Windows Phone Twitter Clients Comparison

It is unbelievable that just a couple of months ago I lamented about the lack of good Twitter clients on the Windows Phone platform. These days however I have five permanent third party Twitter apps on my Lumia, three of which I paid for. Of the six Twitter clients I have selected for my comparison here, three were only launched this year. It goes to show how much the Windows Phone platform has exploded since last year, with an average of around 300 new apps submitted each day.

The five third party Twitter apps listed below are, in no particular order, the best Twitter clients you can get on the platform now. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses. I have also included the official Twitter client in the comparison despite how awful it is, well because it is only fair that we show Twitter how it is supposed to be done.

Do take the comparison table with a pinch of salt, after all having the most features does not make an app great. For example, despite how featureless Ocell is, the app is by far the quickest app here to launch. So if you are looking for something lightweight, Ocell should be on your radar as a secondary backup app. Best of all, it is open sourced under the Apache Software License, so the potential is huge.

I will be updating this table from time to time, whenever new updates are made available that introduces new features, so make sure you bookmark this.

glƏƏk! Twitter Client for Windows Phone 7 review

Users of Windows Phone 7 devices will find no short of Twitter clients on the Marketplace to play with. With establish brands like Twitter and Seesmic seemingly unable or unwilling to focus on the platform, third party developers has come in droves to fill in the missing gaps that Microsoft has failed to provide with their Twitter integration.

That's not to say Microsoft didn't do a good job integrating Twitter into Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, but there is so much more to Twitter than just replies or uploading pictures to Skydrive. After all different people use Twitter differently. With Carbon, Rowi and Mehdoh leading the charge, it is fair to say that there is a healthy amount of Twitter clients on the Marketplace.

You are not a number

Ever noticed how by being online you are slowly being turned into yet another number? The rise of so-called social media metric services by Klout, Kred and Peer Index has slowly been ruining my experience on Twitter. And not because people using them would tweet button their Kred+ or Klout+ onto Twitter, which is already annoying enough.

I refer to of course to the number game. The age old belief that huge follower number equals that of influence is still popular and while it is true to a certain degree, it is easy to game Twitter and up your numbers artificially. I won't go into details, but one method is through boosting their Kred, Klout and Peer Index number by tweeting endlessly about stuff they obviously have no clue about thus boosting their respective social media metric thingy. Gullible people would then be fooled into thinking that these people are worth following because hei, they have a big score next to their name so they are experts.

This, of course, is bullshit.

So why should I give a shit? Well because some of these people are good Twitter users who has turned evil. They have value I do not want to miss hence why I was following in the first place, but they also dilute their value with nonsense. They would set up some auto tweet some random stuff service so their Klout number would not fall. Stuff like what I am going to tell you next.

I had the misfortune to once read an advice RTed into my timeline. This advice was so ridiculous and stupid in epic proportion you can actually tell that it was crafted by a so called Social Media Guru/Expert/Specialist TM. It went something like this:

"If you want people to RT your tweets then you better start to RT theirs"

I could not remember who it was who retweeted it, nor the person who originally tweeted that but I hope they are reading this: you retweet because you saw a tweet you want to share, not because you want another twitter user to reciprocate. Advice like this ruin my Twitter experience because I do not know if a retweet that just entered my timeline is there because of the user's genuine desire to share, or because they want to game Twitter.

You can follow me on Twitter. But do not worry as I will not be expecting you to RT my miserable tweets to your followers.

Carbon Twitter Client for Windows Phone 7 review

Update 2 (17 October 2012):

A highly critical message to the developer of Carbon used to reside here for a month. Satisfied that he has read the message, I have decided to remove it. You can find the original review below of a product that no longer exist (abandoned), which is a shame as it had plenty of potential.

Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 has an excellent social media integration, including support for Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. Twitter is well integrated within the OS, but it is still missing a tons of functuinality such as searches, trends, reply to all, RTs, multiple accounts and more importantly, direct messages. Until Microsoft expands on the integration, it is up to third party clients to fill the void.

