
TuneIn looks like your average site pulling links to media from the welcome page. But once you are in things are a different matter. Logging in is via oAuth, and then you are brought to a very eye pleasing dashboard.
You have a choice between tweets and media for selections on the left, above channels (I will cover this in a moment) and the normal selections for direct messages and replies. Tweets are what you would expect and that is a stream of people you follow. To the right of your followed tweets is a media column sorted by popularity or time and then subsets of pictures, audio, video and articles.
On the media column, you can reply, retweet or bring up a smaller window with more information including the tweet that included the link and how many others also point to the media source. Each media link shows a small thumbnail of the media itself.
On the tweet column you can also reply or retweet but I would hope they add direct message and the ability to see someones profile in there. Adding in the ability to see any media links that person has would be a great cross use of the site. You can send your own tweets from the top of the page as any web client would do.
Now, if I choose media from the left side as I mentioned earlier in the review, the whole middle section becomes columns of media. The columns are then split into audio, video and pictures which are sorted by popularity or time. You can also change the column listings to a gridded newspaper feel that I really liked. The default for the grid approach was to show all media types by popularity. You can change this to time and by subtype as before for filtering.
Lastly, there was the channel ability on the left side. You are able to create and name your own channels. I created one, that had to be 3-20 characters in length, and then was stuck what to do with it. It had the columns for tweets and media, but I didn’t see how the filtering or adding people/things to it worked. Or if it was supposed to search the channel name for content itself. I am not sure there.
Overall I loved the UI for the media and hope they keep adding features as the beta cycle goes on. Heck, they might even read this. A great site to check out and an awesomesauce way to see media on Twitter. TechCrunch had an article on it here and they did a demo video on YouTube you can find here.
Filed under: Add-on Tools, Web Clients, audio, media, pictures, video