derek derek derek

This entry should not be taken as a strict review of Tweetie, as I’m sure it’s great for people who are into socializing with social networks, but my use of this new application is what spawned these thoughts.  Specifically, it is an example of how a tool (Twitter in this case) can be used by people in such dramatically different ways that high-quality applications made for that tool can still be complete failures for the individual.

Wrong Assumptions

Tweetie, like many Twitter clients, starts with the assumption that you both follow other users and that everything said by those whom you follow is possibly relevant to you.  For me, this is a complete failure.  I have no interest in using Twitter for social networking - I use it for work, and that’s it.  The only accounts I follow are those directly related to EllisLab (and one upstart account that I want to keep an eye on to see what it’s all about).  I use Twitter to both broadcast and aggregate information for my job from that data source.  That means that I’m interested in aggregating, not people, but content that relates to ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter, EllisLab, etc., regardless of who says it.

Signal to Noise

A real-world example: I’ll pick on Michael Boyink.  Boyink, creator of of Train-ee.com, often speaks about ExpressionEngine in his Tweets, and responds to others who might be asking about it.  In Tweetie, to have easy, instant access to this information, I’d have to Follow Boyink, which means I now have to filter his posts about ExpressionEngine out from the dozens of other tweets he writes about Jeeps, his family, life in Michigan, etc.  It also means that Tweetie is going to prompt me to open the app whenever he tweets anything regardless of whether it’s content from him that I’m interested in or not.  For me, this is noise.  He’s entertaining, and we might have conversations about these things outside of that context, one-on-one, but it’s not the signal I’m looking to receive from Twitter.

With one or two people, you can easily scan and it’s not that big of a deal.  But our EllisLab account is following 603 accounts at the moment.  To be useful to me, this content should either never be displayed to me or should be dismissible with a single click or a hot key, and certainly never prompt me to look at it.

But Tweetie Has a Search Feature

Yes, Tweetie supports searches.  I maintain searches on a variety of keywords, and in Tweetie this translates to dozens of new windows to hold each search.  Yuck.  Could they not have used tabs?  Worse yet, the searches are not persistent, meaning if you relaunch the application, you have to set each one up again.

And speaking of multiple windows, I’ve heard many people rave about it, but having message composition in a new window is a backwards step for me as well.  A new window is appropriate for email, because the content can be long, you may want to refer to other emails, save as drafts, etc.  Twitter is limited to 140 characters, and is much closer relative to instant messaging.  Can you imagine how annoying it would be if in order to instant message someone, you had to open a floating dialog box?  How Windows ME is that?  It annoys me no less in Tweetie.

Why not use Tweetie for tweets and RSS for Twitter searches?

For me, the data source is important.  Information gained from Twitter is not equal to information gained from the web sites whose feeds I subscribe to in NetNewsWire.  I tried it thinking I’d really like it, and Twitter searches felt so out of place, it’s silly.  It also further fragments the information I’m trying to receive by using two different applications to access the same data source.  And I don’t want my Twitter sourced information updated at the same frequency that my site feeds are.

Tweetie is not all bad

Since some might find this entry after searching for reviews on Tweetie, I’ll include a bit of positive.  It has a nice UI, seems to function pleasantly enough, can connect to multiple accounts, and separates them nicely for you.  It makes it easy to follow a message to its source to glean more context, as deeply as you’d like to dive.  It’s probably great for people using Twitter as a social network, perhaps the leader currently in quality of Twitter apps.

So what am I using?  Right now, EventBox, as it meets most of my needs.  It has a lot of useless stuff, though, since I do not use Facebook, Google Reader, Flickr, or Reddit.  And it can only access a single Twitter account, which is painful.

Topic vs. Speaker

The sum of this story is, that I must be in a tremendous minority, but I can’t imagine that I’m really the only person out there that wants to use Twitter to connect to content, and not to people.  There is a distinct difference in aggregating information based on what’s being said versus being based on who’s saying it.  Someday the right application will come along.  Right now, for me, it’s not Tweetie.