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…
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.
The other day Robert Scoble had a Qik video in which he interviewed on of the developers of Twinkle (web link, iTune link) a Twitter client for the iPhone. Yes, yet another Twitter client and yes for the iPhone. Twinkle caught my eye because it’s location-aware.
Unlike Twitterrific and Twittelator which can add a link to your tweet to show your location, Twinkle can show you a feed of tweets by people within a certain radius of you. When it launches it requests the use of the GPS to find your current location.
The default distance to search for “local” tweets is 50 miles but that can be changed.
