Reviews

Yesterday, most of the tech blogs (and, indeed, Twitter itself) came over all giddy at the release of TweetBot, a new, full-featured Twitter client for the iPhone that many pundits are suggesting is the first legitimate challenge to Twitter’s official app, Twitter for iPhone.

Billed as a ‘Twitter client with personality’, TweetBot is certainly nice to look at, and comes with a number of innovative features, but is it really as good as Twitter’s product?

Short answer: not quite, but assuming that they don’t fall foul of Twitter’s wrath, TweetBot could very well be the client of choice in versions to come.

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Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Michael Brito (Edelman Digital), and Tim Devane (bitly). Register now.

Many dedicated TweetDeck Users had tired some time ago of running a bulky, memory-hogging desktop application to control Twitter (and then other social streams) some time ago when web-based options such as Hootsuite became available. The folks at TweetDeck heard their cries, and Wednesday released its own long-awaited Web app. But there’s one thing that still rankles.
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You might be hard-pressed to find a more useless Twitter app than Twimon (in fact, that is a challenge). Twimom combines all the worst aspects of Twitter clients, Tamagatchi eggs and check-in services in one giant buggy ball of inanity. It’s as if someone decided they needed to come up with a way to get kids who aren’t interested in using Twitter at all to start tweeting.
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They say it’s always 5 o’clock somewhere, and with BarBird — a new iPhone app that harnesses the power of Twitter to find specials (happy hour or no) — it’s more true than ever. Once its promise is fulfilled, this app could be a barhopper’s dream.
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There’s a fine line between “I just want you to shut up for one damn minute” and “I’m going to unfollow you.” Or, at least, that’s the premise of a new feature introduced by Handmark for Tweetcaster Thursday, called, appropriately enough, “Zip it.”
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The best thing that can be said about the new official Twitter App for Mac (also known as the artist formerly known as Tweetie) is that it’s simple. The next best thing you can say about is that it’s free.
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A work-at-home dad turns to Twitter to share updates about kids, causes and life. It’s a curated selection of bizarre quotes, funny stories and temper tantrums. Woven between potty-training woes and breakfast time songs is a family growing through adoption and learning how to change the world, one status update at a time.

Written by Kevin Hendricks (@kevinhendricks), Addition By Adoption is a great read – laugh-out-loud funny in parts, whilst touching and moving in others. Certainly if you’re a parent, this will have a lot of appeal.

The concept of sharing your story via tweets is clever and I think will become pretty commonplace in years to come.

Visit Kevin’s site to purchase, or pick up a copy at Amazon. A portion of all sales (or donations) will go toward building a well in Ethiopia.

Twitter for iPhone – aka, Tweetie 3 – was released today. You can download it here (iTunes link). It’s free.

This review will be brief, essentially because Twitter for iPhone isn’t enormously different to Tweetie 2. Sure, they’ve moved a few things around and done a couple of minor adjustments to search, but for the seasoned Tweetie user the overall difference is very marginal indeed.

These include:

• An ability to use the app without actually having a Twitter account. (Which seems both utterly pointless and actually self-destructive from Twitter’s point of view.)
• On the off chance you think that Twitter looks fun, you can now sign up within the app
• Search results have been “improved”, which means you’ll now be able to see ads

So, not much different for veterans. Be warned – if you install Twitter for iPhone, it overwrites Tweetie. It’s one or t’other.

For new users to Tweetie, however, this is an essential download. For the full list of reasons why, check out my review of Tweetie 2. Don’t let my indifference put you off – it was already spectacularly good. I just expected this upgrade to offer a little bit more.

UPDATE: Tweetie has been bought by Twitter and replaced with Twitter For iPhone, which as of the current update is essentially the same. The main difference is that it is now completely free. Read my review here. Tweetie is no longer available on the app store. However, the review below remains valid simply because Twitter For iPhone is for all intents and purposes the exact same application.

I know, I know. I’ve come very late to the highly-regarded Tweetie, and that’s because I’ve also come very late to the iPhone, having owned a 3GS for just a little over one month.

Hence, I have no experience of the original Tweetie, which was released for the iPhone way back in November 2008, and therefore have not had the opportunity to become as passionate about the client as many others.

Please forgive me. I will try to make up for this oversight with enthusiasm and detail.

Honestly? I give Buzz about a week
before it drops off the front page.

So, this is essentially a first look for me, which should provide some comfort that this is an open and honest review.

A Little History

Prior to getting Tweetie, I was using TweetDeck on my iPhone. The TweetDeck app is free, and because I was familiar with TweetDeck on my PC it seemed logical to install this first. Indeed, I was quite happy with this decision, as for the first three weeks of iPhone-related Twitter usage TweetDeck seemed to hit all of my buttons. It was fast, it was easy to use, and it basically just worked.

(I’ll be reviewing TweetDeck for the iPhone at a later date.)

But all the overwhelming positive mentions of Tweetie kept eating away at me. Could something this loved be anything less than excellent? All of a sudden I was very keen to find out.

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I’ve used and enjoyed HootSuite for about six months. Initially, this was entirely at work, because the platform is (comfortably) the best and most feature-rich way to manage multiple social media accounts, notably on a multi-user basis. It’s web-based, works out of the box, is fast and efficient, and gives you tons of control over your columns, allowing the end user – and their business – to see exactly what they want to see.

Lately, I’ve found myself drifting over to HootSuite at home, largely because of issues I’ve been having with Seesmic Desktop, which had been my Twitter client of choice for as long as I can remember.

Earlier today HootSuite was down momentarily while they added some new features to the platform. This included a welcome People tab, which allows you to quickly manage your new followers, as well as those you have recently followed yourself.

Interestingly, it comes with integrated support from Klout, which while not a flawless system is probably the closest thing we have right now to a reliable measure of an individual’s online influence and social status.

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