even more significant. For this reason, on the soon-to-be released Taptu iPhone application, we’ve done away with much signup. We ask for the bare minimum information, only when it’s strictly necessary, even though sometimes, there’s a part of us that would love to know more about you.

In a similar attempt to keep it super simple, in creating the signup page for Cambridge Geek Nights – a small local gathering of geeks and geekettes – I chose to have a single, retro-looking text field. In a world of more, More, MORE, it can be difficult to take a few steps back and remember that sometimes, we don’t need to make you type your name and email address!

[Geek Nights were founded in Oxford and, with the help of David, another Taptu team member, I'll be launching the first Cambridge one in June in my spare time. If you're in the area, why not join us?]

Over the past few days, there have been many arguments about the Nokia’s soon-to-be-released flagship device: The Nokia N97.  According to a Forum Nokia post, the N97’s CPU will be an ARM 11 processor running at 434 Mhz.

To compare the N97’s processor speeds, another site has charted competing smartphones including the BlackBerry Bold, HTC Magic and Samsung i8910 with clock speeds ranging in the 500-600Mhz range.

My To Do About Nothing

In my humble opinion, too much is being made about one metric of a mobile handset’s performance.  Depending on the handset’s operating system speed and memory usage, the amount of physical RAM in the mobile device, and many other factors – the Nokia N97 will probably “feel” snappy and efficient to most users.

When evaluating how a customer like or dislikes a phone, CPU speed is likely the last thing most consumer’s list.  Other factors such as onboard features, battery life, and how well the handset’s software meets their needs are far more important to mobile handset shoppers.

Let me tell you from experience on the E71 (which only clocks in at 369Mhz) the E71 is the fastest and most fluid Symbian handset I have ever used.  Activities such as traversing the phone’s menus and launching applications happen very quickly and with minimal delay.

Another benefit to having a lower clock speed handset: the battery will last longer.  This will become quite important as the N97 has onboard Wi-Fi, GPS, a 5MP camera, and a widget-based home screen that will likely stress the battery continually.  Having a power-sipping processor will help to extend battery life.

Time Will Tell

At this point, no one except for those lucky enough to be inside Nokia has even played with an N97.  Therefore,  none of us can really say how the N97 will perform with a lower clock speed processor.

However, when the new Nokia flagship is unveiled in June 2009, we will finally be able to see whether the device performs well enough to be called a “flagship”.