As news breaks there are millions of people tweeting about it, updating their Facebook statuses, but it’s hard to make sense of the huge river of information.

Both Storify and Storyful allow to to pick tweets, blogs, websites, as well as Flickr photos and YouTube videos, and put them all together into one place.

Each presents you with a dashboard, into which you drag and drop whichever tweets/photos/links take your fancy. It’s a good way of adding some extra social info to an article. It was heavily used last summer during the UK riots. Today the singer Whitney Houston has died, and there are dozens of curated stories on both Storify and Storyful. I’ve done a couple of very quick examples on the Liverpool FC striker Luis Suarez, who has just (finally) apologised for his racist remarks against Manchester United’s Patrice Evra.

Once you have ‘written’ your story (or, rather, copied lots of other people’s stuff) and published it, you can grab an embed code and stick it on your own website. WordPress.com won’t allow you to embed it into a post, but you can send it directly as a new post from Storify instead. Instructions here for that. I’ve sent the Luis Suarez Storify to my Posterous account for the purposes of testing.

With Storyful you need a pro account to do this, it seems. Boo, hiss.

Otherwise, there’s not much to choose between the two. Storyful offers you a display of people on Twitter that you follow, which is useful and seems obvious – wonder why Storify doesn’t. But then again Storify sends straight to WordPress, Tumblr and Posterous, which is the killer feature.

See also: Ifttt – at least, something useful on the internet

Blogging - any old way

Right, er. So I had planned to review my blog (third of fourth blog I’ve created recently – promise to stick with this one) after three months, to take stock and see where I’m ‘at’, as they say. Which should have happened on 19 January but completely slipped me by.

As such, I’m going to bypass the main event and go straight to the highlights. What’s worked, and what hasn’t? In a simple, easy-to-follow, and more importantly easy-to-write, ahem, list of three.

1. WordPress is by far the best publishing tool for blogs. By far. In the three months I have dabbled with Tumblr (too transient and Twittery); Posterous (too quiet); Squarespace (too expensive and a bit dull) and Blogger (way too dull) until I finally settled on WordPress. It has easily the best choice of ‘themes’ and easy to manipulate CSS, really intuitive CMS and loads of ways to manipulate, bend and stretch your site as you want it. Which, to be honest, has to be a given. Any publishing tool that won’t let you publish something exactly how you want it? Nah.

2. Think mobile. Another star for goody two-shoes WordPress is how their sites look great on mobile and iPad. The mobile view is nothing fancy, but simple and adequate. And their’s the nice ‘swipe’ theme for iPad users. Squarespace, on the other hand, doesn’t have mobile versions. At all.

3. The most powerful social referral of traffic is Facebook. I get some from Twitter, Pinterest, and of course Google, but these are all teeny tiny balls of fluffy kittens cowering next to the mighty Zuckerberg army of killer giants. Scary, worrying, but you just can’t not use Facebook to get your stuff ‘out there’.

Which apart from anything may show that: 1. I can’t make my mind up; 2. Mobile is the future; 3. Social is more important than search.

See also: Best blogging platforms – which to pick from

Photo by ToastyTreat87 on Flickr under Creative Commons

News:Rewired held in London on 3rd February 2012

A few days ago I went along to the excellent News:Rewired annual conference in London. It was a gathering of journalists, photographers, CEOs, entrepeneurs, bloggers, other content creators looking at the latest tools of the trade.

I decided straight away not to liveblog the event – there was already teams of others doing that – or to even tweet frantically (leave it to the youngsters, eh?), so giving myself the chance to listen a little closer to what was being said.

Now, a few days on, I can crack my knuckles and, settled in next to a log fire, get down to a bit o’ bloggage.

Much has already been written, and rightly so because a lot of ground was covered. Many good write-ups here. A lot of the day was split into different sessions, so nobody could attend all and soak everything up. For me one of the most interesting aspects was the amount of time given to social media:

The keynote address was by Liz Heron, the New York Times’ social media editor. There was also a session in social media optimization; another session in ‘searching social media for news’; and a final debate on ‘setting social media standards’.

