Microblogging drives mobile Internet usage

If you’re in any doubt that adding geotagging to Twitter is a good idea, the latest survey from Novarra has found that microblogging services are driving the use of the mobile Internet.

In the past year, mobile usage of URL shortening services such as bit.ly and tinyurl.com — near-essential for sharing links on Twitter — has leapt by 1,068%, while page views of Twitter grew by 3,500% in the first half of 2009.

VP of marketing at Novarra, Randy Cavaiani, said that Twitter was a great viral tool for exposing consumers to new and interesting content.

These statistics are bound to be encouraging for those pushing uptake of the mobile Internet, and it’s not too surprising that Twitter is particularly popular given that interesting things generally happen when users are mobile.

Increased functionality, such as geotagging, more interesting third-party apps, and more mobile operators opening up Twitter via SMS, should propel Twitter usage even further.

Twitter geotagging: Will you be using the new service?

Do you Twitter from your mobile device while on the go, or do you tend to use the service from the comfort of your home computer?

Twitter’s recent announcement that it has added geotagging capabilities to its API means that we will soon see a number of third-party Twitter applications taking advantage of that.

Geotagging is one of the latest crazes, it seems, with many devices now containing GPS devices and making the task very easy.

Yet, while taking photos and geotagging them some time later has few privacy concerns (assuming you’ve granted permission to share the photos on a service such as Flickr), tweeting from an identifiable location raises some possible concerns.

Whereas manual tweeting means you can be a little vague about your exact location (West London, for example), broadcasting your GPS location means it’s possible for people to track where you are.

In the ideal, friendly world, this is a fantastic feature because it allows you to find your friends and other interesting people.

Without being alarmist, a slightly more sinister world may require some care to be taken. After all, unless you’ve made your Twitter account private, you could be tracked by anyone, and the fact that geotagging happens with each tweet means you can’t even delay revealing your current location.

What do you think of geotagging for tweets? Will you be using the new feature?

WordPress.Com Goes Mobile

With the popularity of the iPhone, BlackBerry devices, and other web-capable smartphones, it’s easy to take for granted the fact that millions of people read blogs on their mobile phones. However, not all devices are capable of displaying full HTML. And even those that do, not all screens are large enough for comfortable viewing of web content.

With this in mind, WordPress.com has recently launched several mobile functionalities, namely a few mobile-oriented themes, and (limited) dashboard access from mobile browsers. WordPress.com will automatically detect whether a reader is using a mobile browser, and assuming you have set your site to display a mobile theme when viewed from a phone–activated by default–the reader sees a predominantly text interface, with any header image miniaturized for small screens.

For mobile browsers capable of full HTML, there’s an option to switch to full view. Commenting and limited navigation features are also available on mobile view, making the viewing experience as functional as possible. As for the mobile dashboard, this mostly just involves stats, posting and bookmarking. This is simple enough for those times when you absolutely have to blog about something, but don’t have access to a computer.

This is one functionality I’d like to see built-into self-hosted WordPress installations. While you can usually enable mobile viewing and posting thru plugins, having this out of the box would surely be one good way of expanding readership and giving you a wider array of options when mobile-blogging.

What Are Your Favorite Social Media Tools for Mobile?

Bloggers are relatively mobile individuals. Some of us who earn directly or indirectly from blogging or writing most probably are not stuck in an office all day. Instead, we usually go about town looking for interesting things to write about, attend events, or just simply get ideas and inspiration from our environment. In some cases, we’re constrained with not being able to bring our laptops around, but there are a lot of alternatives to being connected.

Inspired by a recent Blog Herald post by Darnell Clayton on iPhone video blogging tools, I’m now listing a few tools I use myself in getting connected while on the move. [Read more]