Twitter addicts need to tweet all the time. Facebook fans need to update their status, and Like the thoughts of others, constantly.

Social media is all-pervasive and smartphones make it possible to do anywhere, at any time.

Unless you’re driving.

We all know this doesn’t stop people, but the law, commonsense and (hopefully) a developed sense of risk aversion all make it hard to be as interconnected when driving. Which is a pain if, say, you’re a commuter, driving home from work in the peak must-not-miss activity times.

Enter the car makers. BMW’s the latest to take on the challenge of in-car Facebook and Twitter, with a neat solution that harnesses the power of ConnectedDrive.

It’s accessed via a nudge of the iDrive controller: find it in the BMW Apps submenu. There, you have a choice of functions accessed through a smartphone dropped into the centre console (plugging it into a dedicated holster allows BMW to hook it into the car’s wired-in roof aerial, improving reception).

Key to these for Brits will be Facebook and Twitter. Functionality is centred around status updates and having the news of others flashed up on the iDrive display. Yes, even the avatars are displaced in status streams. It’s extremely neat.

Safe Facebook

Broadcasting your own status is the big deal, though. But BMW doesn’t demand you type out status updates. Good job: you’d be there all day, or in a hedge. Instead, it has a list of pre-prepared messages. And I know what you’re thinking here: dear god, how impossibly cheesy.

But wait. Lots of them are dynamic messages. Within a standard text message lies a function that auto-inserts selected variables. A bit like an in-car PHP programmer.

There’s some cool stuff here, explained BMW iDrive expert Dieter Leimig on the 1 Series launch. Happen to be listening to some 1990s indie track that will have your mates in raptures? There’s a message that will insert the track title automatically, and fire it out: I am listening to <insert track title>.

Want to tell folk how far away you are from arrival? There’s a message that lets you enter the <arrival time> from the sat nav. There’s one that lets you tell people you <location>. There’s one that lets you update what the <outside temperature> is.

Tweet or Facebook these at your leisure: it’s smart stuff from BMW and, in time, will hook into far more feeds from the car’s systems.

BMW Apps to grow

Indeed, BMW Apps, said Leimig, is predicted to be a growth area over the next yew years. “We’re giving people the possibility to load up new apps for the car – and, next year, there’s going to be a developer’s kit released, that will let people create their own apps.

“It’s a good way for people with a car that’s a few years old to add new functions and interest to their car.”

Can you think of any variable-embedded status updates that would work well? Or, can imagine any more ambitious apps that you could create, given a BMW developer’s toolkit?

If so, share ‘em below. BMW’s given us the platform and will, in 2012, give us the development kit: why not come up with the ideas to capitalise on it?

+ BMW 1 Series power meters

+ Evernote inspires Ford

+ Social media strategy advice needed

Rolls-Royce has released an iPhone app that shows just how car makers can innovatively use the smartphone platform.

The Rolls-Royce Ghost App lets iPhone users paint a ‘virtual’ Ghost car with any of the offered body and trim colours they like. Creating a perfect visual representation of their very own Ghost.

Every single combination they create can be saved into a ‘garage’, for showing off to their mates. Clever or what?

Coming from the maker of what was once called ‘the best car in the world’, you’d expect it to be good. This journo has just downloaded it and can report, yes, it is extremely trick indeed.

It’s a smart way of showing just how many colour and trip options are available with modern cars, plus a taster of how they’ll look together. It’s got stickability – Rolls-Royce says there are ‘thousands’ of combinations to play with.

Also part of the App is a gallery of Ghost images, video and a function to search for the nearest Rolls-Royce car dealer. Alas, this doesn’t use Foursquare-style location functions, but takes you instead to the web browser. Never mind: it’s still good.

The App is so impressive (and free!), I’d expect other brands to quickly copy it and do something similar – particularly car makers who really focus on the individuality of their ranges.

Check out the Rolls-Royce Ghost App yourself, at the iTunes AppStore.

What can the iPhone teach us about electric cars?

McLaren F1 dashboard on the cheap

iDo iPhone at last

APPLE caught me unawares with the iPhone. Why do you need an iPod to make calls, I first thought? Hmm. I’ll stick with my Nokia.

What an idiot. I failed to see that call-making ability wasn’t central to the iPhone’s appeal. No, it was the other things it could do on the 3G network that mean I now wake up in mental anguish because I don’t own one.

With an iPod, you’re socially networked. You have Facebook, full Twitter, iGoogle, Flickr, YouTube… everything you need so’s not to be tied to a desk.

At the moment, I access many of these through the iMac – great, addictive, brilliant and all that – but very much a one-location activity. I can send basic Tweets from my boggo Nokia, but do not much more than that. Facebook? Window shopping, little more. And there’s not a cat’s hope of doing anything Flickry.

What about WiFi and the MacBook, you may ask? Well, you’re right. It means I can sit anywhere. And doesn’t your iPod have WiFi, plus Safari? Yup, both true.

The MacBook means I can FB away during Corrie, and the iPod means so long as there’s WiFi, there’s some form of connection – Emails too, through MobileMe.

Fine… but it does get a bit, uh, ‘hot’, lugging a hard-working laptop around. And it’s still not fully intuitive, or totally convenient, or… well, detached from work.

To lessen the risk of ‘accidentally’ opening up MSWord and subbing tomorrow’s news, I’ll turn to the iPod. And cuss Apple for being devious. No Bluetooth, you see. So, no remote 3G access. It’s WiFi or nowt. So, short of specific locations, it’s not ‘mobile net either’.

Enter the Tablet. Convenient. Flexible, Highly portable. With, I’d imagine, Bluetooth, for 3G mobily connection. Super hi-res screen. Interface to die for – and that little-demand touch-screen interface that really does make it beguilingly convenient.