This is not surprising, given the rush to embrace Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and soon Pinterest, Tumblr, Flickr and Instagram. Liz Heron talked of social media skills being a natural part of the journalist’s repertoire. We would all agree.

But during a session on exploring paid-content models, some interesting stats about social media use by news websites emerged, which stuck with me.

Francois Nel, an academic, gave an interesting talk comparing the digital strategies of The Guardian and the Daily Mail [disclaimer, the company I work for, Northcliffe Digital, is owned by DMGT, which also owns the Daily Mail and the Mail Online. But it was his research anyway, not mine].

Mr Nel compared the newspapers’ two print products, their two websites’ growth, their iPad apps, and their social media strategies.

He argued that at the same time as Mail Online has become the world’s largest news website with a 60 per cent year-on-year growth, it has managed to steady the decline in print circulation of the Daily Mail. It has an iPad app which promises users their ‘favourite website’ in an app. It does have a Facebook page with just over 17,000 ‘likes’, and a Twitter account with 55,000 followers. DMGT is doing very nicely, financially speaking, Mr Nel told News:Rewired.

Then he turned to The Guardian, saying how the print edition had fallen by 14 per cent year-on-year, and the website had seen smaller growth than the Mail Online. It too has an iPad app, which promises ‘today’s paper, beautifully delivered’ (note, not the website, but the paper).

Where The Guardian does get bigger numbers is in social media – 300,000-plus Twitter followers (and that’s just one of many Twitter accounts it uses) and with more than 285,000 Facebook fans.

Mr Nel made two very interesting conclusions. First, he said The Guardian was wrong to use digital channels (web and iPad app) as a substitute for print – that is, giving people the same content in both formats. The Mail Online, he argues, gets it right by separating print from digital, and offering a wholly different product. That’s very interesting to any journalist who will have heard the phrase “newsroom convergence” repeated a few hundred times or so over the past five years.

Secondly, he argued that consumers needed to think about ‘reciprocation’ – by which I think he meant that Guardian readers (and one would guess that there were many at News:Rewired) should be thinking more about what they were consuming for free, and start choosing to pay for it. (I may have not interpreted the finer points he was making there).

But for me, there was a third question, surrounding the use of social media. The figures clearly show that The Guardian has far more reach on social media than the Mail Online. Indeed they have even made a Facebook app so users don’t even have to go to the Guardian website. (More on how that works, beautifully explained by The Guardian’s Martin Belam, here] More social reach, but struggling as a business. So, what’s the point of getting the most Facebook likes and Twitter followers?

Of course social media serves a purpose to journalists, bloggers, businesses, organisations, just about anyone. You can bet I will be tweeting and sharing this post. But I do wonder if the rush to embrace it may not one day be a Second Big Mistake made by the news media.

We did it once – when we put all our content online for free. Now it’s too late to turn back the clock. With Web 2.0 we’re not just making content free, but we’re putting it on other platforms.

Where’s the pot of gold going to come from?

See also: NUJ pay claim down from 30% to 3% – how times have changed

Nexus S Android phone

Android mobile telephones are made by different manufacturers but all use the same ‘Android’ operating system, built by Google.

It is said to be an ‘open source’ OS because Google allows programmers, companies, individuals to take the basics of the code and add their own layers, twists and user interface. It is also thought of as being ‘open’ because there is a vast range of mobile phones running Android, unlike Apple’s iOS, which can only run on iPhones and is not licensed to other hardware makers.

It is a bit like the desktop computer war of the 1990s between Mac and PC; Apple’s Mackintosh was for Mac only (albeit it was briefly licensed to 3^rd parties during a spell when Steve Jobs wasn’t running the company) while Microsoft’s Windows was licensed to every computer manufacturer.

Google has its own version of the App Store. It’s called the Android Market and most apps are available there. Google’s vetting isn’t quite as tough as Apple, so there some more obscure apps to try out, but also more danger of apps with viruses.

