Send to KindleTwitter is a phenomenon. It’s one of the hottest topics in the media now, not just the tech media. Most non-Twitterers roll their eyes when someone tries to explain what they’re missing. Many first-time users abandon it pretty quickly too.
I’ve been using Twitter consistently for over two years. In my opinion, there are quite a number of ways to effectively use Twitter, but I would guess that most people fall into one particular pattern. Up until recently, for me, that was as a personal, extended away message service. In other words, I used it to let friends know what I was up to.
Because of that, I protected my tweets (meaning, I had to approve who was permitted to follow me), since the world didn’t need to know that I was off to a concert or having dinner with friends. To accomplish this low volume use of Twitter, pretty much any of the hundreds of Twitter clients more than suffice. After trying many of them, I settled on the all-in-one Instant Messaging (IM) client Digsby. It’s not a great Twitter client, but it’s a great IM client, and having Twitter integrated was a bonus (one less app to deal with).
One of the clever things that Twitter clients do (which is a clever part of the Twitter API) is to announce themselves with each tweet. I was noticing that most of the people that I was following were using TweetDeck (this was a few months ago). I looked at it, understood what people liked about it, but it didn’t fit my usage pattern, nor attract me to changing my usage. One of the reasons is that it didn’t support multiple Twitter accounts, and I had no interest in changing the way I used the one account I had (@hadar).
As any regular web surfer knows, JavaScript (JS) is taking over the web. It’s really hard to find an interesting site that doesn’t either require JS, or use JS to make the site dramatically more interesting/usable.
One day I saw a mention that one of the more sophisticated JS-driven websites was called PeopleBrowsr. Note that there is no E at the end of “browsr”. Even if I realized that it was a Twitter client, I had no interest in a web-based Twitter client. I was merely curious to see just how sophisticated a JS application could be on the web.
Folks, I was totally blown away. Aside from being wildly impressed by what one could do with JS, I quickly switched gears into discovering just how much of the Twittersphere I was ignoring (even though some of the people that I had been following for years are Twitter Rock Stars). Even more impressive is the fact that you can click on skip login, and get a complete sense of how PeopleBrowsr works, without entering your Twitter credentials.
In fact, in their default non-login mode, you already see many cool features, and can start to explore the application.
PeopleBrowsr is so awesome that many people have covered it extensively, and have done so better than I ever could. The list truly goes on and on, but I’ll just put forth three links, two video, and one blog, if you want a feature oriented tutorial:
A fantastic introduction to PeopleBrowsr Lite Mode (recommended for people who want to get their feet wet with PeopleBrowsr).
A fantastic introduction to PeopleBrowsr Advanced Mode (this is the mode I use). The same author intends to produce a video about Business Mode in the near future, and I look forward to viewing that as well.
Guruvan has an in-depth article on why he switched from TweetDeck to PeopleBrowsr, and there are many good points in there. It’s a long, but worthwhile read.
PeopleBrowsr comes in two flavors, a browser-based version (best viewed in Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox) and an Adobe AIR version. The user interface is identical in both, but there is an important functional difference between them.
The browser version is resource friendly (both to your machine, and to their servers) in that it won’t update unless the PeopleBrowsr tab is in focus. For the casual Tweeter, or the person who can’t avoid distractions, this is ideal. Only when you wish to catch up with your Tweeps, do you switch to PeopleBrowsr, and see what you’ve missed.
The AIR version runs continuously in the background (as it should), and puts up the typical popup alerts whenever a new tweet comes in. Of course you can ignore them, but the whole point is to be aware of what’s happening in the twittersphere, and that means constant distractions. This isn’t unique to PeopleBrowsr, as any other AIR Twitter client will default to this behavior as well.
I would have preferred to use the AIR application, but I have found the browser based version to be a tad more reliable. So, for the moment, I use it in Google Chrome exclusively. PeopleBrowsr is still officially in alpha (beta coming any day now), but it’s reasonably rock solid most of the time. Occasionally, there are some glitches, but given the amount of raw power in this app, the growing pains are well worth it.
Now for the big win. Because PeopleBrowsr handles multiple Twitter accounts so well, I was inspired to register two new Twitter accounts. The first is my first public account, @hadarvc. The second is for a new micro-business that Lois and I have formed, but have not yet launched, @songsandjingles.
Handling all three accounts in PeopleBrowsr is not only easy, it’s fun.
The team behind PeopleBrowsr is tireless and talented. Their pace of innovation is incredible (another testament to them, and to the power of deploying JS-based applications). They are super-responsive to any issues brought up by their users.
I highly recommend anyone who uses Twitter to give PeopleBrowsr a try. If you don’t use Twitter, and want to know what all the fuss is about, then PeopleBrowsr is a pretty cool way to discover some of the more interesting things about Twitter, without even having to create an account. How cool is that? 🙂
Update: I should mention that PeopleBrowsr is way more than a Twitter client. It can connect to many Social Media sites, including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, etc. For the purpose of this blog post, and for the majority of my personal use of PeopleBrowsr, I only covered the Twitter portion…
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