Indeed, it’s so ‘easily always on’, I reckon it is a genuine game-changer. It’s come along, just as the possibilities of Real Time Web enter wider acceptance. And, RTW + Tablet = virtual excuseless reasons not to be perma-on.

Will I queue up to buy one, for circa £350? Probably: watch out Birmingham’s Bull Ring, for another tent. Because I know my life will change because of it. Will mean I really can don’t have to be sat here, typing, remote from the motorsport on Sky – I can do both at once.

Can’t at the mo, though. So, you’ll have to excuse me…

Social media and I

Social media brings close access to heroes!

My mum’s media mash-up

HOW is this motoring journalist finding social media is helping him?

For the past few months, I’ve been religiously following the many, many bibles; it quickly became clear socializing would be no hardship to me.

Hard as it may be to believe, Twitter wasn’t the first to be mastered. But it’s certainly been the most useful. Particularly as I’ve chosen some brilliant people to follow. @jakehumphreyf1, @steverubel, @grandprixcom, @richardpbacon and the genius @PerryBelcher, to name but a few – they’re constantly posting useful Tweets and links.

Indeed, it’s the links that’s really cemented Twitter, rather than the updates. I’m hooked into motor industry experts, so get news far quicker than I ever have. Through Twhirl, my trusty desktop AIR, it’s brilliant.

Google Reader was my first love, though. I discovered RSS, was introduced to this by Brendan Cooper, and nowadays have it a staple of every browser I use. Never, ever before have I been so clued up in the areas that matter – cars, technology, PR, journalism – and there is never a time Reader lacks something of interest. I am never now stuck for something to read. Never. It’s ace. Albeit making a tiny Sony Vaio P Series even more essential…

Reader does take some commitment; as with emails, I don’t like to have unread things sitting there. Which is why I’ve been finding read-it-later resources such as, well, readitlater, very useful. And Xmarks saved me in a million ways, when I had a recent Firefox 101. (Still not working, alas: social media hasn’t quite managed to solve that one.)

Twitter, though, you can’t help but keep coming back to. It’s omnipresent, but a real weapon for me. My editor, @cardealered, uses it to inform of new stories on our site; here, we’ve discovered the power of the retweets to drive traffic. And, outside of work, there’s nothing better than Tweeting the random car thoughts that come into my head…

Hopefully they’re useful to people. The reciprocal insights from those I follow are.

It’s via Twitter, and Reader, that I discovered @bmwblog; here, I’ve been able to promote some road tests I’ve written using Flickr. I was trying to think outside the box; car nuts like images, like detail. And, road tests, you can get very good one from lots of outlets. What I try to do instead is harness the power of the picture with bite-sized snippets for 20 or so images; a road test, well, in pictures.

It seems to have gotten quite a good response, and it’s all down to the genius of Flickr. Fans of the cars in particular have responded in kind, and I’ve met quite a few new folk and groups via this.

Of course, I’m a Facebooker – have been since way back in 2007. Didn’t understand it fully then, but loved the concept. Now see it as a part of my life; just what social media should be.

I haven’t really cracked Last.fm yet – need to give that some time. I can see the potential. I’ve also been foisted off a Mini blog, through stumbling straight into advanced social media techniques, without fully introducing myself to the audience first. Learning curve, that one (and reason why my future car choice has changed…).

LinkedIn, I’m on, and reckon it’s potentially huge, but isn’t quite ticking over fully for me yet. And delicious is just that.

What all this has really ingrained in me, though, is the sheer vitality of the web. The Cloud is the future, permaconnectedness the next crucial element. A few months ago, I longed for the most basic phone out there. Now, I need – NEED, I tell you – an iPhone or BlackBerry.

I want my house networked. I want to stream music onto my hifi. I’m looking at Mir:ror, and blogging on the go, and tidily coding up my own website, and all sorts. It’s changed how I work. It means my goals, aims and desires within motoring journalism are completely different. It’s even changed the relationships I have with PRs and other journalists.

With the socially savvy, I’m closer. There’s more trust. Confidence. We work together better. With my readers and our respective employers the ultimate beneficiaries.

So, what next? Your guess, etc… Reader comes up with something new every day. I’m no longer signing up for them all, but filtering the useful ones. Question is, where do you find the time to experiment? You make it, that’s how. With the Cloud, office hours are fluid. Boundaries no longer exist. Just like any good social media rockstar.

Even writing about it is exciting me. Must dash; Who knows what Reader might have for me…

Social media brings close access to heroes!

bmwblog and UK car dealer agree

First blog

MAC fan Charles Moore has written a well considered piece on theappleblog, making the link between the Mini and, well, the Mac mini computer.

Me, I’m also a worshipper of both, and the comparisons are so apparent, I’m amazed I’ve not spotted them before.

Macs? Well, they’re cool, classless, not the cheapest but exceedingly well packaged, extremely well conceived and pretty damn trick underneath the surface. This blog is originated on a Mac. Everything you see here has been written processed on a Mac.

Minis? Well, we all know they’re pretty cool, period. ‘Nuff said there.

What’s soon apparent in the piece, though, is that Moore is comparing the original Mini, not the new MINI, to the Mac mini. That car, he says, is more of a rival to Apple’s premium machines.

Interesting.

These really are quite delectable things of envy.

But, a Mac mini can do most of what they do, for much less. While also being, well, the world’s greenest and most efficient computer. The exact same concept the original Mini introduced the world to, back in the day.

It’s a compelling piece. Have a read and see what you think. And try to deny the genius of the wordplay: Mac mini. Mini. Max respect due to both.

Have I (again) solved the great Mini search?

Can you help me buy a Mini in 2009?

Mini fixes easy to come by