Degutis Insights

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.

In addition to a Home screen that shows all of the tweets from people you follow, there’s a Nearby screen that shows only the tweets from people within the range you’ve set.

This is a great way to identify local people, or people passing through, that are part of the Twitter community and you may want to follow. Twitter, afterall, is all about being social.

Twinkle also supports adding photos to your tweet (as does Twitterrific and Twittelator) and it lets you click on links which open in a Safari window (Twitterrific supports links, but Twittelator doesn’t).

I’ll use Twinkle exclusively on the iPhone over the next few days to give it a full test.

- Al Degutis

Note - apologies for the layout of the images in this post. I cannot get WordPress 2.6 to lay them out any of the ways I’ve tried. It could be this template. This is the best of the worst.

Updated - Since about noon (Central) time today, Twinkle appears to be unable to pull the Nearby tweets and displays the following message:

Seems as though the Twinkle servers may be overloaded now that people have heard it’s available and started trying it out. Haven’t we been here before.