Book: The World According to Twitter
My co-author, David Pogue, sent me an autographed copy of our new book. Sure, I only provided one line but I feel that without that single line the book wouldn’t be the great work that it is.
Seriously!
Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category
First impressions of the Nambu native Twitter client for Mac OS X
Yesterday I learned of native Twitter client for Mac OS: Nambu. What caught my attention is the Mac app look and feel and it’s ability to have a multi-column view based on groups. As I explained in this post, groups is the main reason I like using Tweetdeck. Both Nambu and TweetDeck are still in beta but after a full day of testing Nambu (v1.1.10), Tweetdeck(v0.25b), which I’ve used exclusively for many months, is much more stable and further along in features. I briefly tested the Seesmic Desktop preview (i.e. pre-beta) but stopped using it within a few hours. It just was too raw for me.
Things I like about Nambu:
- Mac app look and feel; it feels at home on a Mac.
- Groups – I gotta have my groups which I use to ensure I don’t miss tweets from family and friends, monitor local happenings and news, and keep up with tech. The single column view of all the tweets from those you follow is fine if you only follow a handful or a dozen, or two, people. That’s not me.
- The ease with which you can add people to groups, through either a list or a context menu brought up by clicking on their tweet.
- Threaded responses – Nambu will show a reply to tweet immediately below it as part of that tweet.
Hopefully Nambu is using the Twitter message ID to link the messages and reply and not just grabbing the most recent reply as some other Twitter clients. - Nambu displays the source of a link, albeit only a partial, instead of the URL shortener link, allowing you to look before you click. If you hover over the link, it shows both the shortened and destination links. This could help avoid malicious websites like last week’s Twitter worms.
Nambu bugs uncovered so far in v1.1.10 (3029):
- Some links in tweets are not active hyperlinks so you have to copy and paste them into the browser to get to the web page.
- Hovering over the Twitter profile of someone in the Home (a.k.a. everyone feed) will sometimes bring up the profile details for someone else. It’s an intermittent bug, but once it confuses the profile it continues to do so for a while.
Things I’l like to see in Nambu:
- The ability to manually resize the columns. Tweetdeck could use this feature as well. It seems so simple and obvious, at least to me, for an app that allows you to create multiple column.
- A way to reorder the columns in the group view. If an easy method exists, I can’t figure it out. I’ve had to close the columns and reopen them in the order I want them to appear.
- Twitter statistics – Tweetdeck will show you a Twitter health status, the number of API calls used and when the next reset will occur. This helps me know if Twitter is down, or if I’ve exceed my Twitter rate limit for the hour.
- Deeper threading of replies. As mentioned above it appears that Nambu will only display one reply per message. I’d like to see the full thread of reply which would help bring context to many messages. It could be a settings option so it wouldn’t need to be forced on everyone. Even better would be the ability to expand and collapse the thread.
- The ability to choose your preferred URL shortener. Nambu is hardcoded to use only tr.im.
- The ability to sync your settings, especially groups, across multiple computers so I can have the same set up on my Macbook Pro and my iMac.
- The ability to backup your group settings. I’d hate to spend a lot of time configuring my groups to loose them due to a app bug or system problem.
- Stability – Nambu locked up once for me within the first few hours of use, which very rarely happens on Tweetdeck. It may have been an isolated incident since I just started using it yesterday, but a quick look at the @nambucom Twitter account it may be related to groups. Time will tell.
- Twitpic preview – Tweetdeck recently added this feature in which clicking on a twitpic link will bring up a preview window showing the image, or part of the image if it’s a large one. You can then close the preview or click on the image to bring up the browser. It is so much more efficient than having to open a browser tab to view the image only to close it immediately afterwards.
- Facebook intergration, especially being able to post updates to Facebook. It’s handy to be able to see other’s updates, but I mainly use Tweetdeck’s Facebook integration to post to Facebook.
- Friendfeed integration – Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook all in one app would be the trifecta.
I’ll continue to use Nambu, at least in the near-term, in hopes that the bugs and features above eventually are fixed and added, respectively.
