Platypus Farm

And the winner by just… a beak, is…
Okay. Can you tell I’m not a writer?!

As a twitter hater, who has refused to use the service even though I have had an account since 2006, I’ve been waiting for some better interfaces to truly embrace the genre. After I actually I understood what this was, I was hoping that twitter would add more features to make some sense of it all. I’m glad they didn’t. Everyone has figured out what they want from this new technology on their own. And now we’re seeing all sorts of applications popping up to help customize according to communities taste.

So I read about Tweetie on Techcrunch and thought: finally, something that will let me keep up with the cool kids. More recently, I installed wakoopa which tracks what you have on your machine and what you do in general. Very big brother, kinda creepy and a long story. Although that’s not a twitter client. The point was to learn about new stuff based on the recommendation from the community. Hence my discovery of Beak. It’s a bit of dork fest to stumble on an application that wasn’t in some blog post. But I digress. Now I have 2 twitter clients sitting on my Mac. So which one sticks around on my desktop? For the purpose of this post, we will ignore the mobile clients. I’m still trying to catch up with the cool kids; bare with me.

The Comparison

Beak has a couple of additional features immediately in front of you along with the main navigation. The main nav is on top for Beak and on the left for Tweetie. Beak seems to have some of the actions you can take right on each post, like retweets and direct messages. Each of them expanding to reveal an entry box. Whereas Tweetie brings up another window. Reposting is on a right click for Tweetie. Time stamp is different: calculated time from Tweetie vs. actual time stamp from Beak. Not sure which one I prefer.

If you’re thinking these are trivial differences, well, I agree. The difference is not much all. But both of these clients make it easier to use twitter. These apps not only make it easier to engage and understand the madness that everyone is so hysterical over lately. But they also make it easier to have conversations with the community. This last bit is what I’ve been missing all this time. Mostly due to laziness around learning twitter ethicate.

So back to the comparison: which is a better client?
I’ve been looking at Tweetie for slightly longer. But Beak feels better visually. It’s more like many IM clients, nice and compact. Much better then those massive, I-am-so-in-touch-with-everything-I-need-to-have-5-bigilian-panels-of-tweets-in-front-of-me-at-all-times. One of the small things I really like about Tweetie is how the visual display of your messages are differentiated by swapping your snapshot to the right—down to the little pointer triangle that they reference in the application icon. This comparison does not take into account Tweetie for iPhone which highlights another critical factor in the whole concept: mobility. Honestly, I have no idea if one is really that much better then the other. In a side-by-side comparison I prefer Beak. A much more experienced twitter might disagree based on a specific interface feature and I’ll happily accept their veto.

All I know is that these apps will make the concept mainstream. It’s a bit like when wysiwyg editors came out. Those who knew how to code, didn’t care for them at first. But those editors boxed up the technical stuff and made it magical. Thus people gathered around to see what they could do with the new toys. Even as a web dude, I have an aversion to learning new syntax. Who wants to memorize what @somename signifies or what RT stands for in this new context. Now, if you give me a shinny new application that lets me talk to the people I like to follow, in a casual way… well, I’m intrigued!
And I didn’t have to learn the new language, because you gave me a decoder ring?! Thanks internet:-)