So what can I say? Twitter is rad. Aside from all the poachers and spammers out there that try and ruin it (which always happens with any new tool that comes out), the function and the culture is awesome. And of course all the accompanying indie apps that have come out to support it like TweetDeck, Twhirl, TwitterBerry, etc….these are all excellent.
Will there be enterprise level tweeting tools available?
TweetDeck and Twhirl have allowed me to definitely speed up the process of managing my tweets and interactions with others but companies like Dell and soon Seagate are maintaining multiple Twitter accounts to server multiple purposes. Dell has accounts ranging from customer support, to enterprise computing, to discussions and tweets on Dell’s thoughts on cloud computing….as they should. While it’s easy if you have individuals maintaining each account, what happens when you’re like me and several other social media people that I know that maintain several accounts all day and need to be retweeting, DM’ing, posting and replying simultaneously? Twhirl sorta helps but then I have a mess of about 15 windows on my desktop and on more than one occasion have posted or replied to the wrong account out of sheer desktop organizational confusion.
I’m aware of Twitterhawk. I think it’s got some powerful features but they’re still trying to automate certain thing to the point where you are borderline spammy in nature even though not blatant. I cannot have very strong opinions on this app yet though as I have not tried it myself…but I will try it out hopefully in the next couple weeks.
What I would like to see is a really nice granular interface that takes the Twhirl concept, pulls all the windows together in a tabbed format like a web browser, and allows you to manage view your different accounts that way. I know that based on what I’ve seen with TweetDeck, if you have several accounts with several threads going at once, the API calls could get pretty obnoxious for the infrastructure guys to the point of hundreds of thousands of calls per second if it really blew up, but hey…this is 2009 and we have the technology. I’d almost like a more refined Flock concept but ONLY for tweeting and managing Twitter accounts. This would be SO useful for me and many other corporate social media folks that I know who are making Twitter, or at least trying to, an essential tool in their web marketing toolbox.
If someone out there makes a tool like this, I will pay for it in cash.
Tweet on my brothers and sisters! If you know about something that I don’t app/solution-wise, please comment here.
TwitterFox – Social Media App Integration – We’re Gettin’ Closer
Ok so we are getting closer…slow but sure. I’m testing out the TwitterFox app for Firefox (installed on my Flock browser) and so far I like it. It actually has (albeit drop-down vs. the tabbed I’ve requested and hoped and dreamed for in the past) solution to managing multiple Twitter accounts in one spot. The beauty of TwitterFox for me is that I use Flock for all my social media work and play. Since this sits nicely in the corner of my Flock browser, I don’t need to open TweetDeck or Twhirl on the side….AND with the new version of Flock that adds the Facebook notifications widget into the browser itself even though you can simultaneously look at other tabs that aren’t logged into Facebook, I’m now getting used to, and enjoying being able to check the lower-right hand corner to just see what is going on activity-wise with the tools I use all day. My only ‘con’ I’ve seen so far is that I’m totally addicted to how TweetDeck overlays 4 buttons on top of each person’s avatar. I find myself hoping all Twitter apps operate that way…oh well…not at all a showstopper for me though with TwitterFox..more of a personal nit.
The more I can do with the less apps the better and TwitterFox is pushing us another step closer.
In a perfect world I’d be able to use Flock and have a bunch of little icons on the browser’s bottom toolbar for Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, etc. that were always checking/active/displaying notifications or little indicators while I did other stuff, so that I could open one app – Flock – and see and monitor all. It’s pretty fascinating to watch it all unfold.