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~