Desktop Client – Twhirl

I use Twhirl as my desktop twitter application. I looked at TweetDeck but it was overkill and it takes up too much screen real-estate. I tried the gorgeous blu (works only on Vista and Windows 7), but it does not have an adjustable font. The default font is too small for my aging eyes. Twhirl is surprisingly feature rich but it takes awhile to figure out all the intricacies. I’ve tried others, but keep coming back to Thwirl.

iPhone App – Tweetie

Tweetie is terrific. I had previously used Twitterific and Twinkle on the iPhone but Tweetie ($2.99) satisfies me the most. Tweets are presented in bubbles similar to the iPhone’s SMS bubbles. Thankfully, the font is adjustable. Functions and information are an easy swish away. Twitterific does have the advantage of supporting both Twitter and friendfeed.

See also: 29 Twitter Apps for the iPhone Compared (Mashable)

Blog Integration Widget – Twitter Widget

I use Twitter Widget to feed my tweets into the right sidebar of my blogs. Prior to April 2, 2009, I had used Twitter Widget Pro on The Daleisphere and Twitter for WordPress on DaleDietrich.com, my iMedia Law Blog and my Video Game Law Blog (I used two different tools because for some reason Twitter Widget Pro didn’t work on my other blogs after my move to media temple. Thanks to Dave Zatz for his suggestions and inspiration here.

URL Compression Tools

URL compression tools are used to compress URL’s before embedding them in Tweets. There are many to choose from. I rotate between several:

• The TinyURL.com bookmarklet (available here) generates compressed links to the page I’m viewing directly from my Firefox toolbar. One click on the bookmarklet and a TinyURL to that page is added to my PC’s clip board for easy pasting into Twhirl.  I probably use this the most.
• Bit.ly has a similar bookmarklet tool accessible from the Firefox toolbar, but using it requires an extra click. It has the advantages of: (i) generating a smaller link (every letter counts on Twitter); and (ii) you can use Bit.ly to track how many people click through the link if you are so inclined – I’ve never been so inclined.
• DiggBar: As of April 2, 2009, simply typing ‘Digg.com/’ in front of any URL in any browser and then press Enter generates a compressed URL that you can copy and paste into your Tweet (See: DiggBar Launches Today! or watch the video below).

Note:  Regrettably, this DiggBar approach won’t work on the Daleisphere or any of my sites because long ago I added some special sauce in my headers to prevent my sites from being embedded in an iframe. I did this because some jack@ss was embedding all my posts into an iframe on his site and passing my site off as his own. Because of that my sites are locked out of this cool new tech. Grrrrr! I may revisit my approach to iframe in the future.

• Twhirl has a built in URL compression tool that I find too clumsy to use often. I much prefer how blu compressed URLs on the fly.

Reference:

• Twitter Toolbox: 70+ Awesome Twitter Apps, Mash-Ups, Plugins and Services
• 29 Twitter Apps for the iPhone Compared

Note

The contents of this post had originally been contained in my ‘Twitter Tips for Beginners’ post. However, I change the Twitter apps, tools and widgets I use  so frequently that I decided that a regularly updated post dedicated to the topic would be more useful. As such, I intend to update this post from time to time as my Twitter tools change – and they will change!

For those  of you wondering what this twittering business is all about, below are links to a few good articles on the topic that should get you started:

• Ten Things you Must Know before Using Twitter (a good primer)
• Twittering Tips for Beginners by David Pogue has written a good
• What I know about Twitter by Harry McCraken
• The top 7 mistakes new Twitter Users Make
• 10 Ways to Increase Your Twitter Followers by Kevin Rose
• The Twitter Apps, Tools and Widgets I Use by yours truly
• Twitter Toolbox: 70+ Awesome Twitter Apps, Mash-Ups, Plugins and Services a huge list of Twitter resources

Since joining Twitter a few months back, I have wanted to understand how it overlapped/interacted with the web-content aggregator friendfeed. I looked at friendfeed at least two or three times and never quite ‘got it’ – until today.

