Ok, I have been trying out Twitter for a couple of weeks now and I am still not sure what to think of it. I don’t think I can do justice trying to explain Twitter, so it might be best to just go explore their website and let them handle that task. If any of my readers want to add me as a Twitter friend, I am DougRivers on there and my Twitter page can be found here. You can follow my Tweets there, and if you are on Twitter already, just click “Follow” and you can see what the heck I am up to. Lynda joined for a few days, but she got a bit uneasy with so many people following her, that she had me help her delete the account. I don’t understand why she was picking up so many followers, I have had very few people even look at my Tweets. (Although, my Twitemperature is a Hot 85° (29° C) as of the time of this writing.)
I have been experimenting with a couple of Twitter clients on the iPhone and one on my Mac as well as just posting and reading Tweets in Safari. First up is the Mac client I have been playing with: twirl
twirl is available for Macs and PCs running XP or Vista and requires Adobe’s Air to be installed on your system to work. It supports multiple accounts on Twitter, laconi.ca, Friendfeed and Seesmic. I wanted a dedicated client on my MacBook Pro, rather than relying on going to the Twitter website in Safari to read/post Tweets and I really didn’t want to have to shell out $14.95 for the Twitterrific for Mac client, so I took twirl for a whirl. Unfortunately, it has to be one of the least Mac-like programs I have used in the last couple of years, with TINY, unintuitive buttons in a 2-paned, pastel-framed window. Attractive perhaps, but frustrating to use. After playing with it for a couple of days, I can use it without straining my limited mental faculties, but for something as simple as a Twitter client, I don’t think there should be a period of having to get used to the program’s peculiar user interface conventions in order to utilize the service. I mean, if that was what I wanted, I would be using Windows, and to tell the truth, twirl feels like a bad Windows port. I will continue to use twirl for now, but the search goes on for a decent Mac client that is either free or at least under $10 — can’t justify any larger capital outlays while I a still unemployed — and I can’t really recommend twirl, except for the fact that it free and seems fairly stable.
Next up, I tried out the free Twitterrific client on my iPhone. There is also a Twitterrific Premium app available for $9.99, but I have not tested it, but would be interested in hearing from anyone who has tried both and wishes to tell me about the differences between the two by leaving a comment to this article. Twitterrific is probably the nicer looking of the two iPhone Twitter clients I have been using, with a little bird for an icon and a bigger picture of the little fellow as the app loads up and downloads your Tweets. Tweets are displayed in white text on a black background with the newest ones at the top of the screen, but if it has been a while since you have checked on things, the app opens the list where it was when you closed it and that can mean a lot of scrolling up if you follow a lot of people or if the ones you follow post a lot of Tweets — I follow TUAW and Engadget and with this week’s MacWorld Expo, there have been a LOT of Tweets in my list. The four controls at bottom of the screen are easy to understand, with circular arrows for Refresh, a talk balloon for Post a Tweet, a little page with list on it for the Detailed Info/List View toggle and a little wrench for Settings.
Personally, I wish they would just do away with the Refresh button and have the app just go out and check every few minutes for new Tweets. The Post a Tweet button is pretty straightforward, with a text box for your 140-character posting, a close button to cancel the operation if you can’t think of anything worthwhile to say — something a lot of people out in the Twittersphere should avail themselves of — a toggle button for regular Tweets (a talk balloon), Replies (a backward curved arrow) and Direct Messages (a little envelope). Next is a little camera button to post picture Tweets. The little circular crosshairs next to the camera button sends up a location Tweet to let your friends/Followers know where you are, or in my case with my 2G iPhone, hopefully within a mile of my current location. Then you have the character count so you know how much of your 140 character allotment you have used up for the current Tweet. Finally, you have send button to post your little gem of information online. The Detail Info switch brings up the selected Tweet with buttons below to Reply, see your Favorites, view User Info on the poster of the Tweet, Post a Tweet, Refresh or return to the List View. The little Settings button lets you change a few options for the app and is also where you go to enter your Twitter ID and password.
It is a nice enough app, but I really don’t like that doesn’t open at the top of the list when you open the app and doesn’t go to the top when you Refresh either. The little sounds it makes when you launch it or refresh the list is just a little too cute for my taste — can be turned off in the Settings, but I like to have audio notifications — and can be embarrassing in a group setting. Also, this app is ad supported and the ads appear as Tweets and I just find this wrong. But I really can’t knock it on price, so if that is a consideration, then give Twitterrific a look.
Last up is Tweetie, a $2.99 app that is a bit more capable than Twitterrific — as well as easier to type. Tweetie has two different themes (Chat Bubbles and Simple) to give you a choice of looks — they are selected in the Settings which is found in the iPhone’s Settings Pane, rather than in a Settings area within the app itself — and after trying both, I think I prefer the Simple theme, but to each their own.Tweetie also lets you set up multiple Twitter accounts— why one would want to is beyond me. There are more controls in Tweetie and I think they are organized much better than the other two clients I have looked at for this article. When you open the app, you find yourself in the Tweets page (at least if you have only one account like myself), with a button at top linking to a page with your various accounts to the left, Write a Tweet button to the right (with options to do Picture and Location Tweets), a Refresh button right below them — it refreshes automatically every little bit anyway, so this button is slightly redundant — and below that is the Tweet list. Along the bottom of the screen are buttons for Tweets, Replies, Messages, Favorites and More.
Most of those buttons are self-explanatory, but More takes you to a new page where you can look at your Profile (review your recent Tweets, search your Direct Message, remind yourself of exactly who you are following and who your followers are); Go to User to search for Twitter members by Screen Name; Nearby to see who is Tweeting near your current location; Trends to see what people are Tweeting about and finally Search, but I have not used it yet, so I don’t know what you can search for with it.
I find Tweetie to be the easiest to use of the three clients, it doesn’t make any cute bird noises, I can search for other people on Twitter and add them to my Follow list or stop following them from within Tweetie, I can see what people nearby are Tweeting about, and if I click on an url (usually a tinyurl link), the built in browser is much better than the one in Twitterrific. So, after two weeks of Tweeting, I am going to give the nod to Tweetie.
I am still new to Twitter, so I have probably made a great many errors in Twitter etiquette, so please forgive my ignorance.
