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.

Get your copy today!

Seriously!

Click here to get more info on the book.

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

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)

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

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.

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

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:

1. type (followers, friends, sent)
2. id (Twitter message ID)
3. name
4. screen name
5. location
6. description
7. profile image url (the Amazon S3 location of you pic)
8. url
9. protected [updates] (true/false)
10. status date (date the tweet was posted)
11. 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

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…

Desktop Apps

• Spaz – Spaz, an Adobe Air app, was my first foray into Twitter desktop apps.  Adobe Air apps work on both the Mac and PC.  It worked fine, but as you’ll see I just moved on and haven’t went back.

• Twitterrific – Twitterrific is a Mac only Twitter app.  It’s available in two versions: a free version that displays occasional ads and a paid version. After using the free version briefly, while using Spaz on the PC, I purchased the ad-free version for the nominal fee.  Shortly after that Twhirl came out.

• Twhirl – When Twhirl, another Adobe Air-based app, became available I gave it a try with the intent of seeing if it was better than Spaz.  I found that I preferred Twhirl to Spaz and Twitterrific.  Twhirl has the ability to receive and post updates to multiple Twitter accounts.  This isn’t an issue for the average user, but I maintain my personal Twitter account plus the AstroPhoto Twitter account.  Twhirl became my primary Twitter client.  Since then, a lot of features have been added to Twhirl including support for Seesmic video, Friendfeed and most recently Indenti.ca.  Twhirl is easily the most feature packed Twitter app.  One of my problems with Twhirl, and this may be a limitation of the Twitter API or constant change in available services by Twitter, is the inability to browse back through a day or two of tweets. Maybe it’s a setting or button I’m missing (and if it is please tell me) but right now, for example, Twhirl only shows me messages going back 7 hours, followed by older @replies and direct messages.

• TweetDeck – TweetDeck, yet another Adobe Air app, is the newcomer to the field.  It is still in early development (Beta v 0.16) but has a lot of promise.  It utilizes a multi-column approach that allows you to categorize incoming tweets.  The first column is All Tweets while the second is Replies, messages sent as replies to you.  This keeps the replies from getting buried in All Tweets if you follow a sizable number of people.  You can add additional columns and have the ability to create groups of people you follow (e.g. Family and Friends, Journalist, etc) which display in their own column.  I have a more detailed write up of TweekDeck here.  Recent enhancements included visual and audio notification of tweets or search result updates.  The visual notifications are nice but the audio notifications were very sharp and uncomfortable on the ears so I quickly disabled it.  I like TweetDeck’s concept but find it takes up too much of the screen.  It can be reduced to a single column showing only All Tweets, but that defeats the benefits of the Replies and Groups columns.  You can re-size the apps window but the font is does not scale up or down.  Although minor, you cannot change the color scheme either.  I’d like to see a single column All Tweets window with tabs going up and down the side.  Each tab would represent each of the columns such as Replies, a custom group, etc.  Clicking on a tab would slide out that column, allowing you to create a display of various columns that could quickly slide back out of the way.TweetDeck v0.16.1b was just released which integrates TwitScoop. TwitScoop creates a “Tag Cloud” by scanning hundreds of tweets per second to identify hot topics. This is a great way to find out about breaking news such as this week’s Southern California’s earthquake.  This update also changed the audio notifications to a more soothing twirble (it sounds wirble-like to me).  It also include TwitPic integration and replies with  @username anywhere in the tweet are now treated as a reply and show up in the reply column.  There are additional features and fixes which you can read about on TweetDeck website.  One bug I uncovered while beta testing v0.16.1b is that it can’t be closed normally via Quit on a Mac. I confirmed this on my iMac and Macbook Pro, both running Leopard. I understand the eagerness to get a new release out (I’m just as eager to get my hands on it) but as a beta tester of that version, I feel that the very few hours I was given to test it before it was made public was too short. I wasn’t able to get my feedback in before it was released to the public.
  I like TweetDeck, but I find the fixed font and column size plus the lack of FriendFeed integration .  I’ll keep an eye on TweetDeck to see how it progresses.

