Twitter Announces Changes to Header, No More 3rd Party Image Apps

Twitter made some changes this week that were met with less-than-enthusiastic fanfare from its estimated 140 million active users. The big news is the new profile, which allows you to update your header photo above your tweets with a Facebook Timeline-like image. A recent post by Marketing Land gives a step- by-step tutorial on updating your Twitter header. In addition, a photo stream will now appear below a user’s most recent tweets on iPhone, Android and iPad.

The changes seem to be mostly aimed at mobile users, and as one twitter user pointed out, “who uses the web interface anyway?” According to Twitter’s blog, your background image on Twitter.com will still be present, but the new header is supposed to enhance the user experience, and supports simplicity and consistency on iPhone, Android and iPad, which seems to be a goal of Twitter and leads us to the next big change.

At the same time the new header announcement was made, Twitter dropped its thrid party image hosts from its official apps and launched new versions of its own iOS and Android apps. This has left a bad taste for many users who feel that Twitter is turning its back on those companies that helped make the platform bigger and better, as evidenced by the comments below this Mashable article.

Have you updated your Twitter header? Send us a link to your profile and tell us what you think of the changes. 

@TodayShow updated its header in time for Twitter's big announcement, which was made on their show Tuesday morning

Android - The G-Phone (Google Phone)

Almost 1 year since Apple launched his iPHONE and redefined the mobile cell industry adding a very intuitive and easy to use smart phone. Now other manufacturers such LG, Nokia and Motorola are behind the iPhone success producing phones with similar features like the iPHONE. But all of them have a lack of good operating system, applications, etc.

People from Google are seeing this opportunity and they want a piece of the cake offering Android which is a software platform and operating system for mobile devices based on the Linux operating system. It allows developers to write managed code in a Java-like language that utilizes Google-developed Java libraries.

Google will not make the phone, but has helped develop the software that handset manufacturers will install in their devices. Samsung, HTC, LG Electronics, and Motorola are among the companies that have said they will produce phones that run on Android. Also Android is designed to allow independent developers to write their own programs for mobile devices, so Android based phone users will be able to download applications for their phone over the Internet. The first handset to run Android (aka "the Google Phone") has been approved by the FCC. In the documents provided, it appears that we have now a release date for this highly anticipated phone: November 10th, 2008.

So we will see a new G-phones soon