Internet Tech Boston

This morning, TweetDeck v0.21b was released, providing a boatload of small, but much needed, user interface improvements. For those of you who don’t already know TweetDeck, it is a Twittter client. It’s different from some of the other ones out there, in that “it aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.” TweetDeck is my Twitter client of choice.

But, for those that know and love TweetDeck, the biggest drawback has been its management of empty space and overall width of the application. The UI was just a little on the “clunky” side. It looks like the development team heard these complaints and have addressed them in the latest release. Aside from overall “compactness” in the standard layout, this version of TweetDeck now comes with a setting for “narrow columns” which is pretty handy, reducing my application width by a full 20%, allowing me to add a new column into my display at full screen, if I choose to.

Another nice improvement is an apparently new integration with a site called TwitterCounter.com. This provides an auto-generated @ reply sent from TweetDeck Services to you that provides follower statistics and, even cooler, projections of follower counts based on current rates. Here’s what my first TwitterCount message said: “@msmamet followers 193, added since yesterday 3, average growth per day 1, predictions: tomorrow 194, next month 223 (twittercounter.com).” It doesn’t look like this is a true @ reply sent through Twitter, but rather it’s generated by the application and put in your “Replies” column – so it’s private. I suppose if you like to brag, you could always Retweet it.

I’m still exploring the list of changes, including a new spellcheck feature, but overall it looks like this release has made the application markedly better. I encourage you to download it and try it today. What are some other Twitter clients that you use and like? I’d like to know your thoughts about it!

Not sure if you’ve noticed it, but Twitter has reached critical mass. At the end of last year, Twitter was little more than the latest toy for techno geeks and PR teams. In short, it was little more than a diversion. But, things change as they often do, and Twitter started to gain some ground early 2008 as something more than a geeky tech toy. It actually became a viable method of communication for the “always-on” tech community. Now it’s starting to spread outward from there.

Their early success led to some pretty disastrous scaling problems and growing pains, which made their “Fail Whale” infamous. Twitter was down so much in the early to late Spring, there were more than a few people who decided to dump the service and move over to the fast growing, more stable, and ex-Google-exec-backed FriendFeed. But, in the back of my mind, I knew there was something special about a product that drew so much attention, that even its failures were an opportunity [for someone] to make money.

Credit Twitter’s founders for making the right moves. If your product doesn’t scale well and your engineering team can’t figure out how to fix those problems – fire them, and find more capable people. There’s no reason to try and rearrange the deck chairs on the Titantic. In the end, do what is right for your business – no matter the human cost.

Well, the plan worked. The Twitter team hunkered down and “fixed the glitch” that was causing problems and the following few months culminated in an early September Nielsen Online report detailing a gigantic 422% growth of unique visitors to Twitter from the same period last year. Numbers don’t lie, which led even the perennially-negative Mike Arrington at TechCrunch to (tentatively) declare that “the worst of Twitter’s scalabilty issues are behind them.”

Nowadays, I’m a regular Twitter user again. I don’t use FriendFeed, or Plurk, or Pownce, or any of the other Twitter-clones out there. The release of popular clone Identi.ca, which seemed like a possible deathblow in early July, now seems insignificant at best. Twitter isn’t about technology, you see – it’s about community. The Brits have showed us that driving on the left-hand side of the road doesn’t offer any real technological driving advantage to the right-hand side. Instead, the power lies in the fact that no matter where you inside a given country, you can always count on everyone driving on the SAME side of the road.

Twitter has the critical mass of community, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it can’t be beat by FriendFeed (I don’t even use it anymore), or newcomers like Identi.ca, or anyone else, unless the founders do something royally stupid. But even if they do, it might not matter. Prevailing critical opinion is that Twitter founders Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams have a little more than luck on their side.

What do you think? Does Twitter have us right where they want us, or are they still ripe for the picking? Or, let me put it another way – which of you regularly uses a micro-blogging service that’s NOT Twitter?

For those who are interested in micro-blogging and AIR apps, you’ve probably already installed both Twhirl for Twitter and more recently AlertThingy for FriendFeed.

AlertThingy was just released on April 13th by Howard Baines. Three days in, and I do enjoy it. But being a new “thingy,” it lacks some cooler features, including the ability to post directly to Twitter while posting to FriendFeed. Twhirl currently supports something similar – it allows posts to both Twitter and to Pownce.

With a new release of AlertThingy is coming soon, there’s a strong indication this one will come with Twitter support. One of the authors of AlertThingy is a Twitter user himself. In reply to a Tweet from me where I ask of any plans to have AlertThingy update Twitter, too?, Jeremy replies: you never know!

Now, check out his most recent “Tweet Testing!” . Testing a tweet from within AlertThingy perhaps? Twitter is reporting that his most recent Tweet was sent via web, but stay tuned for more details.

Update: Not only has AlertThingy now released support for Twitter, but Twitter has shot back by releasing support for FriendFeed.