Twitter Trifecta
Ever since Twitter’s popularity grew, developers have been doing interesting things with the tweets that come in from it. Sorting, groups, threading, replies without having to type in the person’s username, and so many more have found their way to our desktop.
Somewhere along the line, I found myself lost in a sea of tweets. I wanted to follow person A, but their tweets were taking over my timeline, and I couldn’t focus on people B, C, and D whose tweets are much more interesting. There needed to be a way to organize this twomit into little bite-sized chunks so that I didn’t have to do all the manual labor. I also had multiple accounts, so managing them on top of my main account turned into an acrobatic act.
Originally I was using Twhirl before Seesmic bought it. It was, and still is, a wonderful application. If you have more than one account, it’s invaluable. It breaks your accounts into their own separate windows so that you can easily manage your incoming tweets. It had one feature which I absolutely loved and that’s the ability to notify you when you get a reply or a DM with a sound that makes me think of a doorbell on steroids. It also put these unobtrusive little popups in the lower right hand corner of your screen to tell you where your tweets came from. I loved the app, but dealing with several hundred friends forced me to look somewhere else.
Several Twitter friends suggested Tweetdeck. Its biggest draw for me was the ability to create groups of people and have all your tweets funneled into specific columns. I loved it. *BING* But there was *BING* one serious *BING* problem with it. *BING*: it wouldn’t shut up. As great as the groups feature was, it had one major flaw which was the inability to notify you only when you got a reply or a DM. Unlike Twhirl which gently tapped you on the shoulder to say “your buddy sent you a DM”, Tweetdeck was in your face. If you didn’t like hearing *BING* all the time, you could turn audio notifications off. All of them. Your choice was all or nothing. Manually checking Tweetdeck all the time annoyed me so much that I was willing to give up the groups feature for the specific notifications. I asked the developer when this feature would be in. He said “next release”. That was a year ago. As a software engineer myself, I couldn’t figure out why such a simple feature hadn’t been added. It was a *BING* dealbreaker for me.
I happily used Twhirl since then. I found a way to manage my friends list by using visual searches such as people’s avatars and tweet habits. I got pretty good at it. I kept going back to Tweetdeck to see if there was a checkbox that said “only notify me on replies and DMs”. No such luck, even for Christmas. It was on my list.
Last night, Loic LeMeur, the founder of Seesmic, unveiled Twhirl on steroids called “Seesmic Desktop”. It’s a direct competitor to Tweetdeck and much prettier to look at. Knowing that Loic would try to put out an application that at the very least works like Twhirl, I gave it a spin. Not only does it allow you to create groups like Tweetdeck does, it has notifications only for replies and DMs.
Heaven.
Tweetdeck, Twhirl, and Seesmic Desktop are built on the Adobe Air platform which allows you to build one application that runs on both Macintosh and Windows. Some apps can work on Linux if coaxed properly. If you’re trying to reach the vast majority of users with one application without having to spend time and resources to build two apps in parallel, Air is an excellent way to do it. It’s not perfect, but gets the job done.
For fairness, I decided to try the Nambu Macintosh client. People have been praising it, saying it’s better than both Seesmic and Tweetdeck. I took it for a spin, and this is where the comparisons between the apps begin.
Nambu
Nambu is a native Macintosh application which means that it only runs on the Mac, and does not work on Windows. If the author wanted to build a Windows version, he’d have to build it from scratch which could take time and resources he may not have. At first glance it’s a nice looking app, reminiscent of Apple’s Mail application which makes the UI very familiar. It allows you to use multiple accounts like Seesmic does which has been one of its major selling points. Unfortunately, managing these accounts isn’t so easy.
I found that the application has one major flaw. If you’re using multiple accounts and want to reply to someone from account A, it’s very easy to accidentally write a tweet from account B. The reason why is that the combo box with your accounts in it doesn’t change for you unless you click on a tweet in the column you want to respond from. There’s a gear icon that drops down a menu with “Reply” in it, but if the tweet is in account A’s column, and you have a highlighted tweet in account B’s column, when you click on the gear of the tweet from account A, the tweet will be written from account B. This is my dealbreaker with this application, I have to trust the application to do the right thing and reply from the account the tweet came from instead of the account a tweet is highlighted from.
Other things that bothered me about Nambu were the lack of audible notifications, creating columns took way too long for a Mac application, I couldn’t swap columns or find a way to shift them around, the Twitpic and shorten URL icons were far away from the rest of the pack, some of the icons were a tad misleading, a two-step process for composing tweets (click “Compose” icon first, then write), the preferences window got lost behind the main one, and you can’t click on someone’s name and bring up their Twitter history.
