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I love twitter (here’s my profile: @PaulDJohnston). It’s my favourite social network, mainly because it’s so simple, quick and social. The best way to use twitter that I’ve found is via a client on your desktop, as the web interface, while useful, doesn’t give you all the info you need at a glance.
Full disclosure: I’ve been using Twhirl for most of the time I’ve been on Twitter (that’s about… 2 and a half years). Twhirl and Tweedeck are clients written in Adobe Air (which is basically Flash on your desktop). Having used Twhirl for so long, I’m quite used to how it does things, but I’ve been increasingly noticing my friends on twitter transferring to using Tweetdeck and I wondered why.
So, here’s a bit of a review of Tweetdeck vs Twhirl.
Twhirl – http://www.twhirl.org/
Twhirl Client
Overview
Nice simple client with an intuitive interface. You see your tweets come in, and you can easily just type your tweets and get out there. Very simple to understand, and when I’ve introduced users to twitter for the first time, it’s usually through Twhirl. Has the ability to add not just twitter accounts, but also seesmic, friendfeed and others. Very useful, although with multiple accounts, come multiple windows, which can quickly become a little unmanageable.
It’s simple to use for a single account, and if all you are after is a constant stream of updates from who you follow on twitter, then it’s very simple and clean. It doesn’t easily lend itself to more complex use of the social space, such as twitter search (even though the functionality is there).
The clarity of the interface is my favourite part of Twhirl. Simply being able to see at a glance who is tweeting and whether it’s a reply or direct message is very important to me. It means I can see at a glance if I want to read a tweet or not. Let’s face it, I don’t want to be taking all my time up, but a quick glance can sometimes be all I have time for.
I would give Twhirl 8/10 for being a solid and simple twitter client. It provides a clean, clear interface for novice/beginner twitter usage, and as such is the perfect client to start off with. It is let down by not providing filtering of a stream, and not providing a simple way of viewing real-time search results and grouping of users.
Pros
- Simple one column interface
- Different colours for @Replies, and Direct Messages within the stream allows for quick glance checking of my stream
- Can easily have multiple accounts displayed at the same time
- Only a few buttons, and small functionality subset
- Easy @Reply, ReTweet and Direct Message mechanism
- I like the colours – personal preference I know, but the defaults are easy on the eye to me, and I know that if I see the “twhirl green” on the screen, then twhirl is trying to get my attention
Cons
- No filtering on a stream of tweets
- Can’t display @replies and Direct Messages at the same time as the timeline
- Account management and creation is a little “clunky” and not intuitive – this is minor as once setup, you really shouldn’t need to worry about it
- No “grouping” of users, to display only tweets from specific people
TweetDeck – http://www.tweetdeck.com/
Tweetdeck Client
I like Tweetdeck and it’s definitely trying to do more than twhirl. It’s a pure twitter client, and has the added advantage of a multi-column interface. It starts with just “All Friends”, “Replies” and “Direct Messages”. You can easily add multiple columns with groups of your friends in it (you set who is in the groups). This is useful when you just want to find out about a subset of who you follow. You can also set a column for a search on twitter. So if you are interested in a specific hashtag, for example, you can see all public tweets related to that hashtag.
There is lots of information and sometimes it gets a little overwhelming. The most useful buttons I’ve found for each column are the “Mark all as seen” and the “Clear seen tweets” buttons. These allow you to remove from the interface things that are “past”.
The font size is a little bigger than twhirl and as such, you can fit less tweets onto the screen. This is frustrating as I find I do a lot of scrolling. The column width appears to be fixed also (or is difficult to change), and so the interface basically has to take over a maximised space on the desktop, which is not hugely helpful.
There are also other functions, such as adding in 12seconds, Twitscoop and Stocktwits to the interface, but I haven’t used these.
However with the search columns, the grouping and the multiple columns, Tweetdeck can be very powerful in giving information very quickly on a specific subject.
I would give Tweetdeck 7.5/10 for being a good twitter client. It is in my opinion, the best choice for the twitter power user. It has good grouping of users and provides simple filtering of information. Tweetdeck is let down by the interface being not quite intuitive enough and providing too much information within a non-customisable and cluttered workspace.