The openness of Android means it has quickly become the world’s biggest mobile OS (200 million devices worldwide as of November 2011). It scores some points due to the fact that devices with Android are usually cheaper than iPhones, and does well in the bonus round by virtue of the fact that Android phones come in all shapes and sizes. Want small? Check. Massive like a tablet? Check.

However, there are some downsides of Android’s open sourceness, and companies’ ability to control the experience of the phones.

They are:

1. There are many phones for sale in the UK which are running old operating systems several years old because the manufacturer of the handset won’t support an upgrade. That means the phone won’t be able to perform the latest technological tricks. This will mean you may find yourself in an awkward social situation such as your neighbour using facial recognition to transform their phone into a hover board, while yours won’t even support predictive texting.
2. Phones have layers of what has become known as ‘bloatware’, the handset makers’ own user interface built on top of Android, which is usually ugly, pointless to the user, full of ads, and makes the phone sluggish.
3. Phone-makers build their own market place, and fill the phone with their apps which aren’t as good as Android apps. You have to repeatedly ignore these obstructive flashy signals and find the hidden paths to the real app store, the real music player, the real email tool, for example.

As with any purchase of a mobile telephone, your first consideration will be which carrier to choose from – you will of course need to make sure you can get a signal at home, work and play, regardless of what other tricks your new phone can perform.

Then it’s quality and price. There are lots of great Android phones for sale, made by many different companies. The usual pros and cons come into play: cost of handset, monthly bill, battery performance, size and weight, etc.

Finally, when you see a phone you like, you should find out what Android operating system it is running.

When Google first launched Android, it iterated really quickly, bringing out new versions of its OS every few months. The most up to date version is OS 4.0 – also known as Ice Cream Sandwich (yes, Google likes to give dessert nicknames, in alphabetical order, to its OS versions).

In chronological order, not including the minor updates in between the earlier OS updates:

• 1.0 No nickname – September 2008
• 1.5 Cupcake – April 2009
• 1.6 Doughnut – September 2009
• 2.0 Eclair – October 2009
• 2.2 Froyo – May 2010
• 2.3 Gingerbread – December 2010
• 3.0 Honeycombe – February 2011 (for tablets only)
• 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich – October 2011
• 4.0.2 Ice Cream Sandwich – November 2011. Bugs fix, ships with Galaxy Nexus which goes on sale in UK
• 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich – December 2011. Graphics and social sharing enhancements.

Check with the salesman and make sure you get a phone with a recent OS, as there are still many Android phones being sold in UK High Street shops with Froyo – that’s already several years old. If you sign a contract for a phone with Froyo, you’re stuck with for another two years unless the handset maker decides to upgrade it, and there is no guarantee of that.

There are now dozens of mobile phones on sale. Handsets of all sizes, and prices, with all the mobile carriers. Your absolute best bet, however, is to get a Nexus model.

The best Android mobile telephones available in the UK – and indeed internationally – is the Nexus range. It began with the Nexus One which came out in January 2010, the Nexus S which appeared in the shops in December 2010, and the current latest which is called Galaxy Nexus.

Nexus phones have come to be called the ‘pure’ Android phones. That is because Google stipulates (and it only does this with the Nexus range) that the phone cannot contain any bloatware, must have the latest version of Android, and ensures that OS updates are pushed through.

These top of the range phones have been made by HTC and Samsung, but sport the word ‘Google’ on the back.

The Nexus One (made by HTC) has been discontinued – so currently the choice is between Galaxy Nexus and Nexus S (both made by Samsung). The Galaxy Nexus comes with Ice Cream Sandwich installed, and the S is expected to get the upgrade any day now. Both phones are slick, have fast browsers, and decent cameras. The technical specs of the Galaxy Nexus are slightly superior to the S, but either one of these handsets is a great buy.

See also: Apple iPhone price guide for UK customers

Rawporter iPhone app screengrab

With a camera phone in every pocket, we’re all potentially ‘citizen journalists’ on hand to film and snap interesting stuff as it happens – fires, brawls, dancing cats. Right?

