Something missing from many location-aware Twitter applications for iPhone is the option to stick a Web map into a tweet. Most simply change the home city in your Twitter profile and slap on some latitude and longitude coordinates. This is great if you feel like looking those up, but otherwise it's a less than ideal way to tell people where you are.
Schmap, the social-mapping service, has a new and free iPhone app out called GeoTweeter (not to be confused with GeoTweeter.com) that lets you do just that. You can broadcast your location on a map that gets sent at the end of your tweet. Each map link takes up just 23 of Twitter's precious 140 characters, leaving you with 117 to tell people what you're up to.
A bookmarked place can be re-tweeted again and again.
(Credit: CNET Networks)To compensate for this lost space, the app lets you add a rating, a photo taken from your phone, and any "notes" you want to jot down about the location. None of these will show up in your Twitter message, and instead are put on the maps page hosted by Schmap. You can access these pages both on your phone, and online. If you've used Place Saver, Schmap's other iPhone application, the functionality is almost identical.
One feature that makes it quite similar to geo-social network Brightkite is that you can use these geo-bookmarks again and again once they've been saved. You get the option to re-tweet it at any time, which will append the location link to the Tweet, letting people know where you are, or what location you're talking about.
Something this application is missing, and in dire need of, is a way to view messages from your Twitter contacts. It's very good at letting you post to Twitter, but the fact that I have to go and fire up another Twitter application, or my browser to view messages is a big oversight. Once that's in there, I could easily see this becoming one of my favorite iPhone Twitter apps.
This is what it looks like on your tweet. Clicking the link takes you right to the map.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Map guide and platform company Schmap has a cool, free service that lets anyone put in a small, mobile phone-optimized contact information page on their site with just a line of code. This is in case you want to take information like your address, phone number, and e-mail address and improve the way it looks on mobile devices.
It shines on the iPhone, but has been set up to work with other smartphones, and provides a built-in map and shortcuts to call you up, with a small sticky note that goes on the top of your home page. When users click on this note, they'll be taken right to that special contact page, letting them save time trying to hunt around your site for an address or phone number.
It's aimed mostly at businesses, but could make a handy addition to your personal site or portfolio in case you want to make it easier for folks to contact you, while forgoing possible spam by keeping that information out of your page's source code.
All you have to do to put one together is fill out a form with your business' information. You can match this page up to the colors on your site, and when finished, it'll spit it out into a few small lines of code that you drop in the header. Any changes you make on Schmap will be reflected back on that page since it's hosted on Schmap's site and not yours. There's also a neat editor that shows you what that page will look like as you're making the changes.
When turned on its side, iPhones will display contact information with a map, too--all without having to kick you off to another application.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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