First of all I have to address the fact that twitter has not been working especially well for me lately. I try to hit a user’s page on twitter, it won’t load about 1/2 the time. This along with periodic outages of not being able to post at all are annoying.

Now that I have that out of the way, I need to talk about the clients I have been using. I have actively and routinely used three clients in the past for twittering: gtalk, snitter, & spaz. I have or currently use the following “addons” to enhance my twittering experience: Facebook twitter app & twitterfeed. Now that I look at it, it is a little bit ludicrous how much time I spend on the whole affair, I’ll worry about priorities later.

Thinking about the user experience, what do I want from twitter? I think that I want connectedness most of all. I want a single conduit that makes me feel connected to my peers, colleagues, friends, and family (not that any of them have taken that jump yet) in social, intellectual, and emotional ways. OK clearly this is a separate post, so I’ll make it one.

What I like about each client: gtalk is immediate, when someone tweets, I get it. Other clients only connect to twitter periodically (no more than 1/min). I really prefer getting them faster. There is a downside to this: if I’m not logged in to gtalk I miss the action, I can’t come back and login and see them, I would then have to go to my twitter page. Gtalk allows twitter tracking. Tracking is an interesting feature that allows you to receive any public tweet that contains a word or phrase of your choosing. For example I have the word “informatics” tracked, and it’s interesting to see the results. No other client directly supports this in the same way.

Snitter: Snitter is an adobe air client, it is easy to use, skinnable, and the developer regularly updates and is responsive to user requests. I like that I can turn off my computer, or come in to the office in the morning log in and see what happened overnight. Many friends are up much later than I am and I can see their tweets and conversations. I like having a character count, so I know when I’ve gone over. I get the user’s pic that they have on their profile next to each tweet, and when I mouseover I get the option to direct msg, @ reply, or make that tweet as a favorite. The user name appears after each tweet, click on it and their profile pops open in the client along with all their tweets. You can easily look at your followers, who you are following all through a handy drop down menu, this is all within the client, not popping open web pages. I already have enough tabs open in FF thank you very much. On my windows laptop I can minimize to system tray, again I hate having a lot of things open. Is there anything I don’t like about Snitter? I know this is nitpicky, but I don’t like the ‘S’ logo, I’ve had problems with it in the past not remembering my user name/password, and as with all clients/twitter itself it doens’t work anywhere near all the time. Snitter allows you to search, which is kind of like faux tracking, so you can search the public timeline for words and phrases. Good, but it’s not being pushed to you. I want push.

Spaz: Spaz is also an adobe air client, It has all the goodness of Snitter, except the @ direct message and favorite are in a different place, I don’t like where they are, and I don’t like that the icon for direct message is an envelope, it makes me think I’m going to email them, and I have in fact clicked it more than once in an attempt to email someone. The reason I don’t like them there is that they seem out of place, right aligned when nothing else it. Spaz also has the character count, but doesn’t let you go over, sometimes I want to go over and if someone really wants to they can click over to the website and see the whole message. Spaz, like some other clients that I’ve heard of but not used also rewards you for tweeting at exactly 140 characters (sometimes called a twoosh) by playing a hilarious little spaz out noise. I kind of like that, it’s fun and playful. I would like to see more than one sound though. In spaz you can mouseover someone’s pic and you get their bio and location, this is OK, maybe you could have both the way Snitter allows the three icons to appear over the person AND the pop-up with their info. If you mouse over ANY @reply in any tweet you can see that person’s name, bio, location, and latest tweet, this is perfect for getting what someone is talking about when you don’t follow the person they are responding to (only works with someone who doesn’t protect their tweets of course). Sometimes this leads me to adding that person, but lately I try not to do that so much, keeping my following to people I know, people I would really like to know who work in my field, and a couple of bots (APNews, CNN, Remember the Milk).

Twitterfeed: I use this to make sure everyone who follows me knows about when I blog. It’s super simple to set up. Would love to see this functionality be built into twitter itself, but probably not a client.

FB Twitter app: This is absolutely necessary as I don’t want to update my status on FB all the time. I am not a habitual 30+ mins/day FB user, just the every other day 5 mins kind of guy. I can check up see what ppl are up to, respond to msgs and there you go. I guess this should stay the way it is.

So here’s what I want: I want the immediacy that you get with TXT and gtalk, no waiting for faux push technologies.

