UPDATE: Tweetie is now known as “Twitter for iPhone” having become the official Twitter client for the iPhone.
Tweetie and Twitterific are two iPhone apps used for keeping up to date with Twitter on your iPhone. For me, they’re the only reason I got interested in Twitter, because I could not see myself glued to the computer to play with it, nor sending text messages back and forth.
So, being fortunate enough to have an iPhone, I searched the App Store for a Twitter app that would allow me to use Twitter on the go. Quite a few came up, but one stood out as it was very popular and above all, free. This app was Twitterific.
I had decided to give Twitter a two-week trial as I did not really understand the draw, but thought I should give it a go, to see what all the hype was about, and Twitterific was the app that was to break me in.
It’s with sadness that I say due to the uselessness of Twitterific, my two-week trial lasted for no more than four hours. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. It just seemed like an incredibly watered down version of Facebook and might have been “revolutationary” ten years ago, but didn’t deserve such an accolade here in 2009.
So that was that. I uninstalled the app and left my account to stagnate.
However, earlier this week, a good friend of mine got to talking to me about Twitter again and was trying to explain why Twitter was so good and all the ways in which you can use it. I was mildly convinced and thought that perhaps I had been too harsh the first time around. I had decided however that Twitterific was largely to blame.
So I went in search of a new app, which is when I found Tweetie. Now, Tweetie is not free, which is why I had ignored it the first time around (why pay for something when you can get it for free). It costs $2.99, but on looking at the feature list, I began to see why. I also began to see how useful many of the features that it had could be, so I splashed out and bought the app, and I’ve never looked back since.
So what’s the differences and why does Tweetie make using Twitter that much more enjoyable and easy? Firstly, I can view my own profile, and as such, see who’s following me, who I’m following, who’s sent public messages to me and who’s sent direct messages to me. That in itself was huge.
Now for some of the awesome features: You can search for anything you like. So if you want to see what’s hot on YouTube right now, you just search for #youtube, or just youtube. Even better than that is the Trends option, where you can see the top 10 words that are being discussed right now, which is amazing for finding out what is breaking news or information.
When posting Tweets, Tweetie makes it incredibly easy to Retweet, Add map location, include any URL (and use an URL shortening service automatically), add pictures and so much more.
Twitterific just sends information your way in the public timeline (or your own if you so wish), but I felt like it was just a stream of information and didn’t really know what to do with it. Tweetie however was a really well thought out app and is a treat to use. I’ll never look back.
Download Twitterific on iTunes