Right. And the best (or worst) of it finds its way to YouTube or Flickr where it can be looked at by millions, copied and distributed to millions more. And most of the time, the ‘citizen journalist’ won’t see a penny.

A new app called Rawporter aims to change that. Currently available to download to iPhones from Apple’s app store (but we’re told coming soon to the Android market place) it provides the newsman in all of us with a way to shoot stills and video and get paid.

Rawporter allows users to upload raw stills and video (no editing, now) to their account, which is linked to a personal Paypal account. The footage is made available for anyone (i.e. mainstream media) to buy.

The company keeps 60% keeps 40% [apologies for error - thanks to Rawporter for pointing it out in the comments]  of whatever it makes from selling your video (it says to invest “in new technology” – are they ashamed of wanting to make a profit?).

I know a lot of hacks, many of them wielding iPhones – never heard any of them talk about this app yet. There’s no rocket science involved: take out phone, open Rawporter app, film video, upload, done. There are sharing options from your mobile, or from the Rawporter website.

In the spirit of, er, being bored at home on a freezing cold school night, I tested the app on my three cats. They were all even more bored than I.

So this test video won’t exactly make a million or win any journalism prizes (but it is for sale at a bargain $8.69) but this app does have a lot of potential.

See also: The Glif – iPhone stand and tripod connector

Apple iPhone 4S with Siri

Want to buy an iPhone? Here is a guide to models, prices, carriers and contracts for people in the UK.

iPhone 4S

Announced by Apple in Autumn 2011. An upgrade to the iPhone 4 which was released in summer 2010. The 4S comes in black or white, and three storage options: 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB. It has an 8-megapixel camera, retina display, and an A5 chip, which makes it the fastest Apple iPhone yet.

The iPhone 4S also comes with all the usual iPhone features – video, apps, iTunes, email, maps, games, etc.

It is also the first Apple device to have Siri, the voice controlled assistant. Siri (which on the 4S is in beta and far from the finished product) can be used to set reminders, ‘write’ emails, call contacts, and ask questions. For the latter, it searches Wolfram Alpha for the answer and, as a last resort, Google.

You can buy an iPhone unlocked from Apple. Prices are £499 for the 16GB model, £599 for 32GB, and £699 for the 64GB. The advantage of buying ‘unlocked’ means you can then pick a SIM-only contract from a mobile carrier, which is going to be cheaper each month. Plus, you’re not tied to a set contract time, meaning you can switch phones/carriers/numbers at will.

Buying an iPhone 4S with a contract, however, is how most people pay for their mobiles. The handset comes at a much lower price, but you pay a little more each month.

Three has contracts ranging from £30 a month to £43, including an attractive £35-a-month ‘all you can eat’ data plan. It will currently cost you £99 for the 16GB model, then £35 a month for two years. That’s a total of £939, and that’s before you cough up for insurance, which could set you back another £10 a month at least.

O2 also offers the iPhone 4S with 24-month contracts. It charges either a small amount upfront and then a fairly hefty monthly bill, or a big spend upfront with a small monthly bill. For example, you can get the 64GB model on a 24-month contract paying just £15.50 a month, but that’s after you’ve forked out £519.99 to start with. If you’d rather spread the cost, you can pay just £29.99 upfront for the handset, but then you’re looking at £57 per month for two years. Option 1 costs you £891.99 in total. Option 2 costs you £1,397.99 which is significantly higher. Best paying as much upfront as you can. Neither price, however, includes the cost of data, which O2 markets as ‘bolt-ons’ which range from £3 per month for 100MB, to £10 a month for 1GB of data. (Tip, choose the latter to avoid going over your limit and getting charged a fortune).

Orange charges slightly more per month for the iPhone 4S, with the monthly payments starting at £46. You can pick up a 16GB model for zero upfront payment, paying £46 per month including data. That’s a total of £1,104 over two years.