Previous attempts by other third party developers has so far failed to capitalise on this. Most of these apps were plagued by either poor performance, lack of features or just plain broken. For example, Twitter's own official app on Windows Phone 7 isn't fit for purpose, and at times does not work at all.

Hate native Tweetdeck? Download the old Adobe Air version now!

When I received my new laptop a few weeks ago I went on to install some of my favourite apps. One of which is Tweetdeck, a desktop client I swear by of which if it never existed I would be tweeting far less.

Unfortunately Tweetdeck has replaced the brilliant old Adobe Air version with a native app, that frankly sucks, to put it politely. It was slow, the UI was horrible - just about everything about it was awful. To make matters worse, Tweetdeck (now owned by Twitter), has removed any references and installer to the old Adobe Air version.

Fortunately a quick digging on the internet reveals that someone has uploaded the Adobe Air version on Mediafire for posterity's sake. The version is 0.38.2, which as far as I know is the last version before Tweetdeck pulled the plug on it. Go download it now, and be assured that you are running a superior and far more productive version of Tweetdeck.

View other users' twitter stream

Well here's an interesting new feature on Twitter web client that is being rolled out as we speak. Twitter has updated the following page so you get to view the user's twitter stream. Rather than be presented with a list of who the user is following, you will be presented with real time tweets from twitter users who the user is following. This makes it easier to discover new people to follow.

The screenshot demonstrates how another twitter user would view my twitter stream:

Twitter Follower:Following Ratio means nothing

A number of my friends on twitter were recently unfollowed by @EleanorConway. I don't mind the odd unfollow, hell I've unfollowed uninteresting people before. But what Eleanor Conway (or her Social Media manager) did was mass following loads of people. Once they reached a certain followback target, she started unfollowing. In the past two days her follow count dropped from 8000+ to 42. As I type this her follower count is 8200 (and dropping as people got wind of her tactics).

What she did was a well known tactic of gaining a high follower:following ratio: follow, wait for a follow back, then unfollow. It's easy and anybody on Twitter can do it. They follow loads of people (in thousands), then some time later (this could be days/weeks or even months), they mass unfollow almost everyone. At the end of this campaign, they will have high number of followers making them look like some hot shot C-list celeb when in fact most of us have never heard of her. I have seen companies like @AudioTechnicaUK do that as well.

Do I have ill feelings for her? No. In the one week since she started following me, she has done nothing that interests me, so much so I think I would have eventually I would have unfollowed her myself. Would she has gotten to where she is if it weren't for the old follow then unfollow tactic? Perhaps, but we will never know. All we know is she got there using the dirty route. It would be better if she attempted to engage with her audiences rather than cast them aside to get a number that would satisfy her ego. It's sad really.

The lesson here is, when deciding to follow on Twitter, to know that the follower:following ratio means nothing. I have friends who have low follower counts, but I value their opinion just as equally (if not more) as some random dude with 50,000 "followers".

January Tweetstats

Hei it's February! How was your January? Personally I thought January was a bit slow, but February is so going to kick ass.

Anyway, was looking at my Tweetstats for January, and it isn't a pretty sight. Have a look at this graph:

I am going to need a lot more sleep in February than I had in January. Problem is, will I?

Gravity for Symbian review

Gravity is a rarity among Symbian applications. It has a UI that not only looks good, but also works great. It is fast and comes with massive loads of features. What started out as a simply Twitter client, the sole developer at Mobileways.de has implemented support for Google Reader, Foursquare, Facebook and the open source StatusNet, with varying degree of success.



Considering how backwards Symbian is supposed to be (according to American blogs anyway), and how there are virtually zero competition on the platform, the number of features on Gravity is quite a feat. The sheer number of features, it's stableness and speed, easily makes Gravity one of the best mobile social network clients on any platform. And I say that with a straight face.

At a time when Nokia is urging developers to code in 'code once, deploy everywhere' Qt, Gravity is still reassuringly native. I've nothing against Qt, but so far none of the Qt based applications I've seen has convinced me it is better than native. Gravity is compatible with S60v3 and all modern Symbian touchscreen devices from Samsung's abandoned at birth Omnia HD to Sony Ericsson's cute Vivaz and Nokia's 'flagship' N8.



