Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’
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
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
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…
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.
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.
I don’t generally block people that follow me on Twitter, as long as they are individuals and not accounts set up for social causes (I’ll choose my causes, thank you). For the last week, I’ve been blocking between 1-3 followers per day, all spammers. Having just read the VentureBeat post ‘Twitter gets its sexy back. And by “sexy” I mean users.’ which talks about Twitter’s growth in June, I have to wonder if a good percentage of that is due to spammers. I’m followed by 70-some people and have been seeing these spammer accounts daily. I can personally block the spam accounts, but that doesn’t stop those accounts from following others. I’m sure most people are not aware that they can report spam accounts via twitter.com/help. I wasn’t. Reporting potential spammers is not simple, just like blocking multiple followers (a chore because you are taken back to your Twitter home page after each block). How many people are going to note the spammer’s account name, then go to the help page to report it? I think that Twitter needs to add a Potential Spammer button next to the account in the Followers list (and please, please, please don’t have that button take me back to the home page afterwards).
Twitter team, please get a handle on this now.
Otherwise, the problem won’t be the Scoble’s of the world clogging the tubes. It’ll be the spammers.
-Al Degutis
We all have a difficult time getting back into the swing of things at work after a three-day holiday weekend. It looks like Twitter is just one of us as witnessed when you click on the Older link:
Is it tired after the long weekend? Or does it have a fear of getting old?
-Al
Twitter can be addicting. It can also be very frustrating when it is down. Some people have suggested that Twitter charge for the service and use those funds to provide a more reliable “Pro” service. So, the question is “What is Twitter worth to you?”