Considering that I work on a Windows machine at work and a Mac at home, coupled with the annoyances listed above, I’m going to skip on using Nambu.
Tweetdeck
As I stated above, I had a dealbreaking problem with Tweetdeck’s inability to notify me only when I had a reply or a DM. That aside, I decided to be fair and take a good look at the app to see if it’s improved since I last used it.
Just like the other apps, Tweetdeck puts your tweets into columns so that you can separate them easier. When you first start the application, you get columns for people you follow, replies, and DMs. From there you can add column for searches, Facebook, 12seconds, and Twitscoop. The searches function is a great way to see what people are saying about a particular topic (eg: “Smallville”). Like Nambu, writing a tweet is a two-step process when the app first starts, you need to click on the “Tweet” button for the edit box to come up.
Tweetdeck comes with multiple language support which is a major feature for a service that works around the world. I only have rudimentary understanding of French and Japanese so I can’t write about how good or bad it is, but I have to give props to the application for supporting multiple languages.
One of the biggest features that Tweetdeck has is Facebook support. You can get updates from people you’re friends with on Facebook, but you can’t reply to them for some reason. I don’t know if it’s a limitation of the Facebook API, but I find that a one-way feed is an unpleasant way to read a stream when you have to wind up going into the web site to reply anyway.
Tweetdeck has some great features, and I know it has a large following, but I can’t find myself using it until my personal annoyances with it are taken care of.
Seesmic Desktop
I’ve only been using Seesmic Desktop for 24 hours, but I’ve fallen in love with it. It’s not perfect, but it does what I need it to do, and does it well.
On startup, its colors are pleasing to the eye unlike the black and white of Tweetdeck. What I like about the interface is that the left hand side has different categories to click on, and the first column reflects what you selected. If you have multiple accounts, your Home selection will show all the tweets from all your accounts funneled into one column with the banner “received as <account name>” so you know which account it came in from.
Similar to Tweetdeck, you can make multiple columns with Seesmic, but Seesmic has an unlimited number of columns where Tweetdeck only allows 10. Seesmic doesn’t offer the ability to read in streams from other accounts yet such as Seesmic’s video service, Friendfeed, or Facebook, but Loic assures us that they’re coming soon.
Like the other apps, Seesmic allows the ability to tweet pictures using Twitpic, and shortening URLs. If you have multiple accounts, replies are properly sent from the account in which the tweet came into.
Everything is clickable in Seesmic. The account name from which the tweet came which gives a full account profile as well as a short Twitter history from the user, if the tweet was a reply there’s a link to the original, and even links to the home page of the app that sent the tweet.
Making userlists (groups) is not that intuitive. After you create the userlist, you add people by clicking the gear in their icon and selecting “Add to group”. If a user you want isn’t in your list, you can’t add them unless you do a search for their name. I found this cumbersome since it would be better to have a way to manually type in the name of the user, or show you the list of people you’re following like Tweetdeck does. Even after I created my list, I didn’t realize until I poked around the app for a while that there’s a “Users” button at the bottom of the column which was active. That was why I didn’t see the tweets, the column was set to show the list of users only. Clicking that button again showed the tweets from the people I added to the list.
Seesmic crashed on me once while using it on my Mac, and it asked me for my Twitter passwords on its first restart, but after that it didn’t ask me for anything again, and kept my settings.
Final thoughts
The memory footprint of the apps are shown below. Nambu took up the least amount of physical RAM which I expected for a native application. TweetDeck and Seesmic are Air apps so I expected a bit of bloat from them, but didn’t think they’d take up so little physical RAM as they did. For some reason I was expecting more. Seesmic took up the most amount of physical RAM which I hope they’ll address in the future because I can’t see what the app is doing that it needs all that memory.
For all these apps, it would be nice if there was a way to save your settings to a host, or have a user-friendly mechanism for saying “this is where your prefs live” so you can manually copy them to a USB key, Dropbox, or .Mac file system so you don’t have to rebuild everything on another machine such as a work or home computer, or a laptop. In fact, it would be nice to see these apps read each others preferences so that you don’t have to rebuild groups if you decide to switch apps.
This is definitely going to be an interesting space to watch. There’s only so much the Twitter API allows, so it’ll be up to the application developers to come up with unique and interesting ways to attract you to their applications.
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