On Wednesday night, the eve of the Mac App Store launch,¹ excitement was building for an official Twitter desktop application, expected to be released. This would be the overdue update to the beloved Tweetie — it has been almost 10 months since Twitter acquired Atebits and Tweetie’s creator Loren Brichter joined their mobile team.² After a not-so major update to the iPhone app, and a very major release of an iPad app, a desktop version of Twitter would finally merge the Tweetie suite.

A year ago, I used Tweetie every day. The application was much more pleasant to use than the bare-bones Twitter.com. But as Twitter integrated new features, like built-in Retweets, Tweetie fell behind. And once New Twitter launched — full of features, both good and bad — Tweetie become irrelevant. Twitter.com is the easiest way to view linked images (even entire Flickr galleries), get information on those mentioned in a tweet, see if something has been retweeted, and follow conversation threads.

So as I saw enthusiasm in my Timeline Wednesday, I wondered, “Why do I need another app if I already have a browser?”

Twitter Clients

The easy answer is that an application can be streamlined — that clients like TweetDeck offer a more customized experience. It’s hard to argue with choice. But despite using Twitter extensively, I’ve never been pulled to take advantage of what some of these clients offer, like grouping users and marking tweets as read. I did like Destroy Twitter for a bit, mostly because you could skin the app, but eventually it became yet another thing to manage.³

Just like Tweetie before New Twitter, I think independent apps had a lot more value before Twitter was redesigned — for example, Lists, which can be used to track people you don’t follow or collect similar users, made a feature like Groups less unique.

Then there’s the issue of how many devices one has. Even if you just use Twitter for iPhone, in addition to the web, you already have two versions of a service that doesn’t sync. This means you’ve probably read the same tweet more than once, many times. And because Twitter suffers from what I’ll call Echoes (different users sharing the same links or information), with just two “Twitters” you can feel like you’re in the Grand Canyon.

Now add Twitter for iPad. And Twitter 2.0. The majority of users won’t be running all four, but it’s easy to see how you could find yourself using three versions of Twitter.

Using Twitter

Twitter has become the go-to tool for sharing. You want it with you wherever you are, without thinking about it. Before I bought a smartphone — I still miss my tiny, cheap Nokias — I would send tweets via SMS to #40404. I’m sure many users still do this around the world. No app required.

If we all had to choose and commit to one version, I think most of us would pick a phone version. With the phone you can do it all: share images taken with the phone, share links, and send updates no matter where you are.

Most of the time though, we’re at home and work, on our personal computers. And when I am, I have browsers open from morning to night. Primarily I use Safari, for reasons of familiarity and syncing with my devices, and Chrome is my video player because I have Flash disabled on my system.

Browsers can be living hells — a tab-infested environment of temptation. Ironically, Twitter itself leads to a lot of this tab-infestestion. When I play catchup on tweets, I find myself ⌘ + clicking (open in background) dozens of links, only to be left with a browser window full tiny tabs disconnected from their source. Lately, I’ve found myself keeping one window dedicated to 3 or 4 tabs of personal sites, where I’m signed in. Admittedly, this doesn’t sound ideal.

But browsers are also simple applications that can help us accomplish a whole lot of tasks. As web-based tools become more powerful, it makes sense to keep a browser running throughout the day — it’s not even really a conscious decision.

While tabs might seem an inelegant management system, I see no trouble in keeping Twitter open in my browser all day. I can even check on the tab itself to see if there are new tweets.

Design

Tim Morgan and John Gruber are already discussing the HIG (Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines) and the drastic ways that Twitter 2.0 diverges from typical application design.⁴ This is not my area of expertise, and anyway, the more I think about Twitter’s apps, I’m more concerned with their existence than their appearance.

However, here are some things that I find bothersome.
To be sure, I could list many things wrong with Twitter.com as well. Ranging from persistent information to their sloppy CSS font stacks.

• The entire app seems to have been designed on the brightest monitors available, because contrast issues run wide. Tweetie may have felt like a cousin to iChat, but at least the buttons where clear and the tweets themselves easy to read.
• The sidebar is unnecessarily dark, rendering the buttons and navigation icons nearly invisible. The maximize button doesn’t even work; considering they have a preference for hiding/showing the window with the Menu Bar icon, why not just drop the min/max buttons all together?
• The navigation buttons for Timeline, Mentions, Search, etc, show their name when you hover, sliding out over your timeline. This is not only hard to read, but it’s irritating to see the names of well-established icons over and over again.
• The application is presumably trying to look more like its iOS counterparts. It has fixed the font to Helvetica, with no option to change point size. In Tweetie, you could select between 10–14 pt.
• The compose box has one huge advantage: dragging and dropping images. But I’m not sure it outweighs it’s huge disadvantage: belittling your tweet. In Tweetie, the compose box was a simple box with plenty of whitespace, like Twitter.com. It’s character count was in the top right corner, clearly counting down on its own. Twitter 2.0’s compose box now includes your icon in the whitespace (for the benefit of those with multiple accounts?), and is dominated by black bar that is 2/3 of the overall size of the box. The character count is now tucked next to a bright blue Tweet button, in grey on black.
• On the whole, the application suffers from visual effects that are hardly helpful. On Twitter.com, the action buttons (Favorite, Retweet, Reply) only show up when you hover on the tweet. They pop into a dedicated space that feels appropriate. In Twitter 2.0, these action buttons fade in and out, and cover up the timestamp. Moving your mouse over a series of tweets is dizzying. Effects like this are fun to see once, on their own — ooh, ahh — but seeing them together, repeatedly, feels inconsiderate.

Future

I thought that I was only going to write about the design of Twitter 2.0. It’s easy to pick at Twitter.com or Twitter 2.0, but ultimately, the larger issue is the Why. Why a desktop client?

Because it’s faster? Have we been complaining about speed? Twitter can be a powerful tool or a major time waster. To get better it doesn’t need to be faster, it needs to be more efficient. It will need to develop filtering systems, reduce Echoes, and be able to sync across devices. But who knows, it’s entirely possible that this can only happen with dedicated apps.

Perhaps we’re not shifting to a World in the Cloud. Maybe specialized apps will come to replace websites, as they do on our mobile devices. Or maybe both the web and apps will evolve simultaneous, playing separate roles — a version for every caprice. This may or may not be a divisive path, but I do think we’re better off when we’re focused. To me, four Twitters is the opposite of that. •