Robert Scoble was a guest on the recent episode 81 of net@night. This guy is quite the friendfeed evangelist (Arrington suggests he’s addicted to it). So much so that the net@nite discussion made me want to take another look. Leo mentioned that Scoble had done a ‘how to’ type video on friendfeed. A quick Google search lead me to this very informative 26 minute video: ‘Robert Scoble: 20 Things About Friendfeed”:

What Does friendfeed Do?

friendfeed is not easy to understand out of the gate. Following along with the Scoble video, I was able to learn the basics, how to how to set it up and how powerful it can be.  A primary function of friendfeed is to aggregate all of your web activities, posts, pictures, comments etc. into one place. I added feeds from each of the following web services that I contribute too(click each to see the underlying feed):

• Digg.com
• Disqus
• Facebook
• IntenseDebate
• Last.fm
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• rss feeds from each of my Daleisphere, Video Game Law and iMedia Law blogs

Secondly, all my public web content will be streamed out, in real time, to those who choose to follow me on friendfeed, Twitter, Facebook etc.

Finally, I can follow others on friendfeed and have all of their public web content streamed out, in real time, to me – in one place.

[Jan 9, 2009 Update: I just noticed that Microsoft’s Windows Live ‘What’s New Feed’ function seems very similar to friendfeed.]

Addictive

I can see how friendfeed can become addicting. I initially set it to follow the same individuals that I currently follow on Twitter (those with friendfeed accounts that is – Dave Zatz, Davis Freeberg, Brent Evans).

I then expanded it to follow some of the diggirati that I respect such as Scoble himself, Michael Arrington, Paul Thurrott, Leo Laporte, Ed Bott, Ryan Block, Jason Calacanis etc. The quality of content (especially since CES 2009 is in full swing as I write this) is outstanding.  Clearly, following smart people with similar interests leads to fantastic results.

Search

The search feature is powerful. There are three normal ways to search friendfeed – your own content, your friends content or everyone’s content.

With all my content from around the web aggregated into one place, I can search all of my public-web content, going back for years in some cases, in one place. There is no need to traverse 8 different sites with eight different search engines to find my stuff.

Even more powerful, is the ‘Everyone’ content search. As I’m typing this post, the Palm Pre was just announced at CES. A simple search of ’Palm Pre’ in friendfeed found endless blog posts, comments, tweets, pictures etc. on the just-announced Palm Pre. Powerful stuff!

Advanced Search

You can granulize your search by content type. For example, you could search just for sub-content types from, say, flickr, or just tweets, or just blog posts etc. You can search by friend. Cool.

‘Best Of’ Feature

The “Best Of” feature, was particularly interesting. friendfeed users can effectively vote on what content is good by clicking on the ‘like’ button beside any entry. These ‘like’ votes are dynamically tallied such that if you click on “Best of”” (day/week/month), friendfeed will display the content that your peers/friends voted to be the best of that day, week, month. Terrific. This is a great way to surface the most interesting content. It’s kinda like “Digg.com for Smart People”.

Issues

Need a friendfeed Desktop App: Like Twitter, friendfeed is web-based. I use the twhirl application to access my Twitter feeds. I would like a similar application to access my friendfeed feeds. They must exist. Any suggestions?

[Note: I purchased the Nambu iPhone App ($1.99) to access Twitter and friendfeed on my iPhone. It seems to work well enough – but it is annoying to set up.]

Loosing Control of Comments: I’m new to this. I’m concerned that if someone comments on one of my blog posts within friendfeed, that I’ll loose those comments. I’d rather have them comment directly in my blog, not on friendfeed. I know Disqus and IntenseDebate were talking about importing those comments back. As I write this, I don’t know the status of backhauling friendfeed comments into the source blog’s database. As you can see below, IntenseDebate pulled in comments I made on this post from within friendfeed.

[Jan 9, 2009 Update: As you can see from my first comment below, Intense Debate pulls comments on a post made in friendfeed back into the blogger’s comments (details here). While it appears that Disqus is working on integration (see here) and there are some tools to do this with Disqus (see here), near as I can tell there is no formal solution for Disqus yet.]

No Comment Character Count: You can setup friendfeed to Tweet your friendfeed comments (as I have done). Twitter permits only 140 characters per Tweet. friendfeed permits more but it does not tell you how many characters you have typed in a comment. If you type more than 140, they get truncated in Twitter. Dang! I note that Nambu has the same limitation.

Outbound Feed Publishing to Twitter: Yikes, I quickly learned not to include every feed from every service in my outbound feed to Twitter. This was a bit much. As of right now, I only publish friendfeed comments, and new blog post entries to Twitter. Not sure what I’ll do with facebook status updates yet. I attempt to keep my Twitter feed more professional than my Facebook world. And I don’t want every comment I make everywhere on the web to appear in my Twitter feed. That’s just noisy overkill.

Conclusion

Will I continue to use it? Only time will tell. It is certainly more interesting, useful and impressive than I had expected. If I can find a good desktop app to run it, I probably will.