Tweeting from my phone

So what is it about Twitter that makes it SO addictive?

I've been tweeting (sending messages to my Twitter account) for a few months now. I follow the tweets of a number of people and have over 200 people who follow me, which is truly amazing. Especially considering I never say anything much; how can you in 140 characters (the maximum length of a tweet). Go and see http://twitter.com/ColinEnglish to see what I mean.

Anyway, I mostly tweet from my Dell Mininote 9 netbook when at home as it is so convenient to use. It runs Ubuntu Linux and I access Twitter via the Tweetdeck application. You can also run Tweetdeck on Windows, so we have it loaded on our home (Tiny PC) computer and the home (Acer) laptop. Truly a cross-platform approach. More on Tweetdeck another time...

HOWEVER, when it comes to my PDA phone, which runs Windows Mobile 6, it is a different story. I normally use two applications, PockeTwit and Twikini. Now both have good and not-so-good features. I don't really intend to write a review of each application, there will be links to their websites below.

Confession time. Not only do I tweet as me, Colin English, but I also tweet under pseudonyms. I started doing this as a joke, but got a bit carried away... PockeTwit allows me to send tweets from any of my Twitter accounts and also merges the "timelines" of all the accounts into one whole one, so I can see tweets from the people followed by all accounts and tweets to all accounts in one place. Occasionally, I find this overwhelming, which is why I have been using Twikini with my main account mostly (or I did until the beta test period expired). I find Twikini easier to use, and I think this is primarily because it only looks at one Twitter account at a time.

[This does NOT mean that having multiple Twitter accounts is a BAD idea - far from it. It is recommended that you keep your personal life and work life separate if you intend to tweet about both, simply to keep your sanity and the sanity of the people who follow each side of your life. People interested in what you say about, for example, your hobbies may NOT be interested in your comments about the interesting C## algorithm you stumbled across in a developer's blog (yawn)].

So horses for courses. I really do like both Twikini AND PockeTwit.

Links:

Twikini = http://www.trinketsoftware.com/twikini/
PockeTwit = http://code.google.com/p/pocketwit/
Tweetdeck = http:/tweetdeck.com

Have fun!

Disclaimer: Other software to enhance your Twitter experience is available for Windows, Linux, Windows Mobile, Palm, Blackberry, iPhone, Symbian, etc. I an not saying that my choices are what YOU should follow.

Twkiki screen example:





















PockeTwit screen example: