Regular readers of this blog will know that I usually post a summary of the Eurovision entrants around this time of year. Alas, what with elections and then post-election holidays and then going to the pub a bit, this year there will be no blog post. I know, it’s a tragedy.

However, it’s not all bad news. I’ll be live tweeting along with the Eurovision final on Saturday night on my twitter account, so much of the, er, insight that usually finds its way onto this blog will be available there. Watch out for numerous Blake’s 7 references.

You can also fill this blog-post-sized hole with my contribution to this week’s Pod Delusion podcast. You’ll find me wittering on about Eurovision (recorded in one take I’ll have you know) around 26 minutes in:

Finally, don’t forget to tune in yourself to BBC One at 8pm on Saturday (or some red buttony thing that I don’t have that gives you the lyric subtitles). I’ll be backing Denmark. Or maybe Romania. Or maybe Albania. I haven’t quite made up my mind. And whereas last year I correctly predicted (for once) that Norway would storm to victory, there’s no such obvious victor this year.

Mark blogged this wek about his top 10 iPhone applications. Always one with an original idea, I thought I’d post up a list of mine. Unfortunately there isn’t an app for that so I’ve had to write it myself. And they call this the future?

This isn’t an ordered list and it’s not an attempt to catalogue the best apps out there – just the ones I use every day or find particularly useful.

1. Tweetie

I experimented with some other Twitter clients (TweetDeck and Echofon) but Tweetie does everything I need with a clean and easy to use interface. My only bugbear is that you can’t do old style manual retweeting – when you “Quote Tweet” it puts “via @username” at the end; I have to cut and paste that to the beginnng and add “RT”. Not a big flaw though given its pleasant handling of threaded replies, direct messages and saved searches.

2. Boxcar

I almost forgot this one because I never actually run it. Boxcar uses push notifications to alert you to various chosen activities. The free version lets you connect it to one site so I use it to generate on-screen notifications when I get new replies and direct messages on Twitter.

3. Facebook

I find Facebook‘s official app a good alternative to their mobile site. The latest version generates push notifications which replace some of the text message alerts I used to use. It’s good for adding photos directly from my iPhone and keeping me up to date with new activity. The drawbacks are that it seems to struggle with time zones on Events – I’ve been invited to rather a lot that are shown as starting at 3am – and it has absolutely no support for Groups, which is a bit of an oversight.

4. Dropbox

Dropbox is an online file storage system. It appears on your computer as a normal folder but when you’re online it will upload the contents of that folder to Dropbox’s servers. A similar folder on another computer can synchronise with the same server allowing you to access and edit your files from different machines – and providing a backup.

The iPhone app is another way to access the files in your Dropbox which means, for example, I can use my phone to read and email onwards Word documents without having to think ahead about which files I might need or having to email them to myself first. The basic service and app are free and you get two gigabytes of storage. There are ways to earn more free space – including by signing friends up using a referral link 🙂

5. Spotify

Spotify is a music streaming service with a huge library of songs. You can use the desktop version free with adverts or pay a subscription to Spotify Premium to ditch the ads. You need the Premium account to use the (free) iPhone app. I use it enough to make it worthwhile – not least because it has a big range of, erm, karaoke tracks…

6. Tube Exits

I know where to stand on the Jubliee Line platform to be in the best place to disembark on my way to work, and I know where to stand on the platform at the other end to be in the best place to disembark on my way home. But for other journeys that I don’t make so often, that anal approach to subterranean travel in London is harder. Or at least it was until the Tube Exits application. Tell it your starting station, your destination and any changes, and it will tell you the best carriage to get on, and which side of the train (same door or opposite) you’ll disembark by. All the data is held offline on the phone so it works even with no reception and there are regular updates as the data changes. I believe it also includes the DLR.

7. RunKeeper

OK, this isn’t one I use every day, but it does the job well. Using the iPhone’s GPS, RunKeeper can plot your path as you travel around. Although you can use it when walking or in a vehicle, it’s designed for runners, to keep track of distances, speeds and routes. On the rare occasions that I go for a run, it’s great.

8. Bejeweled 2

Don’t install this.

Bejeweled is a moving-coloured-jewels-into-lines-of-three-or-more game. I used to play it a lot on Facebook – where it took advantage, like the best Facebook apps, of the playing against your friends option. Eventually I stopped completely because it was too addictive. And then they brought it out for the iPhone – with the killer feature being a connection to Facebook that lets you continue to play against your friends. It’s actually easier to play on the touch screen than with a mouse on the PC which just makes it all the more addictive. And lots of other people must like it too because I regularly get flak for dominating the high score table.

One caveat: the latest version of Bejeweled on Facebook has some new features (coins and boosts) that I’m not a fan of. They’re yet to make it into the iPhone version but when they do I may use them as an excuse to stop playing. I need to wean myself off somehow.

9. Sleep Cycle

This is one of the most popular releases in the App Store though I’ve only been using it for a few days. You place the phone on the corner of your bed and the app uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to monitor your nocturnal fidgeting. It uses this to plot a graph of your sleep patterns, which is pretty cool just on its own, but that’s not the primary aim of the app. These patterns plotted, it then tries to wake you in the morning as soothingly as possible, with gentle alarm sounds timed to go off at the point near your desired time when you are in the lightest sleep phase.