T-Mobile has a long list of different prices and contracts. You can pick up a white 16GB iPhone 4S for £25.54 a month for two years, an upfront cost of £239.99, with 500MB of data included. That’s a total of £852.95

And finally Vodafone, which offers a range of contract lengths as well as different plans. If you don’t want to get tied to a 24-month contract, Vodafone has 12-month contracts starting at £36 a month. The upfront cost tied to that monthly bill is £339 for a 16GB handset. Which is a total of just £771 which is a good deal. That comes with 500MB data each month, but (as ever) does not include insurance.

iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS

Of course if you’re watching the pennies, and you’re not too fussed about getting the very latest Apple iPhone in your hands, you could look at the 4 or the 3GS.

The iPhone 4 is identical in looks to the 4S. It is also excellent. The only significant feature missing from it which comes with 4S is Siri. The camera lens in slightly inferior and the processor slightly slower – but you won’t really notice the difference.

You can buy an iPhone 4 unlocked from Apple for less than £500. Or go for one of the (cheaper than 4S) data plans with carriers.

The final option is the 3GS. This phone came out in summer 2008 and, while is offically still supported by Apple in terms of software updates, it really is the cheap option now.

Unlocked from Apple it will set you back just over £300 and free with pretty much all contracts. The monthly bill will also be significantly lower than the 4 or the 4S, but be warned that the 3GS is coming up to four years old. It is possible that the next big iPhone software update in the summer of 2012 will not support the 3GS. That means if you buy one now, it will not be able to do a lot of cool things within six months.

See also: What’s Apple got that Microsoft Windows hasn’t?

Tom Waits CDs. Do we still need to buy physical music?

The way we listen to music has changed so quickly it’s hard to keep up with the latest services and how they differ.

Actually buying albums and tracks remains popular, but it’s more about shopping for digital files than a physical CD. More recently, new streaming options are getting in on the act – and for the next generations of teenagers this will be the way they discover new music.

In the UK, there are several ways of putting music on your mobile phone or tablet. And lately these have also included social elements – ways to share music tastes and music discovery with friends via Twitter or Facebook.

iTunes - Apple’s iTunes is the most well known way to listen to music on your mobile phone. You make a collection in iTunes and choose which of those to appear on your iPhone (or iPad). The most recent OS update (5.0) allows users to do this without having to physically connect their iDevice to a desktop or laptop.

Apple has also just released iTunes Match. This costs £21.99 per year. It does two things: 1) It holds all your music in iCloud so you can listen to a track anywhere by streaming it where there is a wifi connection, which means that you no longer have to download all your tracks and use up all the memory.

2) Apple will allow you to upload music to your iCloud from any source – CD, Amazon MP3 songs, even tracks you may have acquired illegally in your misspent youth, ahem, and it will ‘match’ it with a higher quality version, no questions asked.

The downside to iTunes is that it will only play on Apple-made devices. Or, so people think.

But you can get tracks from your iTunes collection onto your Android phone, too. Download an app from the Market called Double Twist. You sync the app with the computer which holds all your iTunes music, and it will copy and download them to your Android mobile.

The iTunes poorly executed social function, called Ping, hasn’t taken off. It’s restricted to your iTunes social sphere – there is no integration with Facebook and syncing it to Twitter is messy – so it’s not really very social at all. Most users switch if off pretty quickly.

Spotify - The popular streaming service, you can listen to your songs over wifi on your iPhone/Android/Blackberry – and download up to 3,333 of them for offline listening on your mobile – for £9.99 a month. Unlike the free version of Spotify, paying this also means you don’t have to listen to ads, and you are not restricted to set number of plays per track.

Syncing is really fast. Downloading 3,333 tracks can take an age – all night almost – but once it’s done it’s easy to chop and change this list, meaning you can add/remove albums or individual tracks you wish to save to your mobile for offline listening.

(If you have both iTunes and Spotify on an iPhone or iPod Touch, you may have trouble listening to Spotify songs when your device is connected to a car stereo. I’ve tried to many times, and after playing for approx three seconds, the Spotify track fades out, and a random iTunes song plays instead. Then again, that could just be me…)

Oh, and if you find some music in Spotify that you really, really love, you can buy it from iTunes via your Spotify account.

