Twitter-quest: Google Desktop

Good afternoon everyone. It's been a couple days, and I think I'm ready to give a brief review of the Twitter gadget for Google Desktop. Here we go.

First and foremost: It works. As far as the simple act of being functional goes, it does that. It's also very cute. Very adorable, light blue and green, with a little heart for the "tweet" button. It's definitely got cutesy appeal.

I suppose it would be best for me to go ahead and list the things this app does NOT do, then go on to say how well it performs the things it DOES do.

1) It does not have a reply function. You have to type the @username in manually. The same applies for direct messages. I believe the text command for direct message works here.
2) It does not have a scroll feature. You can only see as many tweets as can fit in the window once you've stretched it to the desired length.
3) It does not have a shorten url function built in. Nor does it have a "post image with twitpic" function.
4) There's no "follow" button.
5) There's no "favorite" button.

Basically, it shows tweets and lets you update. That's about it. If you click on someone's username, it'll open up their profile in a browser window. It has no special plugins or shorcuts or anything like that. It's just the most basic of gadgets. And really, for a simple sidebar app, that's fine. The lack of scrolling and reply function are a real drawback though.

The app works and updates just fine, as long as you don't have Twitter open in a browser window. For reasons unknown, this causes glitches and update errors. Blank entries roll by when it updates, if it updates at all. The good news is, even when it says "error in connection", you can still post a tweet. Even when you can't see anyone else's tweets, it will always let you post your own. (Random aside: When viewing your tweet from the Twitter main page, it says "from web" as opposed to "from google" or some such. Interesting.)

When it's not being glitchy, the Google app is very clean and unobtrusive. If you're looking for a cute little sidebar application that will let you tweet at random when you're busy doing something else on the computer, this is the one for you. However, if you're looking for more functionality, you won't find it here. Start searching for another application, or just stick with the web page.

My personal opinion? I like having it in my sidebar just because it's cute. I always have a browser window open, so it's not my only means of Tweeting. If it was, I'd be quite frustrated with not being able to scroll. When it gets glitchy, I close Twitter in my browser for a little while. That usually fixes the problem. If not, I log out and back in.

Bottom line: Appeals more to the "casual" tweeter than the "avid" tweeter. Did I mention it's cute? =p

Next up: Twitterfox, which I've kept off for the duration of the Google test. (Only using one app at a time.)

~Gretchen aka The Coconutter~

My Twitter-quest begins

In the upcoming days/weeks, I will be using and experimenting with various Twitter applications, some for the Desktop and few for the web. As a personal Twitter-quest, I will be trying to find out which one is right for me. While I'm at it, I might as well share my knowledge and opinions with the rest of the Twitterverse.

I'll take each app and use it for a few days or a week or two, however long it takes for me to form a mostly solid opinion of it. Then I'll share my findings on here. Each app gets its own entry, as detailed as I can muster. Hopefully my information will be organized enough to make some sense.

So yeah. Tune in for that.

~Gretchen aka The Coconutter~

What the blip?

So I checked out blippr last night, after seeing a random news link that it had been bought by Mashable. It had a sort of Twitter-like appeal, so I went ahead and joined. I refrained from blipping everything in sight, so as to not spam my poor Twitter followers with my blips. Blip is a funny word.

Anyway, I already blipped the site itself, so they know my opinion in 160 characters or less. Nonetheless, let me take this opportunity to expand on that opinion.

Good God almighty, I don't think I've ever seen a site as buggy as blippr.

I'm no site development expert, but I've been around the world wide web quite a bit in my time. I know a fucked-up site when I see it. Maybe it's just me, but blippr has some strange quirks. Most are just weird: My homepage kept saying I hadn't made any blips, and showed nothing in the field. But when I click on my profile picture (which for some reason won't properly upload), it shows all the blips. My personal favorite was when, instead of saying I had 0 blips, suddenly I had -2 blips. Blippr, your mathematics are indeed flawed.

At first, I blipped a couple games and didn't put reviews for them. I just hit the space bar so it would think I typed something. Later on, I tried to review these things properly. The box came up and I typed something, then hit submit or whatever. Instead of being like, "You already blipped this thing" or "error: duplicate" or something, the dialogue box just kept re-popping up all empty and ready for me to type in it. It was like a robot stuck on repeat query. "What did you think? What did you think? What did you think?" I had to go back and delete my previous empty blip before it would go back to being sane.

One really annoying glitch was when I connected blippr to my Twitter page. There's a dropdown menu that asks what format you want your blips to be tweeted in. I think there's four options, maybe five. Well, I picked one option, clicked save, and it was all "Ok, your changes have been saved!" Great, except that the box had reverted back to the default option and my tweets were coming in not how I wanted. Good thing it's a format I can live with; no matter what I tried, I'll be damned if it ever worked.

The idea behind the site is cool, and it has potential to be not only addictive but useful. However, until they can fix all the random weirdness, I won't recommend it to very many people. While I'm at it, why is there no "it was ok" option in the blip menu? It goes straight from "like" to "dislike". Some things just don't evoke that strong of a feeling within me. I'd like a neutral option please. =p

~Gretchen aka The Coconutter~