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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 and 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 and direct messages I have (kinda like how Blu does it)
• Ability to thread conversations (kinda like Blu does it)
• Ability to pin and 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