Wanted: A Better Twitter Client

Well over a year ago, I wrote about just how useful Twitter can be, and over time that’s only increased. I have to admit that until about a month ago, I mostly just used Twitter in the web interface. I did install Digsby as a client, but I basically just used that to notify me when new Twitter messages were showing up. But then I kept hearing about neat things (such as groups) that TweetDeck allowed, and I started playing with that. It took some getting used to, but there were definite advantages. Being able to set up groups/columns/persistent searches and laying it out in a nice format actually made Twitter that much more useful. It became, as I noted in a Tweet sort of a “personal Bloomerg” for me.

But still… Tweetdeck had limitations. While you could edit the colors (useful! white text on black background is awful for eye strain), there were limitations. Then, I noticed that Tweetdeck was dropping a bunch of messages. I’d only noticed because people would tweet something in reference to an earlier tweet… but that earlier tweet wouldn’t be there. In the past few days it’s only gotten worse. I asked for some suggestions for other apps and have now tested out both Seesmic Desktop and Destroy Twitter. Both have some nice features… and others that are quite annoying. People recommended both Tweetie and Nambu… but both are only available on Macs, so I couldn’t test them out.

Not that anyone actually reads this blog, but I thought I’d try to put together a feature list of what would make me happy on the Twitter client front (I’m leaving out the stuff that’s already pretty standard, such as URL shortener support, easy retweets, etc.). If anyone develops a client with these features, please, please, please let me know:

• Customization! Let me choose colors/fonts/sizes. Tiny white text on a black background? Sorry. Unusable.
• Let me manage how many columns/groups I want. When you limit what I can do, it just makes me want to look for other apps. Tweetdeck seems to limit you to 10 columns. Not sure about Seesmic. Destroy Twitter has 6 total columns (home/replies/direct messages/groups/search/saved tweets), and only displays three at a time (first three or last three). You can do multiple groups/searches, but you can only see one at a time. That gets annoying. My screen can show more, so let me see more. And making me manually switch between groups or searches? Why? Just show them all.
• Also, we don’t necessarily need the full column metaphor. Why not set it up as a canvas and let me organize each option as I see fit? Then I can set it up exactly as I want. My full stream can be a full column, but I don’t get many direct messages. So maybe I only want direct messages to be a small box in the corner, and then I can put a lower volume persistent search beneath it. Let me organize how I see everything on an open canvas and I’d be much happier.
• Make it easy to set up groups — which means setting up multiple ways to manage groups. Tweetdeck gives you a list of everyone you follow. That works well until you have a ton of users you follow. Seesmic only lets you add if you see people in your home timeline. That’s awful. I purposely set up groups so I make sure I can see important messages from people who don’t tweet often, but I don’t want to miss (like my mom or my wife). Destroy Twitter shows you the first 4 (alphabetical) people you follow and then offers a search box. Showing those first four users is useless and if I don’t remember the usernames, the search is useless. Why not set up a combo of all of these? Show the list. Let people add from their stream. And offer search.
• Notifications: Tweetdeck and Seesmic just tell me I have new messages (and in what buckets) but don’t display the messages themselves. Destroy Twitter and Digsby at least show actual text in the notification… except both just show the latest message (Digsby lets you scroll to the “next” message if you get your mouse over the notification fast enough). I would kind of like to see all the incoming messages displayed briefly. That helps with the whole “ambient information” concept.
• Facebook integration is definitely nice — props to Tweetdeck and Seesmic for doing that… but why won’t either let me clear out those messages once seen? I can clear out Twitter messages, but not Facebook messages.
• Server integration. If I run the client on multiple machines, it should know what I’ve read/not read.
• Better handling of read/unread messages: make it easy to mark stuff as read and clear it out…. and then if I *do* want to go back, make that easy too. Tweetdeck lets me clear out read messages, but if I shut it down and reopen… they’re back. But if I don’t shut it down and reopen, there appears to be no way to get my “cleared” messages back. If I want to see them again, I have to either shut down/reopen or go to the web interface. Maybe just do what Gmail does and have an “archived” box/column that can be opened.
• Show me all my messages. Not sure if this is an API limitation or what… but if I shut down for the night and open up Tweetdeck in the morning, it only shows me a few hours worth of messages. I’d like to see everything since I last logged in. At the very least, make this a user option… (related to this: Tweetdeck, STOP dropping messages).
• Memory management. Stop being a memory hog! All of you. :)

I think that’s it for now… though I may have some other thoughts later. What other features would be good?

