Tag tweetdeck

I downloaded Seesmic for Windows today! (I’ve been waiting for this, ever since I saw it announced and previewed at PDC09!  Get ready for a whirlwind tour of “Wow, that’s cool” and a whole lot of “Seriously? Fail.”   And yes, this post will be heavily focused on comparing it to TweetDeck and the experience encountered there (Hey, have to judge against a baseline, right? :))

Starting with the basic look and feel – this is how things look when viewed from the “All” Tab – Quite uniform, side by side.

Here are some of the Positive things about this interface:

• Seems to have a nice scrolling feel to it, and updates rather dynamically
• Each Column fits ~13 tweets (TweetDeck tends to hit a maximum of 10 tweets per column)
• The ability to interface and work with the Twitter defined Lists, so all lists you’ve created can be managed in this screen!

Some things I would consider gracious limitations of this interface

• No ability to modify the look/feel of the interface (I’m stuck with black text on a white background)
• I’m limited to a maximum of 5 columns available on screen (TweetDeck lets me get atleast 6 columns)
• For whatever reason, the ability to manage the Twitter defined lists = fail, and users are unable to be dragged into Lists to be managed (see below)
• Dragging a person and dropping them onto a Twitter Lists leaves a lock on them (and fails)

Alright, but once you see past the interface, you can tweet easier and better, right?

Here is a side by side tweet test, using Seesmic Desktop, and TweetDeck

When using the Seesmic for Windows Interface, a tweet which looks like:

Test Tweet from Seesmic Getting your beta on for the holidays! (Exchange and WinMo6.5) https://www.pkguild.com/2009/11/getting-your-beta-on-for-the-holidays-exchange-and-winmo6-5/ 

translates into –39 Characters Remaining and Posting Failed

Taking the exact same tweet:

Test Tweet from TweetDeck Getting your beta on for the holidays! (Exchange and WinMo6.5) https://www.pkguild.com/2009/11/getting-your-beta-on-for-the-holidays-exchange-and-winmo6-5/

And the Tweet auto shortens and is ready to tweet, with a surplus of 31 characters!

So, what you’re going to say is “Well, you can click “Link” enter the URL and shorten it.   Yes, I absolutely can, if I thought there was a purpose behind manually shortening a URL when I clearly expect the App to be intelligent enough to figure that out.  If TweetDeck can figure it out, and he’s a behemoth of memory and obesity, Seesmic can get a clue and do the same.    I had WANTED to do this test with the Web based Twitter interface which USED to auto-shorten URL’s, but apparently, they did away with that.  WTF? Yea. Seriously.

So, sadly, the sheer lack of features in Seesmic for Windows prevents me from going into too many more details.  And don’t get me wrong, this is a POSITIVE review, it’s just with the sheer lack of features, optimizations, simplicity and ease of use compared to TweetDeck, I won’t  be switching full-time like I had planned to.

And if you think that Seesmic for Windows will use less memory than TweetDeck – At first (and by at first I mean at IMMEDIATE Launch) it will use up less memory than TweetDeck since TD prestages a lot and pulls up history, however shortly after running the two will start to even out and normalize.    So this won’t be a win for Seesmic for Windows.

I do encourage you to take the plunge and dive into the beta, check it out and make your own judgement and decision.  It can ONLY get better, because in its extremely sparse state at the moment I’m not sure it could possibly get any worse!

This is a question I get asked often, and I always mean to write a post about it.. so here goes!

Which tools do you use?

That is an excellent question! I use the following tools: TweetDeck on my Mac and my PC (Primarily PC due to that being my primary machine), Tweetie on my iPhone, and the Web interface on my Windows Mobile Treo (Because WM5 does not have any good ceApps) Note: I am trying out Seesmic Desktop at the moment in Beta, though primarily using it for Searches due to the color scheme being almost unbearable for me!

Why do you use those tools?

Let me put it simply by saying: These are the best tools available for Twitter on a regular basis.   I agree there are a lot of other tools out there, but more tools does not mean better!  As an example, Tweetie is a far better client than TwitterFon which is by far the 2nd best client for the iPhone (And it’s free!) If you’re using Twinkle or Twitterific today, Upgrade to TwitterFon for free or Tweetie for the nominal fee, it will change your twitter experience on the whole!

How do you use those tools?

TweetDeck:

• I have a column called “Technology” where friends and others in the Tech field (Direct Technical, Marketing, Analysts, Bloggers, YouTube, Blogosphere, Storage, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Etc) are all stored.  Basically if you’re in my “Technology” column, among all of the chatter on twitter, I guarantee I’ll read it when I’m in front of this computer :)
• I also have a column called “Chicago” where friends, folks, people I meet, etc from Chicago who are on twitter are ‘stored’.  And yes, some people are in both Technology *AND!* Chicago, which works out well :)
• On a similar note, I do have a column called NetApp, this is where I store NetApp employees, and only NetApp employees – It’s a smaller list with fewer updates, and thus I’m less likely to miss those as well
• One additional column is a “Search” column, searching for “netapp OR netapps OR ntap” whereby when there’s chatter about our company, a typo of our company or our stock, I can see it!  I’ve used this numerous times to help folks who ran into issues with our systems or equally for those inquiring about information.  I like to help, so this is a great vehicle for that helping!

