Different Interfaces for Twitter

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Jul 13

I recently saw someone send out a message on Twitter, the gist of which was that she was refusing to read any more articles about that ubiquitous microblogging tool. I sympathize with her irritation; recent coverage has been overwhelming.

That said, if you are already addicted to the service, you may find that Tweetree offers some useful functionality. The simple interface makes it easy to see the content associated with URLs included in an individual's tweets. For example, Jose Afonso Furtado, an art librarian in Portugal, provides an outstanding current awareness service via Twitter, a steady stream of news stories relevant to information professionals. His twitter stream may be viewed here; the same stream in Tweetree may be viewed here. Where Twitter automatically reduces a URL in a message to an unintelligible string, Tweetree reveals the full URL in a message and where possible offers the option of viewing the tweeted content in a window without having to leave the Tweetree site (not possible in Twitter itself). This is applicable to blog entries, videos, news stories, and other forms of content.

The interface of Tweetree makes it easier to re-tweet (RT), follow a conversational exchange between two Twitter-ers and view the favorite tweets of others through their profile. Tweetree preserves the basic Twitter functionalities -- posting a tweet, sending others a public @message or a private direct message and bookmarking a favorite.

For those who primarily use Twitter as a vehicle for rapid interaction, I gather that Tweetdeck is a favored tool. That downloadable interface makes it easier to see in a glance any incoming updates, direct messages and re-tweets, because the system lines up each category of message in columns side-by-side. (Heavy users expand the number of columns beyond the default of 3).