10. Google Mail

This isn’t technically an app but I use it a lot. Although the iPhone’s in-built Mail application works with GMail – and I use it when, say, emailing photos to TwitPic – it lacks some of the features of the full GMail website. One of those I use the most is “starring” emails which you can’t do from the Mail app. Instead, I use Google’s own mobile-optimised version of GMail within the Safari browser, with a bookmark straight to it on the bottom bar of the Home screen.

Some other apps I have installed: Tube Deluxe, Scrabble, thetrainline, Huddle, LinkedIn, Zippo (which puts a lighter on your screen – good for gigs) and Flux (which turns your screen into the Flux Capacitor from Back to the Future).

I’m going to start with the assumption that you know what Twitter is. I’ve written here about it enough and it’s got all famous since then – any minute now, it’ll be passé.

Having established that, I can safely lazily define 12seconds as “like Twitter but with video”. Where Twitter requires the poster to encapsulate their thoughts within 140 characters, 12seconds is built from videos that are – wait for it – no more than 12 seconds long.

This makes it very hard for them to be boring (though it happens) and encourages the same cutdown, efficient, pithy communication with which regular twitterers will be familiar (and which is notable by its absence from this sentence). As well as recording live via a webcam, 12-second videos can be produced on a mobile phone and emailed to the site – and the short time limit keeps file sizes low enough that that’s actually a practical approach, and the one I use most often.

My channel is, of course, the place to be, although 12seconds automatically sends a message to my Twitter account when I’ve posted, so you can keep abreast of my video clips without registering on 12seconds – although you should register, because then you can post 12-second video clips too!

So what can you do in 12 seconds? Here are some of my favourite clips from my channel (if any of the embedded videos don’t appear, refresh the page or click the link to watch it on the 12seconds site).

Positive reinforcement on 12seconds.tv

Read more…

It is not my intention that this becomes a blog about Twitter so I’ll let this be my third and final post on the subject for the time being (the next will be a small rant on a different subject).

But I wanted to draw attention to Twitter’s appearances in Parliament on Thursday, and in particular Jo Swinson’s contribution to the Christmas adjournment debate. As well as being the youngest MP, Jo is one of Parliament’s few twitterers, as she mentions:

I want to talk about the possibility of speeding up Parliament’s entry into the 21st century. I know that the Deputy Leader of the House has taken an interest in online matters. Indeed, I remember that, before his promotion to the Government, he was often seen asking questions in business questions to the Leader of the House about whether we should have more e-tabling of signatures for early-day motions and such like. More and more MPs are now using the internet to connect better with their constituents, and Parliament should also embrace this new technology, whether through social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, or through interactive forums, encouraging comments on websites, podcasts, video logs—known as v-logs, they are small videos that can be uploaded to sites such as YouTube—or, indeed, a new website launched today called tweetminster.co.uk. It aggregates all the mini-blogs or “twitters” of those MPs who twitter regularly. I declare an interest, as one of the five MPs identified as those who use this service. The others are the hon. Members for Loughborough (Mr. Reed), for West Bromwich, East (Mr. Watson) and for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), and my hon. Friend Lynne Featherstone. This is an example of a way of connecting more immediately with our constituents, and I would encourage other hon. Members to make full use of the advantages that the internet offers, particularly in relation to the younger audience, who would not normally declare a huge interest in politics.

Jo went on to mention two other important issues of parliamentary accessibility: the rules which keep footage of Parliament off YouTube and mySociety’s Free Our Bills campaign, which I have plugged before.

Thanks to mySociety, you can watch Jo’s speech in full right here:

In tracking down Jo’s speech on TheyWorkForYou, I stumbled across two further mentions of Twitter. Thursday in the House of Lords saw Lord Norton’s debate about Parliament’s communication with the public. The first mention of Twitter came from crossbencher the Earl of Erroll, who also mentioned YouTube:

An interesting development is putting stuff about the Lords on YouTube. I was interested to see how we are rated. About 10,000 people have looked at the piece by the Lord Speaker, which is interesting and informative; about 12,000 people have looked at the Youth Parliament which took over the Chamber last summer; but 47,000 people looked at a pop group called the House of Lords, which was next on the list. That tells me that people are attracted by entertainment. If we are to try to get our message across, we shall have to make it quite entertaining and short, sharp and snappy so that people become aware of it.
[…]
The Lords of the Blog come along with more serious pieces. I have looked at that and it is heavier stuff to go through, but it is good. We need some short, sharp things. I think Twitter used very short sentences to track the State Opening of Parliament; for example, “The Queen has just entered the House” and so on. I do not know how many people showed interest in that, but all those little things build up more interest and then some people dig deeper. That is important.

The final word, though, to the second mention of Twitter, from the Lord Greaves:

A lot of noble Lords have talked about modern communication. I very much applaud the Lords of the Blog, the most interesting being the noble Lord, Lord Norton, and my noble friend Lord Tyler, but that is because I am interested in the same sort of things, which is why I am taking part in this debate. I do not go on Facebook or YouTube and I hope that I will never need to. I know that Twitter exists, but that can stay where it is. However, I applaud noble Lords who get involved in such things.