Twittelator

27 Apr 2009

Posted by Lindsay

Since I lost my job in November I have becoming increasing immersed in social networking and online communications. One of the surest signs of this I am now a Tweeter. That's right. I use Twitter. I can't claim to be an early adopter, though I did know about it fairly early on. My mother-in-law is an advanced tweeter for green technology's, government 2.0 and local Sacramento government. She is an early adopter, a highly skilled twitter user, and taught me almost everything I know about Twitter.

So, how bad is it? Pretty bad. I have not one, but four twitter accounts. They all have a good cause, and only one of them is more idle than I would like. As you can imagine, it's very tedious to keep up on all those feeds. I mostly use my iPhone because it would be near impossible to sign in and sign out of every account every hour on my web browser. Checking Twitter hourly, that's normal, right? Anyway, I was using three different apps on my iPhone to manage all the accounts I have. I finally settled on Twittelator because of it's ability to handle multiple accounts.

Themes

I was slightly disappointed. The first thing I noticed was that the default theme was completely different. The second thing I noticed was that you couldn't use the theme on the free version in the paid version. Seriously!?! Why not just put it in the paid version, you already made it! The third thing I noticed was that the three themes they do provide in the paid version are soooo boring. So, you may have noticed by now I was highly UNimpressed with the provided themes.

Multiple Accounts

The most disappointing of all was multi step process which you have to go through to change which account you are viewing. By default it takes four clicks. FOUR! that's right, four big, slow, time wasting clicks to change account. With some setting changes you can bring it down to a simple three clicks. Which, honestly is a life saver. I might go insane with that fourth click. Say I have 4 accounts I check 6 times a day (and lest be honest, that's on the light side for me) that's a savings of 18 clicks per day. That's a lot. I was surprised that you can't switch accounts by flicking to the left or right, like the default weather app. It seemed so intuitive to do it that way.

Functionality

Wow, this is where Twittelator really shines. The sub-group function is to die for. Really cool. There are a few annoyances, for instance, once you set up a sub-group you can't add anyone else to it. And you can't select from a list of friends names, you have to manually type in each friend in pain staking detail. There are so many options to Twitilator, if you're looking for an app that gets you the most bang for you buck, this might be it.

I think the usability team needs to step up and make some changes. A couple of versions down the road and this app will really shine.

Free theme