Pros
- Lots of information available
- Grouping of users is vital
- Search available in the same interface
- Simple Filtering of streams
Cons
- Single twitter account only
- Cannot find a user’s profile without their image being available
- Sometimes too much information
- Easily cluttered
- Lots of features I just won’t use
- Font size and column widths aren’t customisable
I love twitter – mostly because I can interact with a large number of people at the same time, very easily. However, you only ever get “now” on twitter. I very very rarely ever look back of tweets of either myself or others. If I do, it’s never more than the last 10 or so.
Twitter Applications
There are lots of cool apps, such as twitpic and clients such as twhirl and tweetdeck that really add some value to twitter. The interface and the interaction they generate makes a lot of difference to the overall twitter experience. If there was someway of walking a user through these (no there’s an idea) then you could get more people enthused about twitter.
Persistence
But the best twitter apps are those that persist data from twitter. Most tweets just get “lost” in the ether, and very few people will read them. One study showed that a link in a tweet lasts just 5 minutes! So when building applications, you have to think about how twitter is used and how to persist information for a tweet (like twitpic) or that can utilise tweeting (such as tipjoy).
Twimages – http://twimages.org
I created twimages.org after a conversation with @Hamlesh and it has produced some very interesting results. All of a sudden a user’s avatar/profile image becomes much more revealing! Because you can get hold of the profile image, you can generate a map of images of twitter user’s for a specific user.
You can see who you have conversations with. It changes over time, and as such, can show a change in who you have conversations with.
Check it out. My twimage is: http://twimages.org/PaulDJohnston
Would love your thoughts on it too.
What do you think?
I’ve found that the readers of my twitter stream are wide and varied. My twitter stream is consumed by various applications, including the twitter facebook status application to update my facebook status from twitter and I have many comments (especially from people at my church) who think I twitter too much and I’m always top of their mini-feed!!!
So I thought (for all those people that read my twitter posts but aren’t on twitter) I’d do a quick intro to twitter.
What is Twitter?
It’s what’s called a microblogging application. These applications allow you, in a short amount of characters, send a status update, or in the words of twitter “what are you doing right now?”.
But “What I’m doing” is obvious
As my friend Bezzer says, there is only one answer and that is “I am twittering” but that’s just going a bit far and too literal. Basically, it’s an opportunity to tell people who might want to know what you are actively engaged in at that moment. So you could be “walking the dog” or “thinking about my friend” or any number of things. Bloggers people often use it to say they have created a new blog post. It gets very interesting and bizarre finding out what people are doing!
Why twitter so much?
Well, twitter only matters when you have friends who twitter as well. Twittering in isolation is dull (believe me, you don’t want to know what you were doing last year). It’s much more interesting finding out what people around you are doing. So letting them know is fun for them. But to know that, you have to follow people. Once you start to follow people (calling them your friend is a bit wrong) you start to receive their updates into your friends stream.
Finding people to follow
It’s simple really – search for people. The BBC news has a twitter stream you can friend. Not only that but you can track twitter and get a message every time someone uses a certain phrase. So if you want to find people that talk about premiership football, you might track premiership. You will then get messages from people who twitter about that and can follow them if you like what they say.
Twitter via a client, Instant Messenger (IM) or mobile phone
The thing is, if it’s all on the net, you never view it unless you go to twitter. This gets tedious after a while, so the best way to view tweets is through a desktop application like twhirl. You can also get and send tweets direct to your mobile phone as an SMS or via IM through Google’s IM platform gtalk.
Then, you will receive tweets from other people (those you folow) sent directly to you, and you can twitter very easily, without having to go on the net.
What’s the @ and the # all about?
If you see someone’s twitter and want to respond, you just put their twitter username in and put and @ at the start. So instead of it being a true twitter, it’s more like a comment on another person’s twitter. Putting a # in front of a word means you’re talking about a specific subject. It just helps in searching.
Official commands
There are other commands that help with twitter, and these are defined in the official commands. Take a look!
Want to know more?
Probably the easiest thing to do is to setup an account, download twhirl, find someone on twitter (like me), and follow them. Then, start answering the question “what are you doing right now?”. It’s really very simple. I may even follow you back!
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