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iPhone users can now more easily access and update their Twitter feeds thanks to Twitter's efforts to improve support for mobile browsers, including Safari. Now when you access Twitter.com from your iPhone, you are greeted with a mobile friendly version of the service instead of the standard "pinch me please" desktop version.

Finally I can inform my followers of important moments in day. "I'm eating a ham sandwich, sitting on the john."

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Rumor gets reported there will be Flash on the iPhone. Rumor gets smashed. Rumor gets reported there will be unlimited music on the iPhone. Rumor gets smashed. Rinse and repeat.

What's going on? Why aren't we getting these stories straight?

Turns out maybe these stories weren't meant to be gotten. Turns out maybe these stories were meant to get us.

There was a time when media really was the fourth estate, when it reported the news. In something akin to the scientific method, media observed what was going on in the grand experiment that is society, looked for pattern and flaw, then contextualized it, gave it form and flavor, and broadcast it by mule and truck and cable and fiber to those who wanted or needed to know.

Now media is entertainment and is competing with itself and other forms of entertainment for your attention and your dollar. One of the ways to compete is to get mysterious "un-named sources" to give you the highly prized "sensational headline". And instead of digging for these sources and convincing them to come forward, the anonymous sources now trip and push past each other to get to the reporters first. Why? Because controlling the story is important. Information is power and spin is leverage.

Okay, soap-box, what does this have to do with the iPhone? Two interesting and very similar blog posts emerged recently shedding new light on both the Flash and unlimited music stories that have been all over the web lately. Let's take a look:

Chalk another developer up for the iPhone App Watch: Microsoft. Microsoft has a small team called the MacBU that develops the very successful Office Suite for the Mac -- an office suite that until the recent version was widely thought to be more advanced than even its Windows counterpart and in some ways a "test bed" for features that would eventually make it into the Windows version of Office.

There are several choices for an iPhone case at the Phone Different Store. One that caught my eye was the Belkin Clear Acrylic Case ($14.95) due to its unique "kickstand". I was very excited to see this type of case become available for the iPhone. It is perfect for setting on a tray table or on any table for that matter. But the real question is how does it hold up as a case?

Read on for the full review after the break...

Digg and Pownce founder and web 2.0 darling Kevin Rose, during the latest Diggnation podcast, made the following prognostications about the eventual 3G iPhone (via Apple Insider):

Do you use Apple’s .Mac Services? I do. I like the synchronization between my Macs; it really makes life easy. With the iPhone, I really get a lot of benefit. I can add a website, Calendar appointments, Address Book entry, etc on my iPhone and it gets synced across multiple machines.

Analysts are like Tarot card readers with MBAs, making speculative predictions based on little more than the direction of the wind and bird migration patterns. They follow a similar marketing practice too - the first reading is free, but the second will cost you, and cost you.

The brain trust at Gartner Research, a firm whose name is legendary in "We predicted this all along" market research, has arrived at the astounding postulation that Apple's plans to incorporate enterprise-class features into iPhone will make the device a viable corporate tool.

Not evil twin to Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, this Week in Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple's current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place -- best not to linger...). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

RIM/Blackberry Likes Outages So Much They Start Scheduling Them!

The iPhone OS, like its big Mac brother, has a lot of little tools, preferences, and settings, some explicitly surfaced, others hidden away. The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) brings us one of each this week!

First up, by way of RipDev's molecular decomposition of the code (either that or a well-placed source...) is a way to enable screen capture on your jailbroken iPhone: