Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

BlackBerry Figures That Maybe There’s Something to This Twitter Thing, After All

Good news, BlackBerry users! Someday, sometime, sort of soonish, the good people at Research in Motion are going to support Twitter, via their own app.

What’s that, you say? It’s 2010, Twitter is Oprah-endorsed mainstream, and there’s no shortage of Twitter apps that work with BlackBerry?

Well, you’re right, of course. One of Twitter’s core strengths is its open platform, which allows developers to build any Twitter app they want. And there are indeed a whole lot of Berry-compatible apps.

So the fact that RIM (RIMM) is just now–actually, not even now, since the thing is still in invite-only beta–rolling out an officially endorsed client is telling, I think.

And yes, Apple (AAPL), among other mobile platforms, has done just fine without an official Twitter app of its own. But I use both, and I can say with confidence that apps on the BlackBerry are an entirely different experience from those on the iPhone/iPod platform.

Load up an app via iTunes and you can be reasonably sure that it’s not going to crash your phone or chew up your memory. You can’t say that about a Twitter client on a BlackBerry, unfortunately.

So. The good news is that the RIM-endorsed client should resolve that problem. (Right?) The bad news is that this is still a future-tense proposition.

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”