As I noted the other day, I’m life-testing the Twitter service. I’m trying to take it slow at first. I signed up to follow some famous folk, like John Gruber, and a half dozen friends I found with Twitter accounts. And a couple of people are following me already. I’m posting not more than every few hours and only sending replies when, hopefully, I’ve got something substantive or funny to say. Bottom line: after four days, I’m following 20 people and 6 are following me. Start small!
At first I was doing everything from my Twitter home page, but that got tiring in a hurry. I added the Mac dashboard widget Twidget, but all it does is let you post. So after briefly looking around at what other Mac users, like Gruber, used, I downloaded the Twitterrific application from the good folks at Iconfactory. So far, I’m finding Twitterrific dreamy, though quite spare and striped down. It simply offer a single narrow window pane with Tweets of everyone I’m following and a small space at the bottom to compose my own posts.
You can set it to always stay on top of everything or just act like a regular application window (my preference). You can also choose how often Twitterrific should check in with the mother ship for new posts, though the highest frequency is every 3 minutes, a little laggy for the uber plugged-in crowd. There’s no way to sort posts by author or perform other kinds of archiving and searching magic, but sometimes simple is all you need — or at least most of what you need. I can always go back Twitter’s home page to mess around with the past.
p.s. as to the picture above, snapped a little before 3 p.m. EST on May 6, 2008, I have no idea why Gruber is incensed by commas in web addresses. Sometimes Twitter is too simple.
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