~ Posted by Al Degutis
Twitter as my news feed
I like Twitter (see this video that explains Twitter). I use it as a means of communication with my immediate family. I have also plugged into it as a source of news. Initially I was interested in tech news, comments, rumors, etc. While tech info is still a primary interest, I found myself expanding the people I follow o Twitter to others I found interesting regardless if they are marketers, lawyers, librarians, etc. Using TweetDeck I am able to follow a good number (albeit a relatively small number compared to hardcore Twitter users) of diverse people and grouping them into different categories. Using this approach I have a Family & Friends group, a Tech Heads group, and a Locals group which includes people from the Chicagoland, Rockford and southeast Wisconsin.
These groups allow me to see what’s going on in tech, in business and in the local area. It allowed me to get a feel for the extent of a recent power outage in McHenry county. When ex-Illinois governor “Blago” was impeached my Locals group was abuzz with the news.
Twitter is a great way for me to get regional, national and tech news. If I’m at a computer, I’ll typically have it running so I can stay plugged in. If I need to work without distraction I’ll turn it off, but I do feel disconnected.
Posted by Al Degutis (aka Frumpa on Twitter)
Google should buy Twitter
Twitter is a great, when it works. All it takes is a Steve Jobs keynote or a Presidential Inauguration to bring out the infamous Fail Whale. Unfortunately Twitter’s approach to deal with its up-time issues is to reduce functionality and limit developer access as explained in this Webware article.
The solution to fixing Twitter’s reliability and still allow developers to support its users is simple: Google should buy Twitter.
Why Google? No other company has the capacity to server up millions of people. Even the mighty Microsoft quickly ran out of bandwidth or server capacity to accommodate all the people interested in downloading released the Windows 7 Beta. Only Google can serve the masses reliably.
I like Twitter. I’d like to see some new features such as group messaging. I don’t want to see developers throttled. Unfortunately, Twitter cannot fix this problem themselves. They need Google.
~Posted by Al Degutis
My Twitter Pictures of 2008
Over the course of the year, I changed my Twitter picture to reflect my mood, current events or the time of year. Being the last day of 2008, I thought it would be cool to look back at all the pictures. Join me on a trip down memory lane.
TweetDeck Interface ideas
I’ve used various interfaces for Twitter, including the Twitter.com website itself. As the number of people I follow grew from a handful to dozens and now a couple hundred, I found that only one Twitter app works best for me: TweetDeck. TweetDeck has a number of useful features, but the one that made me use it almost exclusively is Groups. You can create your own groups, as many as you’d like, selecting which of the people that you follow and they’re Twitter updates (“tweets”) appear in their own column. I’ve created groups for Family and Friends, Locals (geographically), and Tech Heads. This allows me to quick browse through tweets in each category.
The problem I have with TweetDeck is how much screen real estate it takes up to display the various columns which includes All Messages, Replies and Direct Messages, plus my groups. I end up scrolling back-and-forth to see the various columns to frequently. It’s my understanding that a future release will allow you to resize the columns, which will be an improvement. I’d like to offer up two other suggestions. Let me preface these ideas by saying I have no idea if either of these are technically possible, nor how challenging it would be.
First, it would be nice if each column could be standalone, free-floating columns or connected. A great example of this is the Google Chrome browser in which you can take a tab and separate it from the main browser window to stand on it’s own, or drop a standalone browser window onto another one to insert it as a tab. Even if it is not possible to do the attach/detach action, just having separate, free-floating columns would be beneficial. Using Twhirl with my various accounts as an example, this screen shot illustrates how this might look:
I have the Twhirl windows stacked in this example, but normally they’re a little more spread out. The key here is to allow me to control their placement including the possibility to overlap them to save screen space.
My second thought on how to manage the multiple columns is to use a side tab approach. In this case, TweetDeck would have its All Tweets column with vertical tabs on the side for the additional columns. When you click on a tab, it would slide out that second column next to the All Tweets columns as illustrated below.
