It is an understatement to say that Twitter is used by a lot of people. With that large amount of people, there are many ways to get Twitter. Some people perfer the web client. Most people, actually, perfer the web client. But sometimes you need something different than the web client. Something that will alert you when certain things happen. This is why I believe that Twitter desktop clients are so popular. Unlike the web site, they run in the background and alert you when something special happens, like getting a reply, a direct message, or something else that requires you attention. It beats all heck for refreshing the page, looking through your Home and Reply tabs trying to figure out what happened recently.
People who do large surveys on what other people like to use while Twittering have figured out that more than 50% of Twitter users use clients other than the website. Most people use Tweetdeck, it having 7.3% of the application market. (Twitterfeed is first, but doesn’t count sine it is automated tweeting) Tweetdeck probably provides the most unique experience for Twitter because it allows you to get updates on specific keywords, similar to track. It does this using the TwitterSearch available at search.twitter.com.
In all, there are over 600 different Twitter applications. Most of which are using direct API calls to the website in order to get Tweets. But what happens when you need to get to Twitter when the website is blocked. In many cases, companies will block websites like Twitter in order to get people to be more productive. This breaks all the Twitter API calls, resulting in, yep, no Tweets on your desktop client. The entire debate on whether Twitter can be useful to your job is up for grabs, but I don’t have a job. I’m trying to Twitter while government paid teachers, sit on their butts during the 4 years I am in highschool, and proceed to waste my time. So, I’m not going to argue whether or not it is beneficial for your job to Twitter. That is up to you.
In order to solve this problem, you first need to understand a little about what Jabber is. Jabber is an open isntant messaging platform that is used by Google Talk and is supported by many clients. PSI, Pidign, etc, all support Jabber. Unlike AIM, MSN, and other networks, Jabber is open so anyone can create an application using it fairly easily. To find more, google ‘Jabber’ and you’ll find more information than you need to know about it/
Let’s examine the problem. Twitter + Unfilter Internet = Happy. Twitter – Unfiltered Internet = Sad.This is, once again, because in order for desktop applications to work, you must have the desktop application go to Twitter.com/api/blah. If that is blocked, you are out of luck. But what if you had a different computer, on an unfiltered connection, go and grab your updates. And then, after it grabbed your updates, it could send you the tweets afterwards, using this new protocol we just learned called Jabber. You would, well, have Twitter via IM!
Originally, when Twitter was first made, Twitter had a IM version, very similar to the one we just described. The unique thing about Twitter’s IM was that it allowed for ‘track’ or the ability to search all of Twitter for certain keywords. This was extremely useful for companies, because if Comcast wanted to bring customer service to Twitter, they just tracked ‘comcast’ and they would find any Tweets about Comcast. But Twitter soon removed this, saying that it the feature was disabled to keep the main service stable. They promised it would return sometime, but, we know that it won’t be coming back anytime soon.
Many believe that Twitter got rid of IM, and would later lease it to specific companies that paid them, as a way of making money. Comcast would now have to pay Twitter so that they could provide customer service on Twitter. Sounds fair enough.
But why did they have to get rid of the IM feature completely? They could have disabled track, and then given the rest of us our real time updates. This, is finally, where this post is headed. I would much rather have Twitter on my Google Talk, with or without track. I think that using IM is a powerful method of recieving updates, one far better than any current desktop client. Because if you enabled IM, you would enable people to get Tweets ANYWHERE, in real time. Instead of having to have a mobile browser on a cell phone, I could just open up my IM client. Instead of having a 3rd party application getting my updates, why couldn’t I just go right to the source and get my Twitter updates from Twitter?
How do you get your Twitter fix everyday? Do you have problems with internet access?