Development of my new “favorite” Twitter client

A few weeks ago I posted about looking for the optimal Twitter.com client for my needs. Ideally, looking for something that will allow me access across platforms and machines, enable me to never miss a tweet (unless i want to) and always know where I left off. My initial idea was an web service that would email each tweet in my timeline, replies, etc. Not being a programmer I found someone to actually build a single user proof of concept. The web app was completed a few weeks ago and I have been using that as my sole Twitter client since then. I would have posted earlier but my work schedule had me trekking around the country, which was actually a perfect time to be testing out such a system in addition to the holidays. Being disconnected for the long transcon flights and spending all day in meeting would preclude anyone from keeping up on Twitter, so it was a perfect period to be testing.

So how does it work?

Every few miniutes the script running on a web server connects to Twitter and send me an email for each tweet from my timeline, my friends timeline, and reply’s. Each email is fully customiable via a tempalte, so ive spent some time develping a tempalte that works for me. As you can see by the image below, it includes the thumbnail, metadata, and links to reply, DM, or RT the post via email using twitermail.com.

From an organizational perspective it works wonderful. I use gmail with tags and filters i am able to continually refine the organization of how i read Twitter. For example, all tweets are given the same label and archived so none appear in my inbox and i can visit one label to see everything. From here i’ve divided up the people that i follow into different groups, you’ve got those people that i personally know, people that i always what to see their tweet and never miss one, news or other information feeds, day traders, investors, new people that i’m following, macro economics, and so on. Really the possibly are endless with tagging (which you already know) And with the speed of gmails web client its very quick to key through each post as its own email or just review the subjects (which also have the tweet text, or one could make the subject just have the username whatever) for a quick scan.

I really consider this nearly close to perfect. Much like tweetdeck (which i think is really cool) but accessable anywhere on any computer or my iphone.

So now that I’ve told you why this is now my favorite twitter client de jour there are some downsides. First and foremost the way its currently set up to post tweets, reply, and re-tweets via twittermail.com (which is a great service) However, in Gmail there is no way that i have found to count the characters in my tweet (if anyone knows how to do this, please let me know). That causes problems as a result, I often end up posting with another client like twitterfox. Second, because the tweets are sent to my email its becoming more and more easy to ignore the Twitter traffic for longer periods at a time resulting in more tweets to sort through at any one point it time (this is good and bad). and third, the UI and functionality is all based on email which is somewhat limiting, however having everything come to one place email and twitter is wonderful. All that said, i really like the ability to catch up on all of twitter exactly from where i left off no matter what computer I am using online or offline, espcially in Apple Mail.app and the imap client of my iPhone.

The question is does anyone else think such a client would be benificial to them? This might be a concept that I try to build out to multi-user client but only if there seems to be enough demand. Please let me now what throughts or recomendations you might have on such a client.

Posted in Twitter on January 5th, 2009 Taged with Twitter

Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus