By far the two companies I’ve written about the most recently are Apple and Twitter. This is to the delight of some people, and the absolute horror of others. And now I’ve got something that will really whip up the fanboys and enrage the haters: Me writing about Apple writing about Twitter.

Yes, Apple has a new business profile of the micro-messaging service that it put up today on its site. The headline may just say it all, “Twitter. Triumph of humanity.” But it’s actually a fairly in-depth look at how Twitter uses Apple products to conduct their business. “Pretty much everyone here at Twitter uses a Mac,” says Alex Payne, Twitter’s API lead, in the video that accompanies the profile.

Specifically, the profile is pretty much like a series of talking points about why the Mac is great for business (as you might expect in such a profile). The profile delves into OS X and how it offers just about everything Twitter needs from TextMate to Keynote. And if Twitter team members really need to boot Windows for testing purposes, they just use VMware. Also brought up is the idea that Macs are more secure than PCs. And that MacBook Airs and iPhones has given employees a new state of mind about working on the go.

“Historically, people thought about the Mac as something for entertainment or graphics, but now they see the value of the Mac as a serious business tool. The same is true of Twitter,” the profile says at one point.

But there are a few interesting tidbits. One is that the profile claims Twitter gets “heavy use” out of Numbers and Pages — two pieces of software in the iWork suite that are much less popular than their Microsoft Office counterparts, Excel and Word. Another talks about the synergy between Twitter and Apple — how the keynote address at MacWorld was a big moment in early Twitter usage history. And how Twitter is now driving a lot of development for both the Mac and iPhone with third-party clients.

The profile also claims that many of the team’s software engineers “were attracted to Twitter as an employer because of its bent for the Mac.” And that one of the reasons the office space is littered with Macs is because they are more environmentally friendly than their PC counterparts — a message Apple has been pushing heavily recently.

A quote from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wraps up the profile, “Twitter is a minimalist communication tool that is very powerful. The Mac is the same way. It offers beautiful design, simple elegance, and a system that’s incredibly flexible and powerful to use.”

I can hear it now. The fanboys will let out a collective, “Awwww” — while the haters scream, “Get a room.”

[via Daring Fireball]

[photos via Apple]

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The N97 will be available for purchase in June. Meanwhile, Nokia has teamed with Aptana to deliver tools for building applications using the Nokia Web Runtime.

As Nokia prepares to launch its Ovi Store mobile application marketplace, the company also is delivering a new mobile device optimized to run applications available on the Ovi Store.

According to Nokia: The Nokia N97 is a S60 5th Edition mobile computer with a large 3.5-inch, bright nHD (640 by 360 pixels and 16:9 aspect ratio) TFT color display with resistive touch-screen and tactile feedback. The device provides excellent user experience for Internet and entertainment by combining QWERTY keyboard with touch UI and Home screen functionality. Use the N97 to connect to mobile broadband using WLAN or HSDPA (3.5G). Find directions and locations with the integrated A-GPS and included maps.

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In this eWEEK podcast hosted by Mike Vizard, the product marketing executive for UC4 Software, Matt Busch, explains why IT organizations need to take a new approach to managing IT that relies a lot more on automation and a lot less on manual labor.
- Audio Podcast Content….

In this article we are going to discuss spider and visitor website usability issues. Luckily for us both search engine spiders and human visitors have similar preferences and are quite easy to satisfy. Before we get deeply into what you should be doing though let s start with some examples of what you shouldn t be doing….

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If you re a web designer who wishes to learn how to build fully-centered web page layouts using CSS you ve come to the right place. Welcome to the final installment of a seven-part series on centering DIVs with CSS. This series shows you how to take advantage of the functionality provided by different DIV alignment techniques to construct centered web page designs which can be incorporated into any existing site with minor effort….

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One part people, one part machine. Is that a formula for more effective decision making? A number of high-profile entrepreneurs believe it is, and they are starting companies based on the idea.

