November 24, 2009 • 9:13 am
ListBrowser is another project from Dave Winer and shows functional simplicity as expected. The main screen is the logo above and a simple box asking for the username of the list owner. You are then presented with, well thinking of it, a list of lists for that person. Clicking on any list brings up a simple view of members, the number of followed and followers for each person as well as their bio and links to them and the list itself.
The XML for the list is available and clicking on any user in the list then gives you their lists. The idea became clear. I like this person and they have a good list. Up pops who belongs to that list and clicking on any member shows you their lists. You can basically use this to jump around for hours finding good content and lists themselves. If he adds in tag searching of some kind for the lists, it would be even better!
Filed under: List Management , lists, profile
November 20, 2009 • 10:53 am
Birdfeed has been out for a bit and we waited for version 1.2 to do a review and let them work the kinks out. Well, they not only worked out some kinks but added geolocation and Flickr support.
While this app is $2.99 in the AppStore, it packs some features and also is supported by Boxcar that we highlighted earlier.
- Direct messages – they flow and appear like conversations.
- Local caching – get stuck with no signal from AT&T? Birdfeed maintains a small cache locally to catch you up when you get back online.
- Unread counts in the right places
- A timestamp indicator to show where you left off reading tweets. All we can say is whew! About time!
- Multiple account support
- your choice of photo service
- Save posted links for later with Instapaper
- see the site for more..
This is a great iPhone app and was fun to play with. I would read the site FAQ for a ton of other tricks and how-to steps for such things as trends.
Filed under: iPhone , iPhone
Boxcar is our top rated, paid iPhone app that reads your Twitter stream (after authenticating with oAuth) looking for direct messages and @ replies. It then pushes them to your device when found. The downside of the service is that the application itself does not tweet, it launches whatever Twitter client you have installed also. You get to choose between Tweetie, Twittelator, Twitterfon, Birdfeed, Twitterena, Twitterific and even Hahlo.
You get one service included in the purchase of the application, and adding on Facebook, Twitter searches and even email is $.99 per service. So they definitely have a monetization plan involved.
Their stats on the page show they have pushed out almost ~13 million notifications, hopefully showing they are a stable and reliable service.
Filed under: iPhone , email, Facebook, iPhone, push
November 19, 2009 • 11:53 am
Tweete is definitely orange in color and geared for mobile web usage. They promote themselves in teh niche between the heavy bandwidth usage of Slandr and the featureless mobile interface. They promote ad-free usage with a bunch of features.
The list of what they did was still impressive, and many can be turned off to speed performance or on for full features. From their site:
Tweete currently allows you to:
- Update status
- View user + friends timeline with pagination
- View replies with pagination
- View direct messages with pagination
- Send direct messages
- View user profiles
- Follow & Unfollow users
- View current API limit usage
- View favourites with pagination
- Add/Delete favourites
- Search twitter
- Configurable Menus
- Tweete settings profiles
- Avatars within the timeline
- Themes
- Turn the header bar on/off
- The ability to enable a restrictive input box or not. i.e. limit input at 140 chars
- Enable/Disable Auto-refresh
- Customize the ReTweet syntax
- Resume line – so you know where you are up to on the /home page
The beauty of Tweete is that most things can be turned off for an ultimate lightweight experience, or alternatively you can turn everything on for a more rich experience.
They also integrate interface tabs and shortcut keys for quick actions, perfect for mobile users.
Filed under: Mobile Clients , mobile web client
Twittme is so mobile it does not even have a standard webpage for information. The UI is simple and from screenshots does have some advertisements included.
This image taken from this great review!
Twittme also offers a native ability to split postings that exceed 140 characters, up to 240 (which begs what do they do with the extra 100). It will then automatically make them into two separate postings.
From testing there is some features lacking, but it does work across devices. This is one to turn to in a pinch.
Filed under: Mobile Clients , mobile, web
November 18, 2009 • 2:12 pm
TweetLevel is the kind of application we need with Twitter lists forming and the questions now surrounding them. How reliable, or seen as an authority, is someone?
TweetLevel looks at a few categories about an individual including Influence, Popularity, Engagement and Trust. Each is given a ranking score from 1 to 100. I like the idea of breaking down the different areas someone might be seen by the community.
what are the numbers?
Each score is rated out of 100 – in other words, the higher your score, the more important you are. There are four result metrics:
* Influence – what you say is interesting and many people listen to it. This is the primary ranking metric.
* Popularity – how many people follow you
* Engagement – you actively participate within your community
* Trust – people believe what you say
I went ahead and used myself as the test victim, as normal. You can narrow your calculation using some built in drop-down choices about your job and location. our avatar, score and rating in each category is then displayed. No need to log in if you have a public stream. What I did like it is tells you why get the score assigned. So as not to spoil the surprise, check yourself out and see what it tells you. Go ahead, you can trust me (according to them) 
The main page shows the top Twitter users by influence, for a quick snapshot of who you should trust. Interestingly, I wish they had an autmated script that could make a Twitter list out of this so I could follow the list and always have trusted, recent content. Humorously Chris Brogan is right next to the new York Times. Good for him!
Filed under: Follower Management , graphing, profile
Trendistic, from Flaptor, looks good and works better. See the trend over 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days and more. Tweet your chart or even embed it. it is all there. You log in via oAuth to interact, if you wish, or just use it anonymously.
It is a tool that allows you to track trends on Twitter, similarly to what Google Trends does for Google searches. It gathers tweets as they are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into one-hour intervals.
You can enter a single phrase, or separate multiple with commas and see colored graphs on the trends. Below that you get columns based on search terms with current tweets themselves. Hot topics for the week can be browsed on the right and wikipedia information is brought in on the topic when available.
Filed under: Graphing Tools , chart, graphing
November 17, 2009 • 9:22 am
Listiti goes after the new Twitter lists by generating hourly alerts to you via email (currently they only offer hourly) on keywords found in that list. The idea is a bit more complex and complete than you think.
The idea of Twitter lists is not to follow the hundreds of people directly, but to follow a list of people to get information on a topic. Well if you are not following them, some of the other alerting systems won’t work the way you wish. You could do a general aslert based on everyone on Twitter, but then you get too much noise.
Listiti will watch keywords in specific lists that you specify. Narrowing the search and the group of people watched. They have a selection of top lists, or enter your own and the keyword you want watched. For example, watch a list of the social media ‘experts’ for a new product name mention.
//
They also have badges that can not only show what list is being watched, but as a promotional tool for that list. You can also unsubscribe from an alert at any time by clicking on the link in the bottom of the email you are sent.
Currently there is no charge for the service, yet the developer requests some free beer.
Filed under: Add-on Tools , alerts, lists
