Byrnesys Blabberings

You may have heard of the online company called twitter, the buzz around this service/business is akin to the facebook buzz of about 18 months ago, and I wouldn’t be too surprised in the next few months to hear less of ‘are you on facebook’ and more ‘what’s your twitter name’.

Call it the fickle consumerism of late capitalism or the successful implementation of a service people actually require, people are mostly over facebook. It was a great idea, the whole status bar really captured peoples imagination, creativity or sometimes just the fact they were going to bed, but soon people became hungry for facebook to do new things until the cart became a little too heavy for the donkey are now people have become bored with getting invited to ‘be related’ on facebook and are looking for something which requires a little less effort and a whole lot of easy to understand simple info on their friends.

Thats where someone in the room points to twitter. Twitter is a status update service that is woefully under featured, but that in turn has become its strength. All that twitter offers is a username and a simplistic, if well designed, web interface.

As user numbers grew a few developers thought they could hop on the bandwagon and design some great features for the service and so though I thought it would be worth giving you a few pointers on the apps that have been developed to use twitter in ingenious and useful ways.

Tweetdeck  – Tweetdeck is what I, and quite honestly most of the people I know who use twitter use, its a desktop application and runs on windows, mac a Linux (I think?). Tweetdeck gives you a column based interface which allows you to group twitter users, which becomes very helpful when you end up following 3 figures worth of users. Here are my categories which might help you get an idea of how tweetdeck can be usefully put to work in organising the endless flow of tweets: friends (people  I know face to face), Blog (People I know through this blog or the Internet at large), Companies (These are commercial twitter users like theguardian tech department, lifehacker and pocketlint), Shalebs (Don’t judge me! You can’t tell me you don’t want to know the last time John Mayer brushed his teeth!) and replies (in case you didn’t realise people can respond publicly to you on twitter by starting their tweet @yourusername and fortunately tweetdeck gives you a separate column for these so you don’t ignore people and seem rude.

Twitterific – This is the app I use on my iPhone for twitter, its has a nice UI and  helpfully highlights any @replies you get. Im not going to lie though, I use this app because it was free and it works, but I have also heard good things about tweetie and the expensive older brother of twitterific, twitterific premium.

Twitscoop – This is less an app and more a tag engine, it operates as a column within tweetdeck and gives you a visualised summary of the words that are most common in tweets at the moment. It can be a great source of info on breaking news.

twitterberry – Now that I am no longer using my blackberry I cant comment on  this piece of software but the friends that I would trust on things like this twitter use twitterberry.

twitterfeed – This is a very helpful site which takes your rss feed, lets say you have a blog and updates your twitter status with the title of the post and a twitter optimised link to it. This is a useful function, but part of the fun of twitter is the interactivity of it and twitter ghost accounts which blindly post links to a blog are a lot less interesting unless the author is prepared to have a little conversation on twitter itself.

fb2twitter – This is actually a facebook app which automatically updates your  twitter with your facebook status. Again much like the above twitterfeed fb2twitter is great for killing two birds with one stone but if twitter is being blindly updated without engaging in conversation much of the things that makes twitter good is lost.

Any other twitter related applications your using out there? Jump in and comment below.

By the way, you can follow me on twitter here twitter.com/byrnesyliam