Spotify also has the best social sharing. Lots of users will post what they’re listening to on their Facebook wall – which can be annoying. The best social feature, however, is the ability to create a playlist and share it. A Spotify user looking for, say, a great 80s music collection, can ask for users’ playlists via Twitter and, once found, can simply copy it. Great.

Last FM - A slightly different offering, Last FM’s best trick is to play you music which is similar to artists you already know and love. Like Tom Waits? Last FM will play you songs from other artists is classes as similar to Waits. This is excellent for music discovery.

Soundcloud – an emerging service which combines AudioBoo-style short recordings from users, of anything from their baby’s first words to waves crashing on a beach. It has been picked up by musicians and DJs as a way of releasing new music. Soundcloud has great social functions, and any track you upload is easily embeddable into your own website.

Android phones come with a range of music players. Here’s a link to the music category in the Android Market. None are as straightforward as iTunes. Android phones work best with either Google Music or Amazon Cloud Player – both allow users to store music in the cloud and stream on mobile phones. Neither, however, are yet available in the UK.

Google Music – not yet in UK, but launched in US last autumn. Google Music has an iTunes-like feature whereby users can upload their entire collection onto Google’s servers, and sync their favourites to their Android phones and MP3 players.

Amazon Cloud Player store – not yet in UK. Amazon last year created a ‘locker’ for users to store all their purchases of content in the cloud. This includes any music bought from Amazon.

It’s very popular in the US – many users buy their music from Amazon and then add it to their iTunes collection.

Other music streaming services popular in the US and other countries, but not available in the UK are Pandora and Rdio. This is due to the tricky business of negotiating prices and revenue share with music labels country-by-country. But, they will get here eventually, probably.

The UK does have internet radio. TuneIn Radio has stations and genres from around the world. Perfect for a rainy Sunday afternoon, for trawling obscure radio stations and hearing some bizarre music. TuneIn Radio comes as an app for both iPhone and Android phones.

See also: Logitech Z515 – nifty bluetooth speakers so you can play wirelessly from your mobile phone

Not two years ago the Blackberry was the king of the smartphone. It was still the executive weapon of choice and the iPhone (still on 3GS, pre-4) was steadily catching up, but was more of an expensive plaything for creative ‘types’, not for the corporate world or for mums.

Android phones were still called G1’s, or something…

How times have changed. Today’s early morning news that RIM chief executives Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie had stepped down comes at a time when Blackberry’s market share is plummeting. It has fallen so far behind Apple’s iPhone and the array of Android phones, it is even perceived to be trailing Windows Phone 7 and Nokia.

The Blackberry used to be great because: 

• Business loved it. It had the best IT security, best Windows integration, and it never went down.
• Loads of kids’ dads would hand down their Blackberry phone when they got an upgrade at work. It meant a Blackberry handset – with free messaging – was the first smartphone for many teenagers in the UK.
• The Blackberry had the best email by far. Better than Android, way better than iPhones. You could argue that it still does have the best email service, certainly if you have to use Microsoft Outlook for work.

The Blackberry started becoming rubbish because:

• Business started hating it. Office workers and executives alike found a more fun mobile phone called iPhone which they could sync with their work email and use daily.
• It doesn’t have any decent apps. Apple’s App Store and Android’s Market have zillions, most of them wonderful.
• It went down. For several days last autumn. And that Really Annoyed People.

Now I don’t know whether RIM’s new CEO Thorsten Heins is a magician, but Blackberry can expect to continue being rubbish, unless:

• It brings out a new and fantastic operating system ASAP which has multi touch, brilliant apps, superb voice recognition, and sits alongside a family of equally stunning products such as tablets and computers which all talk to each other, all of which can access a vast ecosystem of content such as music, books, games and films.
• It never goes down again. Ever.
• And RIM does some incredibly generous deals with corporations who are making bigger eyes at Apple and Windows Phones for future partnerships.

