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.
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
