OK, so I do like Twitter… (I guess this is a mea culpa post)

So a while ago I poked my head into the twitterverse and decided it just wasn’t for me… but after hearing so much about it… I decided to give it another fair shake about 4 months ago. I can say that now I’m actually enjoying this. Don’t get me wrong… it’s still a lot a noise. Twitter is very much like walking into a bar at happy hour and hearing EVERYONE’s conversation at once. It’s definitely a time waster utility… yet fun, but it can also be a useful business tool.

For instance, one week I was teaching my online class and saw one of my students talking about my class in the twitterverse… someone I wasn’t even following this person (simply because I didn’t know they were on Twitter). Then I saw someone was asking them about their experience as they were on the fence about taking my class. With just a few short messages back and forth, we nailed a handful of additional students in an upcoming class. Very slick!

It’s also great in getting help for stuff you’re working on… I saw a good friend need a charger cable for his phone when he arrived at a conference as he forgot his. Within 5 minutes, he was meeting someone who had one for him to borrow… very slick!

For me, the thing that switched me over was getting a good Twitter client. There are plenty out there… but for me it’s Twitterific on the iPhone and TweetDeck in Windows & MacOS. I love how Tweet deck lets me see everyone I follow, plus replies and direct messages. But what’s really cool is you can have search feeds as well. For instance I have global searches setup for SharePoint and WCM as well as a few others.

But TweetDeck isn’t the ideal client. I’ve got some gripes over it. Specifically, it uses MORE memory than Outlook AND Visual Studio 2008! Yeah… I didn’t think that was possible either. I recently tried another client out, Blu, which is this stunningly slick WPF Twitter client. But it just wasn’t like TweetDeck. My ideal Twitter client would be (which I might try to pull together and learn WPF at the same time):

Just like TweetDeck except…
WPF UI
Let me have a big/small app version… for instance TweetDeck is always in the big version… I’d like to have a smaller Messenger-sized client with tabs at the bottom to tell me how many unread replies & direct messages I have (kinda like how Blu does it)
Ability to thread conversations (kinda like Blu does it)
Ability to pin & tag tweets (saving favorite ones)
Ability to tag twitter folks so I can say “show me my political tweet feed” or “show me my developer tweet feed”
IntelliSense when I’m typing a tweet, know the people I follow’s twitter names so I can just type “Spence H” and it changes it to @harbars… kinda like how Outlook new mail does it
When someone is mentioned in a tweet of a friend, give me some visual feedback I’m not following them.
Global searches
Like Outlook / FeedDemon, make it easy to see the read/unread tweets

Maybe I’ll get off my rear and learn WPF some time this year and build my own client…

» Twitter: follow me @andrewconnell.com

Technorati Tags: twitter

posted on Monday, February 16, 2009 6:37 AM

Feedback

# re: OK, so I do like Twitter… (I guess this is a mea culpa post) 2/16/2009 6:50 AM Robert MacLean

"Ability to tag twitter folks so I can say “show me my political tweet feed” or “show me my developer tweet feed”" - TweetDeck can do that, it's called Groups. Select the other actions button on a persons picture (the cog) and select Add to group.

@rmaclean ;)

# re: OK, so I do like Twitter… (I guess this is a mea culpa post) 2/16/2009 6:58 AM AC [MVP MOSS]

Robert-
Thanks... but damn that sure isn't intuitive... and now the horizontal scrolling is even worse! :)

# re: OK, so I do like Twitter… (I guess this is a mea culpa post) 2/16/2009 9:40 AM Todd Klindt

All good stuff AC. I'd like to add a "reply to all" option to your list of demands.

tk

# re: OK, so I do like Twitter… (I guess this is a mea culpa post) 2/16/2009 10:38 AM Keith Dahlby

Rather than start from scratch, you could personalize Witty - WPF and open source: http://code.google.com/p/wittytwitter/

Also handy under "Other Actions": Search for the user handle to show their full conversations. I wish you could turn off the delete column confirmation, esp. for Search.

Cheers ~
@dahlbyk

# re: OK, so I do like Twitter… (I guess this is a mea culpa post) 3/17/2009 9:52 AM Jeremy Thake

You can get intellisense in TweetDeck latest version when you hit @ symbol

Another one to wish list would be ability in Search to not show people you follow so that you don't see tweets in more than one place

Also ability to save settings for TweetDeck and open on another machine - or even when you rebuild to save Groups you've created ;-)

Ability to measure who's tweets you click through on or reply to to see who you actually geniunely read and who's you don't ;-)

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