Am I missing something here? I was in my Gmail account this morning, which I have a new appreciation for after being locked out of it for about 8 hours yesterday, and I see a Twitter ad. The ad was pointing to some guy’s Twitter profile.

The guy (free advertisement) has 173 followers as of 8:37 this morning. I wonder what his CPF (Cost Per Follow) is? Anyways, I think it’s kind of a silly idea, but I’m sure he’s not the first and definitely not the last.

Of course, you can follow me here.

The rumors of the soon to drop iPhone 2.2 firmware features better not be true. Plain and simple, the iPhone could be such a better device if Apple concentrated on core functionality instead of fluff.

I, and many others, use my device as a phone, email client, web browser and messaging client.

The phone feature works as advertised and I’m not sure what they could improve on.

The email client is good, but it doesn’t always work. Nevermind, it only works when my iPhone is charging. I have it set to get my email every 15 minutes from Google’s IMAP server. It never looks for new email when the phone is not either in use or plugged into the wall. This has become increasingly frustrating. I came over from years of Blackberry and then Windows Mobile use with push email. I’m already sacrificing real-time for 15 minutes, now I have to manually go get the email.

MobileMe would fix this problem if they allowed custom domain mapping, but they don’t so it’s not really like Exchange for the rest of us. I’ve heard rumors that the poor battery life problem was fixed in 2.1 only because Apple turned off the fetch email service while the phone is in sleep mode.

The rumors say they are improving mobile Safari by making it easier to access the Google search box, this a good UI improvement in my opinion, so congrats Cupertino.

I’d love to be able to receive Gtalk or AOL Instant Messenger IM’s on my iPhone regardless of whether I have an IM app running. Apple promised a notification server when they released iPhone 2.0. They said it would be here in September, it hasnt been heard of or seen from since July.

A notification server would make the phone a much, much better device. If my iPhone could notify me in sleep mode when I receive a instant message I would be a happy individual.

I would also like the homescreen (before you slide to unlock) to diplay how many emails I’ve missed, how many IM’s I’ve received, upcoming events from my calendar and how many Tweet’s I’ve missed since I last locked my phone.

Yes, make the homescreen customizable. Let me decide what to display on it besides the default missed calls and text messages.

If Apple did that, and perhaps added MMS and copy/paste, it’d be about as perfect a phone as you could have.

Instead they insist on adding fluff features like over-the-air podcast downloading, Google maps streetview and icons in the App store (if the rumors are true). These are novelty features that are cool, but essentially not useful. How useful is over-the-air podcast downloading compared to a notification server? How useful are new icons on the menu in the App store compared to an actual working email client that fetch’s your email?

I also realize that usefulness is relative, but I think it’s a losing argument to put OTA podcast downloading and company ahead of a notification server.

Having said all of that. I can’t not use my iPhone. I’ve tried, trust me. I tried to go back to my Blackberry Curve and I couldn’t stick with it.

I’ve used T-Mobile’s G1 Google phone (Android) and I stuck with the lesser iPhone. I got my hands on Nokia’s E71, which I thought would surely get me to forget about my love-hate relationship with my iPhone. Nope.

The E71 is a great phone. It’s way better than the iPhone in terms of what it does. But there is something about the iPhone that has me locked in (and it’s not my 2-year AT&T contract).

I know what that magic is that keeps me and many other frustrated iPhone owners locked in, but I’m going to save that for another post.

I used to be a big Blackberry user. I was addicted to it, many people are, hence the word crackberry.

While I was once a crackberry head, that addiction is nothing compared to my current iPhone addiction which has been going on for about a year now.

I can’t sleep at night because I know that right next to my bed is instant access to my email, the web, Twitter and everything else I enjoy.

I can’t sleep at night because when I lay in bed, the first thing I do after laying down for 2 minutes is reach over for my iPhone. I’ll play on it for anywhere from 10 minutes to two hours before I’m able to put it down. I average about 20-30 minutes a night on it though.

So, here it is 2:41am and I’m laying in bed writing this post on my iPhone. Somebody help me, I need to learn to disconnect myself.

I apologize to you that visit my blog and not just my RSS feed. You constantly have to endure with my tinkering with the design here. I just can’t ever find a design that I love.

I tried a bunch of differnet things. My first design was a Wordpress theme I downloaded, the second design was a hacked Wordpress theme, the third one was a complete shift. For the third design I created my own blogging platform and I designed it with a minimilistic theme, it was barebones.

Then a few weeks ago I created a new design that highlighted my Twitter posts over my blog posts. I loved the idea at first,but then I didn’t like how it made it hard to find content from my blog. So after a week or so of having that I nixed it, not to mention I wasn’t a huge fan of the design I made for it — and that too was still using the blogging platform I created.

And here we are today. I’ve upgraded my old Wordpress installation, migrated the posts from my custom blogging platform into my Wordpress installation and I created a new Wordpress theme from scratch.

I think I’ll keep this design for a bit. I like the simplicity/minimilist aspect of it, but it isn’t too simple (as was the case with version 3, plain white and black). It’s got a little elegant feel to it and the best thing about it is that I can still highlight my Twitter posts without relegating the blog content as the second class citizen here.

I’m sure I’ll tweak some things as time goes on, but I can see this theme being the one. Any thoughts?

Note: Comments from previous posts are broken because apparently when you use DISQUS you cannot change the URL of the posts or the comments won’t follow it. They should create a setting where you can set a new URL structure. I’ve sent them an email, we’ll see if I can save them.

So, the tweetsville iPhone app looked awesome, I bought it and it crashed immediately.

I noticed other people having some issues with it as well so I figured I’d tell you how I fixed it.

If you can’t even get to the login screen, simply delete and reinstall the app.

1. Create a dummy Twitter account
2. Login to tweetsville with the dummy account
3. Go to Settings
4. Click Clear Cache
5. Click Twitter Account
6. Login with your real Twitter account

That should do it, Clear Cache is the trick, I think. I noticed it was the Timeline that was giving me the problem. So what I did immediately after I changed my Twitter account back to my real account was to click on Trends, then Messages and finally Timeline. Not sure if that helped at all, but it probably didn’t hurt.