• Twitter.com Website – Using the Twitter website is a mixed blessing: sometimes you’ll get to your messages while other times you’ll get the “fail whale” stating the site is overloaded.  Various features are disabled at times, such as the option to view Older messages, to try and manage the load.  Yet, in terms of accessing more and older messages the Twitter web site is probably the best.

Cellphones

My access to Twitter has been limited to a Palm OS-based Treo and the iPhone, so here’s my small world insight.

Treo

I believe I found a Twitter client for the Palm OS, but quickly switched to using the mobile version of Twitter on the web, but can’t recall why.  The biggest problem with using mobile Twitter via the web on the Treo was the rather frequent need to log in again.  That was annoying.

iPhone

• Twitterrific – Twitterrific is also available on the iPhone in two flavors: free and paid.  I’m sticking with the free version.  What I like about Twitterrific is that it supports multiple hyperlinks in a Tweet.  Touching a hyperlink brings up a display of the web page without jumping over to the full Safari browser.  That page includes a button to switch to Safari.  When you bring up the dialog box to send a tweet, there’s a Location button that will update the Location on you Twitter profile.  Most other iPhone Twitter apps simply add a link of your location into the tweet itself, leaving your profile alone.  You can include a picture with your tweet but only by selecting one from your Photo library.  You can’t launch the camera to take a picture right from the tweet entry screen as other apps allow.  Of the iPhone apps I’ve used, Twitterrific displays the most oldest tweets.

• Twittelator – Twittelator is a free iPhone app.  It has predefined groups that filter tweets, such as Friend’s Twitters, My Twitters, My Replies, Everyone’s Twitters, Featured and Favorites, etc.  One very unique feature of Twittelator is the Emergency button (a yellow box with an exclamation mark) which, via a single press, will send an emergency tweet stating that you are in trouble and your current location.  When creating a tweet you can add you location as a link and a picture either from the Library or take a live shot. The latest update (v1.1) saves pictures to the Photo library when taken from within the app.  As far as I’m aware, no other iPhone Twitter app does this.  Version 1.1 finally allows you to open links (it requires a double tap) but it will only launch the first link in a tweet. This is a real limitation as it is becoming more common to have two links in a tweet, one for a picture and another for a location, as in “I’m here doing this.”  An annoying bug that v1.1 appears to fix is the multiple copies of the link inserted via the location button.  Prior to v1, one press could populate your update window with anywhere from 1 to a dozen “map of my current location” links.  It really needs to support multiple hyperlinks in a single tweet.

• Twinkle - Twinkle, another free iPhone app, adds an additional dimension: a Nearby screen that allows you to see messages posted by people with a range (in miles) you specify.  But, these are not tweets from Twitter users in your area, but messages from Twinkle users.  Twinkle uses it’s own servers to track Nearby messages.  In essences you are using two services: Twinkle and Twitter (or just Twinkle if you choose not to connect your Twitter account or don’t have one).  Twinkle also uses it’s own servers for images posted instead of the more commonly used TwitPic. I posted a first impressions write up of Twinkle here and a follow up after a weekend of use (here).  Twinkle was just updated last night to v1.1 which includes some stability improvements and a much needed relocation of the Send button (see my first look post).  I’m not sure if this is an unlisted new feature, or just a random occurrence, but with the v1.1 update I was seeing @replies directed to others from one of the people I follow on Twitter. As mentioned above, this is very much a feature I’d like to see.

• GPSTwit - A new app with a single focus: post tweets with your location.  It does not support pictures or the ability to browse your tweets in its current release.

For now there is no clear cut “winner” for me, no single Twitter app, either on the desktop or iPhone, that I will use exclusively.  Twhirl, TweetDeck, Twinkle and Twittelator are the frontrunners so far.

-Al Degutis

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

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.

There are some benefits to Twinkle using it’s own network. First, if Twitter is down the Twinkle servers store the messages and post them later when Twitter is up again. Second, Twinkle is not locked into the Twitter service allowing them to add other social networks using their store and forward approach, assuming the social network supports that.