Tweetie:

• Honestly, I use Tweetie almost the same way I use TweetDeck, except without the groups – so when I’m on the go, it is primarily to read @ responses and DM’s, and random chatter in the ‘all friends’ column, because I lack the grouping capabilities of TweetDeck!

Web:

• Web is truly the only way I can work on my WM5 Treo, so I’ll launch it if I need to/want to share something and my iPhone is dead or has no signal!  This is especially useful when we’re out as a family and we’re tweeting to eachother in a museum or something :)

Seesmic Desktop:

• Seesmic Desktop is interesting, it provides a number of features (more or less, the exact same features of TweetDeck) with the exception that Seesmic supports multiple accounts, and can expand beyond 10 columns.   It’s lack of color changing support makes it nearly unbearable for me, because as you can tell from this blog, I read text against a black background, and when it’ falls against a light background, I have a hard time reading it.  But I’m giving it some rigorous testing in its course! (Though, for what it’s worth… Seesmic is a memory hog, akin to the old TweetDeck Pre v0.25days) Oh and it just crashed on me when I noticed it took out my API limit for the hour ;)

So, hopefully this helps explain and helps you use these tools a bit yourself!  I’ll break it down a bit more over time, but this is just a high-level touch of how I do some of these things (and effectively, and enjoyably :))

Wow! New Version of TweetDeck! Lots of new Features! Lots to get used to, and some things to get annoyed by!

Firstly.. there is a new Icon! And to tell you the truth, I keep losing it in my application list! doh!  But once I get past that (Yes I keep trying to get past it) I am fine!

Many people are really intrigued by the “Facebook” integration, though that has been there since v0.22b, so I’m not really going to talk about it too much here! – Just to say you’ll end up seeing this:   which will show your friends status on Facebook below it! – You are limited to a single Facebook account (FYI :)) Oh, and part of that is the functionality to post to Twitter, Facebook or both!   Again, not a big deal to me – especially as I use the Facebook plugin app to auto-pull my tweets and update my status (To the semi-annoyance of my Facebook friends, but I use Twitter more formally anyway, so people need to get over that :))

On to Options! (re: Settings)

Look at some of these new settings!.. The big ones is really.. “Show preview information for short URLs” which looks something like this:

So, that is pretty cool, and yes I have that enabled so I can see what kind of content it will be! When you do click on the URL it will still launch via the ‘short’ URL meaning if it’s an Adjix, Bit.ly or other type of ‘tracking’ link, it’ll still get the tracking on it

Oh, and last but not least.. If you’ve ever heard me complain about the Resource Usage of TweetDeck, and how it will tend to eat up >1gb of ram on my system.  Well, it seems the memory leak is fixed (for the moment.. I’ll leave it on over night and see how much I rack up) but it’s been going pretty good to stay in the ~200mb range!

So, good luck out there on your upgrades – Upgrade now! I’ll continue to monitor my resources and more, and if I find out anything new that I’d really like to complain about.. I will :)

First of all, this is not an issue with Tweetdeck, this is an issue with Twitter!

How I personally handle this issue (And I haven’t hit an API limitation using just Tweetdeck)

Is go in and modify the API values to look like this:

As you can see, the major difference is the “All Friends” has been increased from 1min to 1min 12s.

That minor difference alone is easily enough to make up for the API limits on an hourly basis.

If you continue to run out of API calls in an hour, increase that number to 2 minutes or beyond.

While you’re at it, upgrade to Tweetdeck 0.21 Beta released: Christmas Eve!

Read More

If you’re one of those folks who likes to bleed themselves, or just stay on the bleeding edge.  You ought to check out TweetDeck v0.20.6b But this more than just this specific update, it is about TweetDeck in general, a guide of its use and also where to pull regular Releases as well as Beta Interim Updates.

For the unfamiliar, TweetDeck is a GUI Interface to manage your Twitter “tweets”.

There are a number of benefits that the client provides over using the web to access Twitter.

This little icon brings up your Tweet window, to allow you to tweet messages.

This little drop down under “Shorten” allows you to choose your favorite web shortener in order to shrink your URL’s.   If you happen to tweet a lot of content in your 140 characters, you may wan to choose something smaller, such as “zi.ma” or “is.gd” as opposed to “tinyurl” which tends to eat up a majority of your characters!

Also this little gem lets you post/upload a picture to TwitPic and have it tweet it for you right there!

This next little item helps you manage your conversations as you see them on Twitter!

What you can do then is click on the “+” on a user and add them to one of your groups!

In all, it’s really that simple to manage out your users, groups and beyond!

Though if it starts to get unbearable in your groups, you can filter with

And that  covers the bulk of it! Enough to get you started and rolling with TweetDeck, Twitter and managing your users and self so you can have a reasonable experience as you grow!

Feel free to follow me if you’re not already on twitter @CXI