Okay so it’s day three of Twitter for me and I started to feel like I was pretty much tweeting to myself and didn’t have many people I was following, I was far from understanding the power of Twitter and what makes it so addictive. Getting ‘friends’ on Twitter didn’t seem all that easy, I find that the search facility provided is far from useful, unlike say the Facebook one which I find quite thorough. So I updated my Facebook status, where I have a few hundred friends, asking everyone that twitters to send me their info so I can follow them and hopefully get them to follow me (I know that there’s an app out there to sync your tweets to your facebook status, but I’ve always found this quite annoying as I find my news feed gets hijacked by twitterers and I wanted to learn to walk before I completely whored myself out to Twitter). I get hooked up with an old friend @keithelder who took the time to explain a couple of things to me, there’s actually a lot more to Twitter than meets the eye. For example you don’t just @name to comment on a persons tweet, there’s actually a reply button which associates your tweet as a comment to theirs (this I discovered for myself yesterday).
all @ replies
The first thing he explained to me is how to change my reply settings, which I didn’t even know you could. When logged into the Twitter website go to Settings->Notices and the second option down @replies allows you to change this setting, by default it’s set to only show replies from the people you’re following. The good thing with the ‘all @ replies’ setting is it allows you to see all replies posted by people you follow, whether or not you follow the person to whom the reply is directed, read more here. Basically by enabling this setting you’re better setup to find new people to follow, and maybe even come across some that you already know.
Twitter Clients
The next thing he told me was not to use the Twitter website and to get a client. I’d been using TwitterFon on the iPhone but I hadn’t really thought about this approach for my desktop. He pointed me to a Windows client he made called Witty Twitter (needs WPF so you’re good with .Net 3.5) which I installed and it looked pretty good. But no sooner had I installed it than I noticed that it actually tells you in a tweet what client was used to post it, and most people (including Keith who wrote the Witty Twitter app!) were using something called TweetDeck.
TweetDeck
And within a few minutes of installing TweetDeck a whole new world of understanding was opened up to me, it instantly made Twitter 100 times better, I finally grasped the potential that Twitter has. It’s honestly a completely different experience, in fact to the point where I wonder if they shouldn’t push a Twitter client as the primary tool when signing up, at least somehow make it obvious, or better yet make the website interface as useful. The first thing you notice is that its laid out into 3 different columns – ‘All Friends’, ‘Replies’, and ‘Direct Messages’, and that layout alone instantly helps you to understand how Twitter really works. Another obvious improvement over the web interface is the built in URL shrinking functionality, there’s various services to chose from, the most familiar being tinyurl, and you realize a tweet no longer needs to be a messy experience involving multiple tasks and windows. I won’t get into it much more, this isn’t intended as a review so much as a pointer in the right direction for Twitter novices such as myself.
Today Twitter is a lot less shit!
Tags: Social Media, Twitter
@averagejoe it’s not about it being better or worse, that’s not the point of what I’m saying. Twitter really has nothing at all to do with Facebook. This post was merely to help enlighten anyone new to Twitter or that didn’t already know, that their experience with the service can be greatly enhanced with TweetDeck, IMHO of course.
To try and compare Twitter to Facebook is really comparing apples to oranges, they are two completely separate applications with different purposes and accomplish different goals. I was also confused by the similarity a Facebook status message has to a Tweet and didn’t understand the difference between the two until I actually jumped into Twitter. Maybe in this subject is a good idea for a future post.
How is this better than Facebook’s newsfeed?
@Jon yeah I maybe should have been more clear that there are other options out there for a good Twitter desktop client. I did look at twhirl, but really I just went with the one I saw most people in my Twitter feed using.
In any case I haven’t opened it up once this week and am just using TwitterFon on my iPhone even when I’m at my desk! Haven’t tried Tweetie yet cos TwitterFon so far has been everything that I need and it’s free. I found a good comparison review here and it seems that something that they highlight that TwitterFon does is “shows the number of unread tweets…plus when it loads, it automatically scrolls to the latest tweet”, which implies Tweetie doesn’t do that, which is functionality I can imagine I would really miss.
Tweetdeck also has the very powerful groups functionality ( although I guess this is best when you have over 100 people you’re following).
I personally prefer twhirl but mainly because I like the smaller interface more. Tweetie on the iPhone us great too.
Btw great post. I didn’t know about the website @reply setting and I’ve been using twitted for ages.