A common problem encountered using Twinkle is incomplete messages. This isn’t due to an application bug or service problem, but something more fundamental: the location of the Send button. In v1.0 it is inconveniently located (in my opinion) in the lower right corner between the Spacebar and the Backspace key making it too easy to press by accident. When I suggested that they change this, I wondered if this was just a personal issue/preference, but having seen a number of incomplete messages followed immediately by the whole message it’s obviously not just me. (Note – they responded to my suggestion, informing me that it will be changed in a future update.)

Twinkle allows me to post my updates to Twitter (called “tweets” by the user community) as well as follow others, but it also lets me see messages from people I don’t follow within a distance that I specify (see my previous post for screen shots) by utilizing the iPhone’s location awareness and the Tapulous network. This exposes me to others that I may want to follow. Of course the opposite is true, as you’ll see messages from people you’d rather not follow. This could range from someone you find annoying, someone that is harassing you, to an actual stalker. A Block option would address this. So far I haven’t needed such an option because a relatively few number of people are using Twinkle at this time.

The benefits of location aware apps go well beyond that of “friending” people. By tuning in to local chatter you can find out what’s going on locally, including news events. Imagine what it would have been like if something like Twinkle was available during the Virginia Tech incident. More recently, on Valentine’s day this year there was the shooting at NIU; something closer to home for me both in location and personally because a friend of mine works there and a family friend was going to school there. I first heard about the incident when my friend sent a tweet about it shortly after the incident began. Using a location aware app can help spread the word of such events as well as natural disasters.

Location aware apps are cool and have a lot of promise but it will take time before enough devices support them (GPS is not a requirement thanks to tagged WiFi and cellular triangulation) and people take advantage of them. Twinkle is a great example of a location-aware social network app.

Twinkle is far from perfect. In fact, there are a number of issues, in my opinion, that may have warranted that the 1.0 release really be called 0.8. But since it is a stable release, 1.0 is arguably appropriate. Things I feel that are missing:

• Delete messages – there is no way to delete messages
• Search – there is no way to search for messages; although you can search for Twitter messages via Tweetscan or Summize (Summize was recently acquired by Twitter), but this doesn’t help people who only have a Twinkle account, or people trying to search Twinkle messages
• Access to archives – there is no “Older” or archive button like on Twitter so you can’t go further back in time then what is displayed in the app for either Twitter or Twinkle (i.e. Nearby) messages
• ReTweeting or should I say RePing – the ability to resend someone else’s Twitter or Twinkle update; at first blush this doesn’t seem to be an issue on the Twinkle network as you are seeing the entire stream of local conversations, not just who you’re following, but you may be seeing a message from someone 10 miles south of you, so the person 10 miles north of you may not see it.
• Web access – the Twinkle app is a good one, but it would be great to extend network access via a web site

As this blog post states there are still more Twinkle enhancement on the way and I’m sure that there are more than that posts lists, possibly some of the above.

On Sunday (July 20th) Twinkle became unusable. It would launch, start to load messages and then exit.  A post by TwinkleKing (Twinkle’s Twitter account) stated:

Hi all, we are aware the crashing issues. These are related to invalid avatar images, and we’re pushing a new version to the app store.

The problem turned out to be related to Amazon’s S3 service outage according to news reports.  Twinkle, just like Twitter, uses Amazon S3 to store people’s avatars (i.e. account pictures). It will be interesting to see how quickly they can get the updated app up on the iTunes App store and how quickly iTunes will make it available for download.

Some questions that are on my mind, which I also sent the TwinkleKing Twitter account:

• When you Follow someone via Twinkle is that a Twitter follow, a Twinkle follow or both?
• Do tweets send directly to Twitter via the web or a client, such as Twhirl, end up on the Twinkle servers or is that only possible via Twinkle? It appears it does: I posted a tweet using Twhirl about installing the latest version of Twhirl and it did show up in the Twinkle timeline.

I found myself checking Twinkle throughout the day on Sunday to see if it was back up again. I guess that means I missed it while it was down. Hmm, does that mean I’m getting addicted to it? Umm, no… I was just trying to finish this write up… yeah, that’s the ticket.

- Al Degutis