I am not going to go into what Twitter is in this post. If you don’t know about Twitter, then go here. What I am going to talk about is a few applications I use for updating my tweets. Lets start with the desktop applications first.
There are a ton of different applications for your desktop to update your Twitter posts. I have used two Adobe Air apps that I ended up liking a lot. First of them is an app called Twhirl. This little app looks sort of like your standard Instant Messanger window. Nothing really fancy about it, but you don’t always need those bells and whistles. Whenever someone that you are following sends out a tweet, you get a little popup window on your screen telling you who said what. That way you can be working on something else, and not have to worry about missing any tweets.
If you wanted to go a little more indepth, I would suggest using TweetDeck. TweetDeck gives you a ton of options! It defaults to a three column view of your standard twitter feed, direct messages, and TwitScoop.
You can see a snapshot of how I have my TweetDeck laid out below.
The TwitScoop is an interesting feature. What it does is check all of Twitter to find out what some of the most common buzz words are. This gives you an insight on what people all over are talking about. When Apple updated their computers the other week, Apple was a big buzz word on Twitter. The bigger the word appears on TwitScoop, the more people are talking about it. I don’t use that feature that much, but it is cool to know what is on the minds of fellow Twitter users.
I have added a column called local friends. I went through and made a group of just the people I follow who live around me. I could make more groups and fill them with anyone I want. You can also click on someone’s icon and from there view their profile, send them a direct message, re-tweet them, or just respond to something they have said.
Now if you have an iPhone, there are a ton of apps you can use to update Twitter. Recently I have only used two, and I have beef with one of them. Twinkle and TwitterFon are both free apps and bring a little something different to the table. They are both pretty standard when it comes to viewing your Twitter feed and sending out tweets, but Twinkle does something a little different. With Twinkle you can monitor people who are Twittering around you. It uses the GPS in the phone to know where you are, and then look at people within a certain radius around you. Kind of cool if you want to start find new people to follow. Another cool feature with Twinkle is if you tilt the phone on its side. You get a map of the world, and it will randomly select someone around the world, and show you their last post. Cool feature, but I don’t use it that much.
With all that said, I have a problem with Twinkle. The app is SLOW. It takes a long time for it to update, and then once it does update, you have to wait until you can scroll through your tweets. It is because of its slowness that I switched to TwitterFon, which I have found to be MUCH faster.
TwitterFon does all the standard Twitter functions, but in a very clean style that I like. Here, just read what the website has to say;
“TwitterFon is a simple, clean, easy to use, and super fast Twitter client for your iPhone and iPod Touch. TwitterFon is focused on 80% of your task of Twitter such as check friends/replies timeline, check direct messages, send a reply and/or a direct message, and search. It also focused on easy to use. It has very clean user interface, very fast response and scrolling. You don’t need any hassle.”
It is simple, fast, and clean. Perfect for browsing Twitter on your iPhone.
So now that you know of some cool Twitter apps, try them out and start following me on Twitter, @jimiradcliff. Let me know if you have found any cool Twitter apps in the comments.
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