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Twitter Client Gripes

Like many in my trade, I keep a Twitter client open all day. 140 characters works very well between compile times, reloads, uploads. I still use RSS extensively, but Twitter fills the gaps nicely as my brain is always looking for information to absorb (feel free to follow if you don’t).

To this day it amazes me that I can’t find a perfect Twitter client. Tweetie back in its day was pretty damn close, but since it was bought by Twitter, it went downhill to the point of being unusable on the iPhone. Amazingly priced at “free” it’s not worth the price. These days TweetBot is as close to perfect as I can find on the iPhone and I’d recommend it to anyone who is frustrated with Twitter for iPhone.

Largely due to neglect the Mac client is still usable to me, however it’s hardly awesome. Why doesn’t “command /” reliably bring the window to focus? Why can’t I set my preferred url shortener? The developer console has lots of weird select and focus issues. I could go on…

From where I sit, these are the most annoying things Twitter still hasn’t figured out:

  • Search Blows – This one everyone always complains about. Search isn’t good, and only goes a few days back. It’s a miserable experience.
  • Amnesia – Twitter has a very limited memory. You can only search a few days back. Your timeline can only go so far back. Even DM’s can only be retrieved a mystery period back. Everything eventually disappears. I actually backup my tweets to a MySQL database so I can search anything I’ve ever tweeted. Most don’t have this luxury. Perhaps they should just partner with Google and let Google handle their archive/search problem. Let Google pay for the data, and for the right to solve this problem.
  • DM Downgraded – This one is pretty specific to the new Twitter “Let’s Fly” UI. Direct Messages, are very obscured and buried. Yea I get it, you want everything out in the open. It’s annoying however to hide useful and sometimes important UI.
  • Incomplete Clients – There’s no interface that seems to do everything. If you want to know how many RT’s or Favorites posts have, the best UI seems to be the website. If you want to use a custom URL shortener, Twitter for iPhone has you covered. Twitter for Mac has no UI to show what client a tweet was created with, mobile with its limited screen size does. It also has no way to see RT stats for a tweet. Want to be notified when you have a mention or DM? iPhone or desktop client is best (that’s not the web clients fault). Amazingly these UI’s all come from the same company. Facebook (now) does a pretty good job on feature parody across web/mobile clients.
  • What are favorites/lists – I don’t think anyone has fully figured out what these really are and how they should be used. Is there a value to maintaining a list? It seems most use favorites as bookmarks to read later, some use it for marking tweets they really like. I know I’ve done both. Facebook hasn’t figured out lists completely either, though I feel they’ve at least given them a useful purpose for power users.
  • Spam – I think if a user signs up and just @replies a link to 50 people, an algorithm should be able to detect they are a spammer and stop it.
  • Placeholder – The thing that annoys me the most is they still haven’t figured out how to leave a placeholder on your timeline. Why can’t I just pickup where I left off? I need to search for it. Facebook never solved for this problem either. Amazon’s Kindle (and apps) solved for this brilliantly. Surely Twitter could adopt an API to solve for this. As someone who restarts their browser often due to work I’m doing, this makes the web UI unusable.

So what am I ignoring in terms of annoying Twitter client things?

2 replies on “Twitter Client Gripes”

You forgot “Linux users have mostly been told to go to hell.”

I loved TweetDeck, but now you can’t even (easily) get it for Linux anymore; and the last-released version has a number of bugs that just make it unusable (my favorite is the TypeError’s it throws in the console, after which the window refuses to repaint).

I understand that relying on AIR was probably a losing proposition, longterm, but it’s frustrating to just have a great product disappear with basically no explanation.

But that, apparently, is also common among Startup 2.0’s now.

I’m not much of a desktop Linux user, so that doesn’t impact me personally, but yea, you’re right. Linux has been pretty much been left behind in the 2.0 world. Web browser only.

But then again, I’m surprised no 3rd party Linux client ever really did anything other than TweetDeck.

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