sean.blog

I really kind of like the new breed of web tools that combine presence with the what am I doing now lifestream sort of concept. Sites like Twitter and Jaiku lead the pack in this space, with Twitter still being the big cheese. The concept is simple if you have not seen it. Post what you are doing, right now, in 140 characters or less. Simple enough right? These sites typically allow you to post from either their web page or via SMS. Twitter also offers the option to post via an IM through Google Talk, and recently through a new mobile accessible web page. The Google Talk and Mobile interfaces make Twitter accessible to me from anywhere with my Blackberry.

I found myself wanting a way to monitor the posts of my friends, both services let you subscribe to what others are saying, and make new posts easily without visiting the web page. I started playing with some of the Twitter clients available on the web. Jaiku does not have an API yet, and there really are not any 3rd party programs for using it…yet. For those of us with PC’s there are a couple of software options to access Twitter. Twitterroo and Twitbox were the two I found initially that I liked best. They worked pretty well out of the box, let me look at either just my time line (me and my friends) or at the public time line. But both programs seemed to require more effort to monitor than I wanted. They kept falling behind other windows and hence off of my radar. Point being they were not a good fit for me, although I think both are great programs.

Yesterday, I started seeing links to a program called Twitbin, which is a Firefox plugin/siderbar Twitter client. The client is very simple, and has a nice clean look to it. Posts alternate between a light blue and yellow background to help make them easy to distinguish visually. When links appear in a posting, the program converts them into easily identifiable and clickable links (a simple feature that I like a lot). The sidebar can be displayed/hidden using the Ctrl+Shift+M key in Firefox for Windows, making it simple to bring up, and hide again. Since I tend to live in my browser, and am used to working with one type of sidebar open or another, this has turned out to be a good solution for me. I often worry about plugins in Firefox due to already difficult memory problems with some plugins, but I don’t see any noticeable memory usage differences with this plugin installed.

I could extend the post and talk about why I am using Twitter over Jaiku, but for now suffice it to say that having an application like this sidebar is a big part of the reason. Just makes using it easier. If you are a Firefox user, you can do worse than to give the Twitbin plugin a try.