Tweetie Review: Multi-Account Management for Twitter
- View TwitPic photos directly
- Most Twitter features available through a native iPhone interface
- Takes multiple taps to follow a link
- Favoriting a tweet blocks everything until completed
It’s possible that Twitter is the killer app for the iPhone. Or maybe the iPhone is the killer platform for Twitter. Either way, the two go hand-in-hand — I don’t know any iPhone owners that aren’t Twitter addicts. It’s no surprise, then, that there are so many Twitter apps in the App Store. One that’s gained a lot of popularity recently is Tweetie, from atebits LLC.
Since buying my iPhone, I’ve used Twitterrific almost exclusively. While reviewing Tweetie, I couldn’t help but compare the two. Both are excellent apps, but written for different Twitter users.
Tweetie allows you to read and manage multiple Twitter accounts from its easy-to-use interface. In fact, except for changing your personal account settings, just about anything you can do on Twitter you can do from Tweetie: follow and unfollow, search, view user profiles, and more. Many of the things other Twitter clients send you to the Twitter website to view, Tweetie presents in a user-friendly, iPhone native way.
The main screen in Tweetie is your timeline, which shows the most recent tweets from people you follow. There are also separate screens for your @replies, direct messages, and favorites. As I mentioned, you can search directly from Tweetie, and see keywords that are currently “trending” on Twitter.
Posting from Tweetie is easy, just tap the post button in the upper right-hand corner. If you want to post a photo, you can take it from within the app or use a picture you’ve already taken. Photos are uploaded to the popular TwitPic service and the URL is attached to your tweet. The URL isn’t shown so it doesn’t clutter the screen while you’re writing, but this does limit how much control you have over placement of the URL in your post.
The one area I found Tweetie lacking was in the reading experience. Every time you open the app it starts fresh, loading the most recent tweets from your timeline. It has no concept of where you left off reading previously, it just starts you at the most recent tweet. This makes it more difficult to read from oldest to newest and to follow conversations. Also, while you can see from the timeline that a tweet has a link or a photo, you can’t visit those directly from the timeline. You first have to tap to go to the tweet detail screen, then tap again to visit the link. And when you’re on the detail screen, you can’t navigate your timeline in that view, you must go back to the timeline view to keep reading. And when you favorite a tweet, a modal dialog pops up that keeps you from doing anything until the favorite is saved. This seems like something that could happen in the background so you can return to reading.
The way Tweetie shows you TwitPics is nice — it scrapes the page and just shows you the image. I’ve always thought TwitPic should have iPhone-optimized pages. I wonder, though, how long it will be before TwitPic (which is advertising-supported) asks atebits to stop doing this.
Overall, if you’re a power user — someone that monitors/manages multiple accounts and wants all that Twitter has to offer in a single interface — Tweetie is probably the app you’ve been looking for. If, however, you’re a power reader — someone that doesn’t want to miss a single tweet, and wants to process those tweets quickly — Tweetie may not be for you.
Tweetie is currently $2.99 and available in the App Store.
I’d rather use Twitterific then Tweetie. Interface is better.
Never really used Tweetie long enough to like it though. :\
Unlike the above comment. I much rather prefer Tweetie to Twitterific. In fact, on my Mac I also prefer TwitterDeck or Jetwit (this one for quick sending) to Twitterific.
In the end, your really must try them and see which one fits your workflow better.
I persoanlly use twhirl I used to use twitterific but I started using twhirl due to I think it has a lot more features!
Thanks
Seth
I prefer TweetDeck as it is cross platform and free.
Excellent content here and a nice writing style too – keep up the great work!
My Twitterific preference was on the iPod Touch/iPhone. On computers, I prefer Twhirl.
@Chris: Twhirl is cross platform too. Free, and no ads.
Great features too.
I actually really like Tweetie. It does pretty much everything I need Twitter to do, the way I need it to do it. I don’t really have a good reason to shell out the $ to try a different one, and I’d rather not deal with the ads if I don’t have to.
Don’t forget Twitter Fon.
I’m with @roderick: I like Twitterfon. Everyone’s been raving about Tweetie lately, though, so I thought I’d do some reading about it. Apart from allowing you to use multiple accounts and the native-like integration with TwitPic (which doesn’t matter to me since I’m an iPod Touch user), I don’t see why I should pay for Tweetie when Twitterfon does it all so well. For free. I’ll keep reading, though.
great to do sign up