The change in Blackberry’s fortunes was nicely captured this month by the BBC’s second series of Sherlock Holmes. The first series, which aired in August 2010, saw the eccentric but brilliant sleuth using a Blackberry as he navigated his way through the mean underbelly of London. In the second series, his mobile phone of choice is, of course, an iPhone 4. (Seeing as the series was filmed in early 2011 it wouldn’t be a 4S. And besides, there are no scenes co-starring Siri.)

In all seriousness, this is bad for the consumer. Blackberry should be providing Apple and Google with better competition. Without strong players in the mobile market, technology and innovation will slow down.

See also: What’s Apple got that Microsoft Windows hasn’t?

It was simple, effective. A timeline, mentions, and direct message streams. Easy to add multiple accounts, easy to connect with other apps.

Then a few weeks ago Twitter made some big changes to its service, when it introduced richer profile pages and introduced two new fancy words to its homescreen for both website and official mobile apps – Connect and Discover.

Connect, which replaces the Mentions stream, is a round-up of your mentions plus what other users you follow, and who follow you, are doing. Instead of seeing a list of tweets which mention you, you see a mish-mash of actions from other users.

Discover is a collection of trending topics and ‘stories’ – real time news which Twitter is so useful for. Discover also contains suggestions of people to follow.

All of which is fine, and works well on the website. But on your mobile? Not so much. The simple format of all tweets, mentions and DMs was popular and the app was fast and effective in its previous functionality.

So the changes signaled a mass search party for a Twitter mobile alternative. There’s plenty out there, but a winner has emerged – Tweetbot.

Not only does Tweetbot have the simplest UI with fast, easy to use channels we all want – all tweets, mentions, DMs, it also saves a channel for Favourites and Search – but the latter two can be changed if you wish, to lists, profiles, retweets.

In short, Tweetbot is Twitter from ye olde times, fast and simple, but customizable if you do want the extras (but they’re not forced on you).

See also: Path mobile app gets more sharing features in version 2

These days of course the same information comes to us via our mobile phones we carry in our pockets.

In the not-too-distant future we all wear them on our wrists.

For now, while we still stuck inside the “in between” bit, a sort of purgatory between browser and apps, we shuffle between both. It can get a bit messy trying to organise and make sense of all the available information out there. You see, the web isn’t yet clever enough to find you yet. You still have to find *it*,

And when you do, then what? Your mobile handset is still a bit awkward to consume information (remember, we’re in 2012 still, and constrained by atoms as well as bits.) Your tablet device, such as the iPad, is however perfect for it. Except for the fact that it won’t fit inside your pocket, unless you’re ultra geeky and wear a ScottyVest jacket.

My favourite tool when I spot something on a mobile which I want to remember and take a deep soak in later when I’m propped up on sofa/in bed/at desk is Instapaper. This is a nifty app which bookmarkets your favourite websites/pages/RSS feeds into a plain, simple reader which is perfect for a tablet.

Stumbled across a great blog post (hint, hint) but about to meet your loved one for lunch? With Instapaper you can save it for when you’ve got time and fewer distractions to read it.

It already works in sync with apps such as Reeder and Twitter, and bookmarking sites such as Pinboard. It is also a private tool (unless you choose to make everything you save to Instapaper public) which is quite a noble, quaint notion in this age of social media sharing.

Once you’ve signed up, here are some easy instructions to installing the Instapaper bookmark on your mobile. On the iPhone it works better than Apple’s very own Reading List because once it has been saved to Instapaper, you don’t need wifi or 3G connection to see it.

As well as Pinboard, Instapaper accounts can be synced with other bookmarking / cloud computing tools such as Evernote. This gives you greater access over Android as well as iOS, and any internet browser.

It also works with Flipboard, Pulse, Seesmic, StumbleUpon, Tweetbot, Hitpad… and many, many more.

See also: Cloud computing – best text editors to sync your work across mobiles, tablets, laptops and desktops