I want to see the person’s pic, and be able to respond to them easily. I don’t give a hoot about the favorite function, maybe someone else does.

I want to be able to see who someone is from an @reply.

I don’t want to be constantly referring to web pages, do it in the client if at all possible.

If I’m on a windows box make it minizable to systray.

I want fun and play! The noise for a twoosh is great. Keep it up.

Skinnable is almost necessary, a pleasant icon also good.

I like cross platform, adobe air is probably the way to go.

I want tracking! Not faux tracking.

I am aware that some of these issues go to how the Twitter API works, and that in order to fulfill my wishlist (not holding my breath) changes would have to happen on some basic stufff.

Looking forward to your thoughts via twitter or here.

Snitter says that tracking is not supported by the twitter API. THAT SUCKS. Ok I’ll get over it, I really will. I actually didn’t realize this until today when I decided to turn gtalk back on as well for other reasons (coming up). I like twitter tracking because it gives you a feel for what is happening on twitter with a specific topic, and I’ve met some interesting people that way. I’m missing out on one of the things I think is great about twitter. I like that snitter works in the background, I like that I can see followers, I like that snitter is discreet.

Gtalk is great for twitter because all the conversations then become instantly searchable someplace that I live a lot of the time anyway:my gmail inbox. The shortcoming of using gtalk with twitter is that it annoyingly beeps and opens a window (or sub-window depending on how you use it) that I don’t want open most of the time. I just wish that twitter would send me all my tweets on gtalk regardless if I was online of not. I wouldn’t mind getting a whole boatload of messages when I first sign in for the day (assuming I didn’t leave any of my computers logged in overnight. I have found myself NOT leaving a computer on overnight lately though, so I feel like I’m missing out.

So I’ve heard of people setting it up so that their twitter RSS feed gets set up to email them to their gmail account and then it is appropriately tagged and and archived via filters, and this is the workaround (kludgy, but it’ll do for now) for keeping it searchable, but what I want to know is will it also address the tracking issue? I doubt it since my tracking items don’t show up in any RSS feed I get from twitter, or the fact that I just really like Snitter for day to day use.

What do I do???

So Twitter gave us a new feature recently called tracking, which has yielded very interesting results.

I’m not a Jaiku user, but Kevin, who is, says tracking is like term based self-defined groups. I’ll take his word for it.

Inside your twitter app of choice type “track ____” and then anytime someone tweets with that word you will get a copy. Caveat: Only public tweets can be tracked, but the large majority of tweets are public. Conversely you can untrack things as well.

I’m interested in HCI, Informatics, usability, interaction design, and other things like that, so I’m tracking all those things. So far no hits on Informatics, but I get several on usability each day. Then I use the whois command on the person who tweeted (assuming it looked interesting) and then I check them out, their blog etc. Almost all the people I’ve found through this method are at least somewhat interesting to me, so I’ve then started following them.

What am I looking for? Researchers, bloggers, usability professionals, IX desginers, UX designers and HCI professionals (ok the last 4 could all be the same person with different titles, but you get the picture). People that I can learn from, see what’s happening in industry, who’s looking into what etc.

What is very wrong with tracking? There is no way, that I know of at least and please correct me if I’m wrong, to track what you are tracking. I want to know all the terms I’m tracking. There should be a command to do it like “track _list”. Please twitter add this feature! We need it.

Here’s the twist though: I start to get to know these people in more than just professional ways, and I’m sure that if they follow me, they will get to know more than just my thoughts on HCI. I, and most other twitterers, usually tweet about our personal lives too. Sure I have a group of friends from school who follow me and know me, my wife, my kids, but these other peopel do not. Do they find it weird? I don’t know. I personally don’t mind it. I follow Scoble (despite the amount of his updates, especialy serially) because he is pretty interesting, and arguably fairly influential. Well from following him, I know about his newborn baby girl Milan, how he ends up getting woken up at 3am and the like. Believe me I understand that with a 3-month-old baby in the house.

Is this a bad thing? I don’t know. I know I don’t mind my”met in real life” friends to know about all that, but what about others? I know that a friend of mine sad she doesn’t feel comfortable using twitter because of cyberstalkers. She wouldn’t want someone to know when she is leaving and coming (I often tweet this kind of info and I know some others do too). I talk about transparency a lot in many contexts, and usually it’s positive, security type people warn us against this. What will happen in the long run? Who knows.

What has your experience been with twitter tracking?