In the following post we take a look at three of the most exciting startups entering this emerging market. The movement is a logical development now that millions of people are comfortable posting information online. The web’s next step is to leverage machine learning. These are three companies to watch who are doing just that - combining user input with technology that improves its performance by gathering and processing data. In this case they are doing it in order to help people make better decisions, but these are just some of the first consumer technologies that will enter the cyborg-like space that combines people and machines in order to better serve people.

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The three services we look at are Aardvark, Hunch and Swingly. Unfortunately none of these services are wide open to the public yet. If you go to their sites and request an invite, you should get one soon. You might also try asking around on other networks like Twitter or Facebook; two of the three services discussed below have invites in the wild now.

Aardvark

vark.com (Our initial review)

Premise: Ask any question by IM and your question will be routed to a tagged “expert” on the topic, among your friends and their networks.

Logic: There appears to be some semantic analysis of the tags given users by their friends and themselves, cross referenced with semantic analysis of the questions asked in order to find the right fit. We presume there is or will be some logic judging the history of successful answers from users so as to rank relative expertise.

History of one query.

An IM thread.

Editing user profile.

User experience: High coolness factor when a real person quickly answers your question. How reliable that person is regarding the topic of the question is not readily apparent. Interesting IM interface facilitates relatively sophisticated interactions based on short commands. Fun to browse through open questions; smart deference to email when people aren’t available by IM. Can be irritating to be interrupted by other people’s questions by IM, but not such a big deal. Web interface is quite nice but I’ve hardly ever seen it — just asking and answering questions through IM.

How It Differs From the Others: IM interface offers almost zero barrier to entry and a powerful hook to return to the service over time. Machine learning focuses on identifying human experts, and search is rich with human interaction, thinly mediated by a smart system. You could call this a friend-network-based, semantically powered expert discovery and conversation system.

Stage: Closed beta; new users get 50 invites. Has been in the works for years and is relatively well baked.

Backing: Made up largely of ex-Googlers. The parent company is called The Mechanical Zoo and has raised $6 million from very hip VC firm August Capital and Ron Conway’s Baseline Ventures.

For more info, see this review on VentureBeat.

Via the Official Gmail Blog, the best news since the lunar landing: Go into your Gmail account, click on the Google Labs icon, and enable Google Search in your Gmail account.

A simple little search box will appear right there in your sidebar. But that’s not even the awesome part. The range of tricks you can play with the search results is astounding.

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When you search, the results pop up in a Google Talk-like window. If you click on the links, results open in a separate window or tab.

But then there’s the REALLY cool part. You can click a drop-down menu next to the result and start to really have fun. If you’re hanging out in your inbox, you only see the menu option to send the result to someone via email. If you’re viewing an email, the drop-down menu offers to let you reply with the result. If you’re writing a new email, you can choose to paste the URL, paste the result, or send the whole thing in an email. And if you’re using Google Talk, the menu further allows you to send the result and URL via chat to any of the people with whom you may be chatting.

So, you no longer have to toggle between your favorite email and your favorite search engine. Google’s made it all into one tasty info-sharing sandwich. Essentially, what you’re doing here is lightning-fast social link-sharing via Gmail and Google Talk.

Can you imagine how much smarter this is going to make you look? If you can master this simple tool, you’ll be the most insufferable know-it-all in your crew. I think we can safely label Gmail with added Google Search power as Tech That Will Get You Laid.

P.S. Don’t make fun of my Gmail theme. Please, have a little mercy. I’m new here.

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Welcome to the conclusion of a seven-part series on handling views with the Code Igniter PHP framework. If you’re learning how to use the Model-View-Controller schema, this series of articles can help you get a better grasp of how to use it to quickly and dynamically generate web pages. In this part, we will finish building the database-driven application we discussed in the previous part.
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- Event handlers play a fundamental role within any JavaScript application, since they keep track of mouse clicks, keyboard and window events, and so forth. Logically, their existence permits us to develop client-side programs that are much more responsive than an application running in the web serve…