Apr

17

Twhirl as a FriendFeed Client: A Brief Review

April 17, 2008 |

imageTwhirl now is also a FriendFeed client (also see TechCrunch story about this here - Michael Arrington is an investor in Seesmic and hence Twhirl). You can download the FriendFeed enabled beta version here. This is still a beta version, so things can/will change, but here are my initial thoughts:

+ Twitter and FriendFeed are still kept apart in the app - you either connect to Twitter or FriendFeed. This is not an integrated Twitter/FriendFeed client at this point - or you can have two windows open (one for FF - one for Twitter).

+ it doesn’t seem to push the most recent ‘liked’ or commented on story up to the top - that’s a real problem, because given the volume of posts on FriendFeed, it’s easy to miss something without this feature. Right now, the posts just show up in chronological order, but it does seem to update posts with new comments and likes.

+ there also seems to be some weirdness about when and where items get updated (hey - it’s a beta after all). It seems I have to scroll the page before it updates the top post.

+ Twhirl has implemented an ‘x more comments’ feature so that it doesn’t have to display 20 comments that take up the whole screen, but it shows those comments in the browser. That doesn’t make much sense to me - if I wanted to use the site in the browser, I would just use it there…

Right now, especially after today’s update, I think Alert Thingy is still and more polished client, I think, but competition is always a good thing and both Twhirl and Alert Thingy will profit from it. None of the desktop clients are transformative of the service in the way the Twitter clients turned Twitter into a chatroom, but it’s still early in the game and I am convinced that we will see some breakthroughs here sooner or later.

Twhirl still needs some polish as a FriendFeed client and what I had really hoped from Twhirl was a stronger integration with Twitter. Why, for example, can’t I reply from FriendFeed directly to Twitter in Twhirl. I can do it on the site after all - why can’t a Twitter client do this?

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