Reviews

My Twitter Desktop Welcomes TwitterLocal

I downloaded the desktop AIR application from TwitterLocal yesterday to give it a try and it has been awesome thus far. In case you haven’t heard, TwitterLocal is a tool to create an RSS feed of tweets for your area based off of users’ declared location from twitter. I set one up for all tweets within 15 miles of my zipcode which is about perfect because it encompasses all of the city of St. Louis but leaves out the outlying suburbs so it only includes people that might be tweeting things close to me.

It has also added a new dimension to my desktop. I regularly use Twitterrific as my primary twitter client and I have Growl notifications enabled so every time a new tweet comes in, a small notification bubble pops up for about 3 seconds before fading away. (In case you are a PC user…I have no idea if Growl is Windows-compatible…but it does make my Mac even more awesome!) I downloaded twhirl the other day because everyone was buzzing about it but I haven’t really taken it out for a spin yet. Anyhow, normally my twitter interface revolves around twitterrific but now TwitterLocal has made it awesome.

This is my ‘ambient desktop’, meaning the programs I have always running in the background, in fact I even managed to get a Growl notification for Scoble’s tweet. I actually have quite a few others like Last.fm, FMenu, and smcFanControl but those live in my menu bar. Anyway, now in the background I can actively monitor my SocialFeed on twitter as well as my GeoFeed. I love it.

All in all, TwitterLocal provides an awesome stream but it has a couple things that I think it could do better:

• Make a light version of its client. As of right now, you can click a tab in the app to switch to your SocialFeed, your replies and a tweet box. It is trying to become a primary client but I dont see that happening for me…so continue this version but release a light version that is just a see-through box that hangs out and shows a feed with a box for me to tweet from.
• Window resize is limited…I wish it could be wider and less tall but for some reason, it wont let me drag it any bigger
• Speed…an option for how often to update would be great.
• In-window conversation features similar to twitterriffic and twhirl to @ people.

All-in-all I like it a lot and it is making my twitter-awareness a lot more keen; I feel more tapped into St. Louis than before and I’ve already started following a few new people as a result. With a bit of development, I can see this being a wide-spread tool that more people will pick up. And I love that they went with TwitterLocal.net rather than .com. Some squatter has the dotcom locked up…and I hate squatters.

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