Let's begin with Twitter, as this is what Gravity was designed for. Gravity has almost all the features that I could ever want from a mobile Twitter client. It supports both native and old-style retweets, geolocation tagging of tweets, follow/unfollow, direct message (with threaded UI), the creation and management of lists, uploading images to popular image sharing sites (TwitPic, Flickr etc.), alert, multiple accounts, draft and schedule posts, homescreen widget, notification (in both screensaver on Symbian^3 devices, as well as audible/vibration) and much more.

There are a couple of features I would like to see added. For example an alert when someone follows, filters and the ability to open URLs to Opera Mobile rather than Symbian's native Web browser. Speaking of URLs, you can also set Gravity to save URLs to Instapaper and other services to read it later, a useful alternative to using the favourites function to bookmark posts to read later.



The Foursquare client is as basic as it goes. It only allows check-ins and shouts (to Twitter and/or Facebook - provided you have your Foursquare account is linked to them). There are no supports for leaving and viewing tips, nor is the ability to delete previous check-ins from the history present.

The most curious absence is the lack of Specials, a Foursquare feature that allows participants to reward check-ins to users, so don't go deleting that amateurish official Foursquare Symbian client just yet. Having said that if all you want to do is check-in or shout, Gravity is perfect.



If you are a Facebook user, you will be pleased to know that Gravity supports pretty much most of the important features of Mark Zuckerberg's Friendster rip-off, including Messages (in threaded conversation view), notifications (no friend requests here), News Feed and Status Updates, including replies. It isn't a Facebook mobile client replacement, offering even less than Facebook's touchscreen mobile website. But it is indispensable if all you want is a quick glance on what your Facebook friends are up to, post a status update or reply.

A built-in RSS reader in the form of Google Reader is the next major feature of Gravity worth writing about. This is pretty basic, but at least it has all the essential functions one would normally need form a newsreader software. Like the Twitter bit of Gravity, URLs can be posted to Delicious or added to Instapaper or Read-it-Later. There is an option to easily tweet the post as well.



In an age of 99p mobile apps, Gravity isn't cheap (£8 via the Ovi Store), and that's before taking into account the amount of good freeware social network clients you can get on competing platforms like Android and iOS. But if you have a Symbian phone, and you need a powerful Twitter application then Gravity is your answer. You could do a lot worse with £8 anyway.

I also have a relatively modern Android phone (with around ten Twitter clients installed!), and my girlfriend has an iPod Touch 4G which she tethers wirelessly to her ageing Nokia none-touch smartphone, and both of us always fall back to Gravity simply because we both think it is the most effective mobile Twitter application available on any mobile platforms.

Boring twitter stats

It is a Saturday. It is raining. Summer has long since pissed off, last seen in July heading south.

I am writing my Nokia C3 review, but I am also bored. So I decided to do something even more boring - publish a statistical analysis of my twitter account based on TweetStats! Just for you loyal readers.

Sorry.

I joined twitter on 26 May 2007.

I tweet most on Thursdays and Wednesdays, and least on Sundays and Mondays.

My peak tweet time is 9am, followed by 11pm. I have tweeted at every hour. I tweet least between 3-5am.

Looking at my aggregated hourly tweets, I tend to go to bed at 1am and be up by 6am.

Unsurprisingly I tweet most using Symbian's Gravity client, followed by Web and then Seesmic desktop clients.

I have posted 45 tweets using the full 140-character limit.

Of all evenings, I tweet least on Fridays. I am sure it is pretty obvious why.

I reply most to a guy in Australia, followed by a guy in Sheffield. Of my top 10 @, only two twitter users lives in London. Three are based outside Britain.

Most hashtags used: #cfg (152 mentions). Tweetstats can't look far back due to Twitter limitations, but I am sure #ovigoodthings would be second (ah good times).

I've posted over 400 pictures via twitpic, and that was before I changed my username in 2008.

I've met 80 tweeps in person, most of who are awesome, and some of who I now consider as proper mates. This makes me happy.

So that's that. Right, back to my review.