Alternately, it could slide out that tab into the single All Tweets column, replacing it and keeping it one column wide:
The space required to display the tabs could easily run out depending on the number of groups you create. This could be handled by 1) using abbreviations such as Tweets for All Tweets, DM for Direct Messages, @ for Replies and 2) allowing the list of tabs to scroll up and down.
Again, I cannot speak to the technical challenges to implementing either of these interfaces, but I hope that I’ve provided some ideas that may help improve this great Twitter client.
~ Posted by Al Degutis
Tweetake the Twitter backer upper
Back in July when Twitter encountered (created?) a problem that in some cases decimated people’s followers, I suggested that third parties need to take steps to cover Twitter’s arse. Today I became aware of Tweetake which will backup your Twitter account to an Excel file. As it explains on the Tweetake website: “The brainchild of Alfred Armstrong and Nikki Pilkington, Tweetake is here to allow you to back-up your followers, people you are following and Tweets with just one click.” Read more of the About Tweetake here.
I tested it out and it provided me with the following columns:
- type (followers, friends, sent)
- id (Twitter message ID)
- name
- screen name
- location
- description
- profile image url (the Amazon S3 location of you pic)
- url
- protected [updates] (true/false)
- status date (date the tweet was posted)
- status text (the tweet)
(click to view larger image)
This is very cool!
What I’d like to see is for this to be automated. Backups have to be automatic to be effective. I don’t see how that can be accomplished via a website, but it would be handy if it were integrated into a Twitter client with the option to backup on exit (or startup) automatically.
-Al Degutis
Searching for the best Twitter app
One of the great features of Twitter is that you can access and post it in various ways: from the website, from a dedicated client on Mac or PC, from a cell phone via SMS or mobile app, etc. Maybe someday we’ll see digital cameras with built-in Twitter access. With all of these different access methods, which is the best? Below is my limited evaluation of a few of the apps I’ve used.
But first, I want to mention a feature that no app appears to provide, but I’d really like to see. When a tweet (i.e. a Twitter update or message) is directed to another person using the @reply (where reply is the user’s twitter account name) at the beginning of the message, that message is only displayed to the person it was directed and not display to others, even if you follow the sender. For example, if you follow me (frumpa) and I send a message to @ev none of the applications below will show you that message. The only way you’ll be able to see those messages is if you go the that person’s Twitter page via a browser (e.g. twitter.com/ev). This only occurs if the message starts with @reply. If the @reply is somewhere else in the message everyone sees it. Maybe I’m the minority here but if I’m following someone I want to see all of their messages. Why? Sometimes a message directed to someone else may also be of interest to me, or others.
Okay, now that I got that out of the way…
3rd party apps must make up for Twitter’s incompetence
With Twitter continuing to be so unreliable, I think third party applications such as Twhirl, TweetDeck, Twitterrific and possibly FriendFeed(?), just to name a few, need to add the option to keep a local copy of messages and your Following and Followers list. TweetDeck is already ahead of the game as it keep messages in a local database. But, with Twitter’s latest screw up, in which they inadvertently removed people from following others, the ability to have a backup, export or offline copy of your Following list is very important.
Who is up for the challenge?
-Al Degutis
Twinkle – a few days later
I started using Twinkle, an iPhone app, on Thursday night (July 17th) and wrote this post about it. Here are my impressions and what I’ve learned about it after using it for few days.
Twinkle has it’s own network which it uses for its Nearby service. The Nearby service, also a section in the app, manages messages sent through the service. When you send a message from Twinkle, which they call “pings”, it goes to the Twinkle network (i.e. Tapulous servers) where they are stored and then forwarded to Twitter. This requires you to configure Twinkle with a Tapulous user account and, optionally, a Twitter account. You could easily just use the Tapulous account, but not just a Twitter account at this time. This has caused some confusion for people as to where messages are going and why messages are not showing up on Twitter. Although in some cases people didn’t add their Twitter account or don’t have one. In fact, it can cause more confusion if a person has a Twitter account but creates a Tapulous account with a different user name. Confusion in the sense that you can’t follow the user via the Twitter website, or traditional Twitter client since you don’t know their Twitter account name.
