Three Reasons I Like Snitter Better than Twitterific
October 29, 2007
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Twitter, it’s a neat little service that allows you to write 140 character “micro-blog” posts and share them with your friends. There are a lot of simple desktop clients popping up to allow people to “tweet” and review their friends “tweets” from the desktop. The most popular of these services at present is Twitterific.
A couple of nights ago Robert Scoble tweeted that he’s using a new Twitter desktop client: Snitter, so I checked it out.
I instantly liked it better than Twitterific. Here’s why:
- It allows you to make a small URL from within the interface rather than making you go to your browser to go to sites like TinyURL, URLTea or SnipURL.
- You can send direct messages to people and see your direct messages within the client, rather than going to the browser.
- You can look at a feed of all tweets by your followers, again without going to your browser, even if you don’t typically follow them.
dying to try out snitter but until i find a way to uninstall air beta 1, i won’t have much luck. my air beta 1 doesn’t appear in my add/remove programs, which is super weird… not sure where to dig to delete the files. trying to reinstall it or air beta 2 gives me a message saying that beta 1 is already installed on my comp.
I’m convinced. Case closed. Neat post. (Short sentences)
Have you seen my twitter client? Try it out and let me know what it could/couldn’t do better by leaving a comment at that entry. Many thanks!
I’m still not convinced. To your three points:
1) Twitterrific (or maybe Twitter) does the TinyURL transformation. The catch is that the original link has to be under the 140-characters, too. So there is some middle ground where the TinyURL is triggered even if it would fit as is. Overall, a minor annoyance.
2) You can still send direct messages and replies via the Twitterrific interface, you just can’t see the former. I like the convention of Snitter and other tools to filter those pseudo-channels, but I don’t use either enough to worry about whether I can see it or not. Twitter hasn’t replaced IM or email for me (nor should it), so getting messages in those channels is not bothersome. Again, minor annoyance.
3) I’m not sure what this means. If that means you can include feeds in your stream of those who are following you (but you not them), that would be a neat toggle to have. If you mean that you can peer into the personal stream of a follower, that might also be cool. I don’t see either function in Snitter, though.
The version I have installed (mainly for testing and comparison) doesn’t have any special settings to customize my experience or even save my login. Maybe I’m just missing where these are, but in that sense it seems worse than Twitterrific.
The biggest selling point of Twitterrific, though, is something no one else seems to be doing: disappearing. I get my tweets popping to the surface and then disappearing without my having to intervene. Especially on a small laptop where real estate is a premium, that ambient-notification feature is important. Until I see another tool able to provide that, Twitterrific will continue to be the tool of choice.
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