I should note, by the way, that none of this is to disparage the work done on these apps. They’ve all made Twitter much more useful — so I’m not trying to pull a Louis CK “everything’s great and I’m still pissed off” sorta thing. I’m just finding that in making Twitter much better, they’re also exposing their limitations. All of these apps are in early versions, so I’m hopeful that they’ll all get there eventually. Hopefully this post helps someone get there faster. :)

Go Ahead And Compare Atari Desks

Ok, so remember that last post about the old photo of an Atari 800 on a desk from 1983? The one that I said reminded me so much of the old Atari 800 I grew up with? The one that I said that I was pretty sure my parents had walled off as a disaster area? Yeah, well, my memory was correct, and my parents are awesome. They just sent me a photo of the desk, taken today.

Here’s, again, is the photo from 1983 that Pesco’s friend sent him:

And here’s the photo taken today, April 14, 2008, of the Atari 800 I grew up with that’s still sitting in my parent’s basement:


See why I saw some similarities? Gotta love the wood paneling, right? Ok. So mine’s a bit messier… but I can blame that on 25 years of usage… right? Er… probably not. Next step will be turning on the Atari 800 and seeing if I can coax it to do something next time I’m at my parents’ place.

That Atari 800 Looks Awfully Familiar

Boingboing has a post today including a photo from one of Pesco’s friends, Jennifer Brown, of a computer desk showing an Atari 800. The photo is circa 1983:

The scary bit is that looks exactly like the setup I had with my Atari 800, which I used all through school, right up until I went away to college. The differences are really small. But we had a similar ancient TV. We had the tape player (remember when you loaded programs via cassette tape?). At one point we had two separate floppy drives (the 810s), with the two different doors (one flips, one goes up and down), just like the photo shows (though, i think we had two because one broke, so I don’t think we had them lined up next to each other). I also don’t think we had an Atari branded printer. But, even the desk and the overall setup looks kinda similar to what we had.

So I was looking at that and then started thinking… My parents pretty much declared their basement a federal disaster area after I went off to college (and yes, it’s my fault that it’s was a disaster), and have been waiting for the feds to send in a cleanup crew ever since. I know that they’ve finally been dumping out all sorts of old stuff over the past year, but if I remember correctly (and I might not) that corner of the basement has not been touched in 15 years. In other words, our Atari 800 with the similar setup and the crappy TV may STILL be sitting in my parents basement. I’m not back in NY for a couple months, but Mom & Dad, if you read this and if I’m correct that the old Atari is still sitting pretty in the basement, would you mind taking a photo and sending it to me? And, yes, I do talk to my parents regularly on the phone or via IM or email, but making the request by blog just seems like more fun. If I’m right, and the setup is still there, I’ll update the post with it once they send it.

Turns Out Lots Of Folks Listen To ‘All Things Considered’

Mentioned this over on Techdirt last week, but might as well mention it here as well, since all sorts of folks are emailing/texting/calling to say they heard the show. On Friday evening I got interviewed by Robert Siegel on NPR’s “All Things Considered” talking about “The Streisand Effect,” the phrase I jokingly coined a while back. It was quite a bit of fun. Siegel seemed pretty cool, making sure I was at ease before we got started. I had expected the questions mostly to be about examples of the Streisand Effect in action. Many of the questions were of that nature (though a few other examples I spoke about got left on the cutting room floor). I wasn’t expecting that last question about other phrases I’ve coined or a separate question which didn’t make the cut either about other similar phrases (not by me) that had caught on. I rambled on about Godwin’s Law for a while, but even as I was saying it I knew I hadn’t done a great job describing it, so I was pretty happy that got cut. Either way, it’s been nice to discover just how many people listen to All Things Considered — and I’m glad I didn’t make a total fool of myself (thanks, in part, to the NPR editors).

Twitter Spam Does Exist, If Only A Little Bit

I’ll admit that I was pretty skeptical about Twitter for a long time. I had a few false starts in trying to use it, but a couple months ago I got serious about it and have discovered that it can be useful in surprising ways. It seems that a lot of bloggers have recently been coming to the same conclusion with a bunch pointing to Howard Rheingold’s post about why Twitter is useful. Russell Beattie followed it up with a post claiming that Twitter is great because there are no spammers and no trolls. Unfortunately, that’s not quite true. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been noticing more and more messages alerting me that my Twitter feed was being “followed” by some odd name I didn’t recognize. Like I do with most followers, I’d go check out their Twitter-feed, and discover that it was mostly spamming stuff. I’d also notice that they were following thousands of people with very few following them. Even better, despite having said they were “following” me, most stopped following me immediately. They only followed me to get an alert sent to me so I would check out their spammy feed.

No, it’s not as bad as some other types of spam or trolling, and it can be avoided if people lock their feeds and have to approve followers, but it’s not quite correct to say there’s no spam. And, as Twitter gets more popular, don’t be surprised to see them come up with even more spamming and trolling methods.