Business social network LinkedIn made a major upgrade to its iPhone app tonight but coming from a service with such incredible potential, there remain some major disappointments. The new app looks like a less elegant version of the Facebook iPhone app, but it’s less customizable. There are a variety of useful new features, from faster invite sending to importing contact info to your phone, but the app remains based on the company’s mistaken desire of late to be your all-in-one social media messaging platform. It also fails to deliver the features that would make it most useful. If you’re looking for good news about new features, you can find it in the self-flattering company blog post . Here are the three things that disappoint me most about this new app; hopefully it’s a work in progress and will improve soon. Sponsor What’s The Most Important Kind of LinkedIn Update? People Getting New Jobs! For some reason LinkedIn will not deliver you a simple feed of the new jobs that contacts of yours have taken. Not by email, not by RSS, not through its fancy new API and not on this new iPhone app. Update feeds are cluttered with imported ephemera from Twitter and all too often job changes are obscured behind the phrase “contact X has updated their profile.” They have? How did they update it? It’s maddening. LinkedIn says it’s working on solving this problem, but it doesn’t seem to be a very high priority. Prompting users to click more and engage with a wider variety of message types seem more in line with LinkedIn’s strategy. The company clearly wants to be Facebook and Twitter for the business world – not just a place where we all go to find out essential work information that we use while doing other forms of social networking on other sites better suited for things like short, trivial messages. Importing Contacts to Your Phone is Rudimentary Perhaps LinkedIn isn’t to blame for this, but the ability to import LinkedIn contacts’ info onto your phone is rendered a whole lot less useful by the inability to merge that info with existing contacts. Say you’ve got someone’s name and phone number on your phone already – it’s a headache to pull in a person’s LinkedIn profile info and then merge the two manually. Of course your phone number isn’t an optional field you can fill out on LinkedIn, so all those imported contacts will be people you’re unable to call. You won’t even be able to look them up on LinkedIn again from your phone’s contact list – peoples’ LinkedIn profile page URLs aren’t included in the contact info that gets imported. There’s No Push Notifications This is a professional application that people use on the iPhone – shouldn’t it include push notifications? LinkedIn is used by tons of sales people, for example – you know they’d like to get some of these updates pushed to them. As a writer, I would too. Look at it this way. Last month my LinkedIn contact Tara Hunt changed her profile to show that she’s founded a new company called Shwowp . I want to know that, preferably right away. But I don’t know about it until a month later because I didn’t want to fish through a bunch of cross-posted Twitter updates inside LinkedIn to catch Tara’s news and I didn’t want to click through 3 screens starting with the bland “Tara Hunt has updated her profile” in order to see if she’s happened to change jobs or just noted a new personal interest on her profile page. When someone who has accepted my contact request changes jobs, I want a push notification about what the new job is and the option to call them on the phone immediately to discuss it. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask and that’s when I’ll know that LinkedIn is really serving my professional life. Update: LinkedIn’s Adam Nash, author of the company’s announcement blog post, responded on Twitter saying: “we’ve discussed all three of these enhancements internally. Some are harder than others. All in the queue…Rest assured, we wouldn’t have broken out profile updates into its own module if we didn’t have big plans for it. ” Discuss

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LinkedIn’s New iPhone App: The 3 Worst Things About It

Who was the first person to follow you on Twitter? According to the app FirstFollower.com , mine was someone I never followed back until today! Chances are you’re already following your first follower, but you probably don’t remember who they are and it’s interesting to find out. Built by Russian developer Victor Babichev , FirstFollower appears to perform a function that’s relatively simple but in a much faster way than you can do manually. You could scroll back page by oddly numbered page through a person’s Followers list, but now this handy little app will do it for you. It’s also a very interesting way to find people who are close friends in real-life of Twitter users you admire. Sponsor It’s hard to know for sure how accurate the service is, particularly since Twitter changed the way it displays followers earlier this year, but Twitter founder @ev is said to have been followed first by @dom, one of the handful of people credited with creating Twitter in the first place. The first person to follow @barackobama? Cori Schlegel , a contract web developer who’s worked on several projects for tech journalist Steve Gillmor and probably a good guy to know. See also: The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Heroes on Twitter Did you know that Mary Hodder was the first follower of both chronic innovator Chris Messina’s new Twitter account and our own Alex Williams ? That’s enough to make you think that anyone Mary follows in the future deserves a close look. Fun and useful! What more could you ask for from a lightweight little Twitter app? This is just a small example of the kind of social graph analysis that’s made possible by Twitter’s relatively open user data. Discuss

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Fun: FirstFollower Identifies Any Twitter User’s First Follower

A group of podcasters in Portland, Oregon have teamed up with internet friends around the world to create a new type of charity fundraiser, a live streaming telethon. Called 30 Hour Day , the event begins this evening. It will use streaming media services to deliver the content, the Causes Facebook application to collect donations, and Twitter to spread the word. 30 consecutive hours of music, variety acts, podcasts and other entertainment will raise money for local charity organizations. Will it work? Portland has a deep community of geeks and connections all around the web, so perhaps this group will be able to keep people entertained around the clock. Sponsor Well known geeky guests from outside Portland will include leading international nonprofit tech consultant Beth Kanter and author Tara Hunt . Charities benefitting from the event will include low-income computer assistance project Free Geek , the very innovative Oregon Food Bank and Toys for Tots. You can follow the event on Twitter at @30hourday . Discuss

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30HourDay: Now There’s a Telethon 2.0

When I called Twitter out on my post of the top 10 failures of 2009 for “failing to innovate,” what I probably should have said was this: Twitter has done a decent job of implementing features that we first saw being used by third-party apps. The concept of user lists? Sawhorse Media introduced those . Retweet functions? That was a user idea that had already been implemented formally by many mobile and desktop applications. And the hot Contributor API is something that CoTweet has been doing for a while. The geotagging API is hardly new, either. But instead of saying that Twitter failed to innovate, let’s instead name a few features we love from third-party apps that we think they should integrate themselves – maybe with a key acquisition or two. Sponsor Autocompleting Usernames Third-Party App That Does This: Twitdroid , DestroyTwitter It’s a rather simple feature, but it would make our lives a lot easier. When typing an @ reply or cc’ing a user, it helps to have a cheat sheet in the form of an autocompletion feature that remembers all your friends. Allow Multimedia Uploading and Embedding Third-Party Apps That Do This: PowerTwitter , Twitpic The convoluted process of uploading media to a third party and getting your content synced up to your Twitter account can be frustrating, especially when bugs arise. And not being able to preview images or videos before clicking through is a pressure point, as well. Threaded Views for Conversations Third-Party Apps That Do This: Twitdroid , TwiToaster Being able to see what an @ reply is all about can turn into a trail of digital breadcrumbs ten tabs long. Seeing a threaded conversation in a single click would be much more convenient. Management & Analytics Third-Party Apps That Do This: Bit.ly , TwitterCounter , Tweetmeme , DoesFollow , Twitter Karma I’m obsessed, you’re obsessed, we’re all obsessed with follower counts! Not to mention clickthroughs, reciprocity, retweets, and all the metrics that make up the statistical side of Internet fame. Real-time measurement of Twitter activity would be worth paying for. Official Mobile & Desktop Applications Third-Party Apps That Do This: Tweetdeck , Seesmic , Tweetie , Twitdroid , TwitterBerry The single greatest opportunity for Twitter innovation (and yes, we’re resisting the very strong urge to make a portmanteau from those two words) is perhaps in the desktop and mobile app space. It’s one of the most clearly monetizable avenues for Twitter to pursue, and the “official” stamp of approval on an application would guarantee that app’s success. Moreover, there would probably be clear opportunities for an official app to come pre-loaded on laptops and mobile devices. Clearly, there’s a universe of features for Twitter to choose from. From social gaming to DM schedule reminders, oneforty is like a catalog of what Twitter could – and perhaps should – be doing next. What do you think – what Twitter features would you like to see launched in 2010? Give us your opinion in the comments. Discuss

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5 Features from Third-Party Apps Twitter Should Integrate

Twitter client developers will be pleased to note that popular light blogging platform Tumblr now supports a Tweetie and Twitterific compatible API. In a recent blog post , the company explains how the API will help Twitter clients support Tumblr. While the release allows for similar posting and reading capabilities to last week’s WordPress API announcement, it’s a coup for those looking to Twitter to become the open messaging standard. Sponsor In response to today’s Tumblr announcement, RSS pioneer and blogger Dave Winer writes , “Conventional wisdom says that open standards are created by endless deliberations among experts and big tech companies, and those sometimes gain traction, but this is how it usually happens. Someone goes first. No one thinks of it as an open standard. Then someone clones it. All of a sudden people get ideas. Inspired, someone goes third. At this point it’s inevitable that there will be a fourth and fifth and so on.” Last week ReadWriteWeb suggested that a publish/subscribe standard was already beginning to take shape with both the WordPress API and Twitter/Feedburner integration. As of today, we may be one step closer to a web where content feeds are standardized and portable across a variety of platforms and services. Discuss

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Open Messaging Here We Come: Tumblr Releases Twitter Client API

