seanmonstar

Contextless Twitter Search

Marco outlines what’s so terrible about the Quick Bar in the Twitter for iPhone app, but it sounds more like a fair assessment of Twitter’s trending topics feature in general. The trending topics are simply words that Twitter has noticed are having an increased appearance in a short time period. Once in a good long while, when control of my wandering eyes is slacking, I see something that catches my attention in the trending topics. I click on it, curious about what all the ruckus is about. Since this ships me off to a global twitter search of the topic, I immediately scold myself and my wandering eyes. You failed me!

Twitter Search

The issue with Twitter search is that it is currently a real-time global shotgun of tweets; something I have never found useful. Most tweets are useless garbage, even tweets that I allow into my timeline. The reason I read them is for their context: I have similar interests to the people I follow, and so their short 140-character jabs make sense and sometimes even connect with me, my being. I have educated myself on many of these people, and therefore have come to enjoy seeing their tweets. When I search on Twitter, I never know any of the people whose tweets I’m barraged with, at a real time pace that no human could possibly keep up with.

Twitter search would be useful if it searched using the context of who I follow¹. Only search the tweets of those “trusted” sources, and perhaps the tweets that they’ve retweeted, replied to, or maybe even favorited. These are tweets that I would care about, because if it’s information I’m after, I trust those sources to have spoken about the topic in the context of my interests. If it’s an opinion I’m after, I only want opinions of people whom I understand and can appreciate.

Google’s first attempt at using the social network’s data was with a super up-to-date widget of tweets that contained the same keywords as what you had searched Google for. Needless to say, they were a net negative, since all it served to do was frustrate and take up space in Google’s SERPs.

Google has recently started inserting web pages into the search results if that page has been tweeted by someone I follow. That is putting the context of people I vaguely know and trust, into my search results. That is something I can’t praise enough. @twitter: see @google.

Trending topics

In order for trending topics to mean anything to me, they would need to be given context, just like search should. Trending topics could be formed around all the activity of people I follow, plus the people they follow, just to get a bit more data for trending topics. For instance, log in to Twitter in the morning, and oh!, look-y there. In trending topics is how Amazon shot Lendle in the face. I would find value in that.

As it is, Twitter assumes I care what the the rest of Twitter has to say. I don’t. If I did, I would follow them.

The Search for a Decent Windows Twitter App

I kinda like Twitter. It’s a fun place to leave occasional comments. It’s also a great way to find links to interesting information I would normally miss from my feeds. But being a Windows user, I have yet to find that Twitter application that is a joy to use.

I’ve tried out a couple applications, and found each one lacking:

• Tweetdeck
• DestroyTwitter
• Seesmic

There might be a decent application out there that I haven’t found, but these are the most popular ones available to Windows. It almost feels like people only want to make cool stuff for Macs.

Tweetdeck

Although it’s hugely popular by many, I can’t help but get annoyed at parts of Tweetdeck. To be fair, it’s the closest I have found that meets my needs, but that’s not good enough for me. It can easily handle auto-completing of replies, inserting photos and shortening links. It’s built with the idea of lists in mind, which I particularly like. I’ve currently got a list about MooTools and a list about games. Unfortunately, I have no option of telling the main list to ignore tweets from anyone in a separate list. I don’t want my main list filled with tweets about stuff I’ve already put into it’s own list. I just want a list of “everyone else”, but without having to create such a list and add every new person I follow to it.

I also have gripes about it’s UI. Marking Tweets as “Read” requires clicking individually on this tiny, 5px wide circle. And then after doing that, I must click at the bottom of the list of a tiny icon to “Clear Read”. And I often accidentally click on “Clear All”, since they’re right next to each other, and they’re so small it takes to long to visually register what each icon is.

The notifications system is buggy. Sometimes it hides the summary behind a window, sometimes not. Clicking the notification will bring up Tweetdeck. But sometimes, the notification won’t dismiss itself. Ever. You can hide Tweetdeck again and have a frozen notification sitting in the corner of your screen. The only way to dismiss it is to click it again. The usual behavior is that it should dismiss regardless after a few seconds.

And it’s an AIR application. Now, granted, AIR is pretty cool. It lets front-end developers create apps for the desktop. But given a choice, why would I want to run something in a Flash player all the time? It chews on my memory like a puppy that is teething. It lacks plenty of things that I’m used to having in a Windows app. And it’s integration is buggy (see above about notifications). Next.

DestroyTwitter

While it’s also an AIR app, which means I have similar complaints in that regard, it’s actually less buggy than Tweetdeck. Notifications don’t stick. I still miss my normal Windows feel though.

It has a much nicer way of handling Mark as Read: just check the option in settings to Mark as Read on rollover. And overall, the UI feels much nicer to use than Tweetdeck. You don’t have to hover over the avatar to find your common actions like replying or retweeting.

However, it doesn’t support lists at all. None. Just a single stream of tweets. No thanks.

Seesmic

A native Windows client, and it doesn’t have the Windows XP look either. It generally looks sweet, feels rather Windows-y. I like that it has useful context menus when I right click on things. It’s design is decent excellent. But it’s severally lacking in features. Severely.

It can’t load images from common sources like yfrog, it just launches the browser. While it doesn’t have automatic URL shortening, it does have an Insert Link ability. But my attempts to use it show that it handles errors poorly:

<bitly>
	<errorCode>0</errorCode>
	<errorMessage></errorMessage>
	<results>
		<nodeKeyVal>
			<errorCode>101</errorCode>
			<errorMessage>Unknown error</errorMessage>
			<nodeKey><![CDATA[http://google.com]]></nodeKey>
			<statusCode>ERROR</statusCode>
		</nodeKeyVal>
	</results>
	<statusCode>OK</statusCode>
</bitly>

Seesmic just dumped that straight into my message. And then it kindly warns me that I’m 282 characters over the limit.

While it supports lists, it has the same issues as Tweetdeck in that regard. But, clearing the timelines can also be wonky. I’ve clear my MooTools list timeline, and then added a new person to the list, and it just went out and refilled the entire timeline. Er, thanks.

And it’s bugtastic. Maximizing the window hides away the normal minimize/close buttons. You have to just click in the area and hope you guessed correctly. Even with notifications turned on, I have yet to see a single notification. It regularly errors when trying to get more tweets, and leaves me without updates for long periods of time.

web

Ultimately, at home, it’s just easier to use the web client. None of the clients I have found are good enough to do light browsing with. I do most of my reading at work, so when I bother to log on at home, I just want the latest part that I haven’t read yet. None of the applications I’ve tried seemed to have syncing. Loading one up at home would just dump the whole days worth of tweets into my timeline, and that’s useless to me.

Since the web application defaults to showing me the latest tweets, that’s usually all the ones I want to see anyways. Replying and retweeting are easy enough, although it would be great if it automatically shortened URLs for me.

“That” Twitter App

The application I’m looking for is a native client to Windows, doesn’t look like it came from the year 2000 in terms of UI, and has many of the features you’d hope to have in a Twitter client: URL shortening, image loading, notifications, and lists. I’d love the option to remove all listed people from my main timeline, but whatever. If it has those features, looks pretty (and is intuitive), and isn’t the buggiest piece of code in the world, I’d like to use it. But it really seems like so many developers only like making things for Macs now. There’s got to be developers who still work on Windows… or maybe I should just break out the C#-fu.