richardbarley.com

Twitter [www.twitter.com] is great. Its a really easy way to keep in touch with people you know, but also to keep tabs on people you don;t know but would like to, and also those who you will never know but only dream about.

My friends fall into 3 distinct groups:

• Real friends - People I know and have possibly even met
• Publishers - People who say stuff on Twitter that I find interesting and/or useful
• Celebs - Not just true celebreties but generally people who I will probably never meet

Got to get grouping!

Monitoring your brand

The must-have tool

I blogged a while ago [here] about the toss-up between Thwirl [website] and TweetDeck [website] as my Twitter client of choice. Having given TweetDeck a good run out, I did eventually go back to Twhirl, finding it just did everything I needed in a nice, slick, compact manner. TweedDeck was a bit rough around the edges and, although I really like the ability to group people and have their tweets visible in separate columns, i found the multi-column interface just too clumsy for me. I like my Twitter clients slim, trim and straight up-and-down .

However, a recent comment from Leezl [here] pointed me toward a new contender in the arena,  namely Feedalizr [home page]. So, always one to try out new stuff, I gave it a go.

Feedalizr (they just had to miss out a vowel somewhere) is an Adobe Air application, just like Twhirl and TweetDeck, that combines some of the best aspects of both rival clients into one pretty slick package. It manifests as a single column,  but with the ability to create separate tabs for items filtered by username or service (Feedalizr supports Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr and Jaiku). This is reminiscent of the filtering offered by TweetDeck, but not quite as flexible. The tabbed interface is a big improvement though, and is something that TweetDeck should really look at implementing.

Overall the interface of Feedalizr feels good. Everything is smooth scrolling and the flipping effect when opening the “options” dialog is cool, if rather unnecessary. Click on someone’s name and their entries will appear in a new column. A nice slick way of picking out the signal from the noise.

One very nice feature that  that both Twhirl and TweetDeck lack is de-duping of FriendFeed items. If Feedalizr spots that someone has tweeted something, and that tweet then appears in that user’s FriendFeed list, it will hide the duplicate entry so you don’t read what your firends are eating for breakfast two times over every day.

There are a few niggly issues that take the polish off this potential Twhirl-beater. It doesn’t have Twhirls ability to click on an @name to display that users profile. And the pop-up notifications for new messages contain a rather spurious explanation, which I found unnecessary and distracted from  my reading of the messages.

It is still early days for Feedalizr, which, naturally,  is still in beta, but it’s certainly a promising start and I shall continue to look out for updates. I have added a few of my issues to their site on Get Satisfaction [here] so I’ll see what their response is.

Could Twhirl finally lose it’s crown? Not yet, but maybe soon.

You may have noticed that I use Twitter, the up-and-down conversation/micro-blogging tool. Over there on the right-hand-side is my latest Twitter status from www.twitter.com/richard_barley.  I like using Twitter because it allows me to keep up with lots of folks, some who I would call friends, some who I have never met, without having to invest a lot of time and effort. This suits me as I am essentially rather lazy when it comes to socialising and anything that makes it easier is a winner for me.

Twitter works on the basis of people publishing messages of up to 140 characters. These messages could be anything such as notifications about new blog posts, comments on the weather, updates on a baby’s progress, breaking stories from news outlets, or just plain old “How are you ? I’m fine” type conversations.

There are lots of celebrities using Twitter both real and fake, and I even started up a conversation with Tickle, the cat from the holiday home we recently visited in Carcassonne, which was rather surreal.

Anyway, the big question for me currently is how to access Twitter? There are almost as many different ways to access it as there are crumbs festering in my keyboard. I have tried several in-browser solutions, but none of these gave me the nice warm glow that I was looking for. I use Digsby for all my IM conversations and that handles Twitter well, but I still couldn’t get on with it.

Then I discovered Twhirl and how I loved it’s Adobe Air sexiness. Functionality-wise, it does the lot for me and is a very stable and well-developed application. Then I came across TweetDeck - a new pretender to the crown. This has many of the same features that Twhirl has, but also some that it doesn’t, which are what make it appealing. One of the biggies for me is being able to collect your friends into groups. These groups automatically refresh when new messages (”tweets” in twitter language) arrive. This is really quite cool and allows me to skim down the tweets from those people I don’t really know, but just like to keep an eye on, while pulling out the important tweets from my closer friends and key notifications.

Where TweetDeck falls down is that it is still in early days. The interface can be a bit clunky and there are some important features missing - following/removing friends for instance. These will be addressed, but how soon?

So I have a dilemma. I know there is a redesign of the Twhirl interface coming along soon, and TweetDeck is constantly improving too. I would like to make a decision, but I think these two clients will be battling for my desktop space for a while to come.

In the meantime, why not sign yourself up for Twitter and see what you think? Let me know if you have a better solution.