It seems we’ve come across way too many stories lately about successful folks stealing good ideas from unknown underdogs. We hate to be the sourpusses of the tech set, but we’ve come across another unhappy but still viable tale of questionable dealings, this time involving Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and his hot new mobile-linked credit card scanner company, Square . Sponsor Dorsey and his Square co-founder, Jim McKelvey, had reportedly been negotiating with electrical engineering professor Bob Morley, who says he built and filed a patent for the technology for scanning a credit card and converting its data from a magnetic stripe into an audio signal. The professor, who lives and works in St. Louis (where Square has its Operations HQ), said he wanted to give Square his tech in exchange for shares, but that didn’t pan out. The parties ended their negotiations unsuccessfully in October, about four months after Morley filed his patent. The patent hasn’t yet been published, and no one’s certain exactly whose technology Square’s card scanner is employing. But let’s back it up for a second: How are we even sure this Morley character isn’t a complete charlatan who is simply taking advantage of circumstances to cash in on a company valued at $40 million? Through hours of back-breaking research, a.k.a., looking these folks up on Twitter and DoesFollow, we can see that Morley met with Square cofounders in June and was at San Francisco International Airport again in July. But anyone can claim to have met with the Internet famous, right? However, both McKelvey and Dorsey follow Morley on Twitter, suggesting a more intimate relationship. By way of illustrating this point, Dorsey has a million and a half followers and returns the favor to a mere 751 users. It seems unlikely that a close friend or acquaintance would make such potentially damaging claims, but we’re sure this happens from time to time, as well. Still, Square is about a lot more than converting magnetic data to an audio signal. There’s the iPhone app, photo verification of cardholders and a pretty cool integration with nonprofit organizations, too. And until Morley’s patent is granted, Square is free to carry on with business as usual, regardless of who engineered their hardware. But Morley is also free to shop his tech around to other companies – and in a space this hot and this lucrative, we’re sure he’ll find plenty of interested parties. While we wait to hear back from a Square rep, we’re left to ponder the specifics and implications of this unsavory story. There is certainly a lot of gray area here, but the proof will be in the patents. Discuss

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Did Dorsey & Square Cheat on Hardware Development?

The Twitterati have spoken! Throughout 2009, a few tech topics got so much attention that they managed to make Twitter’s trends. Google Wave was one of the most notable of these, obviously, but what were the other subjects of such interest to Twitter-using geeks? Twitter has just released a list of the top 10 technology-related trending topics of the year; here’s what tweeps have been talking about. Sponsor 1. Google Wave The most-talked-about app of the year – on Twitter and likely in many other circles, was Google Wave. As invitations rolled out in waves, each initiate was given a limited number of invites to pass on to friends and colleagues. This left the twittersphere clamoring for Wave invites and drove the keyword into Twitter’s general trending topics on multiple occasions. If Wave did nothing else right, they certainly mastered the art of the viral marketing campaign. 2. Snow Leopard Apple fanboys (and girls) the world around rejoiced when the newest Mac operating system was released this year. Snow Leopard was announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in June 2008, which meant that Mac geeks had been waiting to buy their copies for more than a year by the time the OS hit shelves in August of this year. 3. Tweetdeck This Twitter app became wildly successful this year and made tech headlines for its Facebook and LinkedIn integration, its iPhone app (a strong competitor to challenge Tweetie 2), its themed interfaces, and more. 4. Windows 7 The longsuffering Windows users among us had long been suffering when Windows 7 was released this year. Better, smarter, faster and less buggy, the OS promised to be the answer to our prayers and a reason to hold our heads up in front of Mac users. Windows also had an interesting marketing campaign that kept their OS on the tips of tongues – and the top of trends – for several months running. 5. CES The Consumer Electronics Show, held each year in Las Vegas, is a gadget geek’s version of the AVN Awards, also held each year in Las Vegas. Coincidence? Most definitely. 6. Palm Pre Several years ago, geeks fell in love with the Treo. Then Palm devices kind of fell off the face of the earth and out of public favor until this year, when the company released the tiny touchscreen device known as the Pre. The first iteration of the device hasn’t yet become overwhelmingly popular, but the Pre definitely has its fans. 7. Google Latitude In 2005, location-based app Dodgeball was bought by Google. The Dodgeball creators went on to make Foursquare, and this year, Google replaced Dodgeball with Latitude, which very simply shows you where your friends are on Google Maps. Latitude could be the basis for more tricky applications in the future, but location tech in general can be a difficult technology to master. 8. #E3 Another yearly holy-grail-of-its-industry conference, E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, is held in Los Angeles. This con is where gamer geeks die and go to heaven. 9. #amazonfail Amazon suffered public criticism this year when certain gay and lesbian books were removed from sales rankings for containing adult content. The trouble was, most of the titles in question weren’t “adult” in nature at all, leading media and the general public to the conclusion that Amazon execs were deeply and terribly homophobic. In the end, it turned out that a single Amazon employee in France set a Boolean flag on adult content from False to True, taking out 57,000 books in his wake. Whoopsie! 10. Macworld And finally, there was MacWorld. Steve Jobs was unable to make the event, and Apple announced that the 2009 con would be the last year the company would participate in the show. The company announced a few modest treats, including new versions of iLife and iWork, as well as a 17-inch MacBook. Apple further announced that music sold on iTunes would be DRM-free. And that’s it for Twitter’s top trends! Do you think the right topics got the most attention? What do you think would have been trend #11? Let us know your thoughts in the comments! Discuss

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Twitter’s Top 10 Tech Trends of 2009