Alternatively bluetooth can be used, but incurs the bluetooth bottleneck penalty like other mobile phone tethers. USB allows the full 3G. I’m also partial to leaving bluetooth and wi-fi off to conserve battery life.

So basically you plug in USB and immediately the network connection becomes active. Dead simple. No configuration and no dead phone battery.

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It was April 6th, 2008 that I posted How to post images to Twitter and Flickr at the same time from an iPhone. It has been one of the more popular posts on this blog.

Flickr now makes it possible to post to Twitter directly via an emailed photo AND via Blog This. Their integration removes the need for TwitPic, and arguably SnapTweet too (though SnapTweet is faster than using Blog This and can be used for multiple images at once).

Images are posted to Twitter with Flickr’s new flic.kr URL shortener.

Here’s how to get set up:

1. Visit Flickr’s beta testing group’s page (actually, this step isn’t necessary, but if you run in to problems, their page is the best resource).
2. Associate your Twitter account with your Flickr account here. It leads you through the process and uses OAuth, a safer mechanism than providing your password.
3. You will be provided with a second special email address to send images to. If your main Flickr image email address is example42test@photos.flickr.com, your Flickr+Twitter email address will be example42test2twitter@photos.flickr.com.
4. Send away!

Photos sent to your primary Flickr image address will be processed as normal (not submitted to Twitter). Photos sent to your new 2twitter version will be processed and then immediately posted to Twitter. Your tweet will consist of [subject_line] [url], with the [url] being Flickr’s shortened flic.kr url.

Example.

After signing up for the Twitter integration you also get a new Blog This addition when viewing a single image. Clicking Blog This brings up the option to post an existing image directly to Twitter. You can post your own, as well as other Flickr users, images via this feature. Very powerful.

Age Demographics from Quantcast – Twitter.com

On Wednesday my wife and I were out at Flavor by Thai Pepper, enjoying some insanely good food and drink. Two conversations took place in adjacent booths, too loud to ignore.

In the booth behind Galina a group of late-twenty-somethings laughed loudly about replacing the contents of a box of chocolates with rocks and giving it as a gift (WTF?!) Behind me, a senior couple dropped the “T” word.

You don’t usually hear random people, especially outside of the tech community, drop Twitter in conversation. However, that’s been changing…

“Twitter? What’s that?” she asked, laughing.

“It’s this web site where you answer a question, ‘What are you doing right NOW?’ – You send a message on your phone, ‘I’m standing in line for a latte’ to everyone.” he described, emphasizing NOW.

She said she was fearful of a greater and greater generational gap forming, to which he disagreed and assured her they could keep up.

Their convo reminded me of a post by Zena Weist, in which she unscientifically found the average age to be ~37. My own findings were similar but I didn’t keep track of demographics.

Most folks on Twitter are not in the high-school contingent, and judging by more scientific methods the average age is indeed in the mid-thirties. 48% fall in to the 18-34 range, but 21% are over 50. That’s a huge difference compared to Facebook and MySpace having only 8% being over 50.

Don’t let age come between you and your tweets…

Follow @sol on Twitter

From Quantcast (Twitter):

Facebook:

MySpace

Quick Links to the streams:

• Flickr Photostream
• Twitter
• Utterz

My plan was to Twitter my progress and TwitPic/Flickr the pics out to my followers. But I woke up at 3am from a caffeine rush and a thought of typing for an hour becoming a nightmare – and boring. Utterz.com, a service doing pretty slick mashups of audio/video/text/photographs/etc, while harnessing APIs from pretty much every popular social networking service, caught my eye (more on Utterz later).

Here’s the day – check the Flickr photostream and the Utterz links below for my audio commentary while I running…

1. Lined up and ready to go
2. Started!
3. Mile 1
4. Mile 2
5. Mile 3
6. Live music between mile 3 and 4
7. Mile 4
8. Mile 5
9. Passing Ed Rendell, governor of PA
10. Mile 7
11. Mile 9
12. Finished!

About Utterz: You start an utter by calling or emailing. Either one initiates it. After that, you have 10 minutes to add more content to the utter. Utterz automatically adds audio from a call or content from an emailed pic/video/audio/text to create an utter similar to what I created above. The call-in feature (dial, press 2, talk, hang up) is extremely simple.

Now, none of the above would be impressive except that Utterz.com is doing it right. This is how services today are supposed to work. Utterz is tied in to all the social networking and blogging services. Any new utter is announced on Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, or even your WordPress/Blogger/MoveableType/etc blog (hosted or self-hosted – COOL!)