Today I installed iOS4 (the latest iPhone operating system) on my phone. It took a whole lot of tries because the download kept failing – I suppose Apple’s servers were overloaded. Anyway, I’ve finally got it installed now.

iOS4 is available for iPod touch, iPhones 3G and 3Gs, as well as the brand new iPhone4. It has a bunch of new features, including:

• Home screen backgrounds
• Digital zoom for the camera
• Tap-to-focus for video
• The long-awaited multi-tasking functionality
• App folders

If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, do the upgrade. I’m really enjoying these new features!

Recently, Twitter has been having some reliability issues. Errors, tweet counts, follow counts, and fail whales have been more the rule than the exception in the last two weeks. Twitter says that this is due to problems in their internal network structure which have been exacerbated by heavy tweeting on the World Cup.

Such widespread, long term outages are a bit uncommon for a web service, but who can complain, seeing as Twitter is a free service? It does raise an issue though: what if you rely on Twitter as a primary means of communicating with your clients and supporters? Do you have a backup system in place?

Possibilities are many: sending updates from a Facebook page, a LinkedIn profile, a FriendFeed account, or with Friendster. Obviously you don’t need them all, but having one or two alternatives is just good planning.

And remember to promote all your social media channels on your website!