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Using Flock to Tame Wild Twitter Storms
By Dave Peterson | April 11, 2008
There’s increasing discussion about the social networking site Twitter going around the net. Some love it (I’d be in that group), some are confused by it, and some can’t understand why otherwise reasonable people spend so much time exchanging fairly mundane (or personal) details of their lives in what can be an extremely public forum.
If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, here are the basics: Posts (“tweets” in Twitter-speak) are limited to 140 characters. There is a public timeline where all tweets appear (unless their author has opted out), and a personal timeline for each user. In the personal timeline, the tweets of all the people/entities that the user has chosen to follow are displayed chronologically. Finally, there are two basic kinds of tweets: Original and replies (which are preceded by an @ and the user name the reply is directed toward).
Some people use Twitter as a one-way broadcast, telling the world what they are doing and sometimes promoting their projects. They often don’t follow anyone. Others mix in an occasional reply or brief back-and-forth conversation. And some people use it for extended conversations, in the style of an instant messaging client.
This can cause a problem, as Twitter displays tweets in sequential screens, and if you follow someone who tweets a great deal (replies or originals) they can quickly obscure the people you’re trying to follow. An example here is the useful, but highly prolific and often repetitive Engadget feed:
As you can see, poor iJustine is getting buried in gadget news. You then must decide whether to “un-follow” the verbose tweeter, track them separately, such as bookmarking their timeline, but keeping them out of your own, or just resign yourself to having to go through many pages of their tweets in order to see everyone else’s.
My solution involves the excellent browser Flock. I started using Flock back in December after it was covered on Mahalo Daily. Besides being a solid, stable piece of software (high praise in the browser world), Flock adds in features designed to compliment social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. Flock features a sidebar that appears to the left of the browsing window. Configured to display Twitter, it looks something like this:
Your most recent tweet shows at the top against a gray background, then all the people you follow display, ordered by how recently they’ve posted an update. If new updates from other users occur, they are displayed automatically at the top, nearly live (I’ve seen a three or four minute lag between when a tweet is posted on Twitter and when it refreshes in the sidebar.)
This provides a clean, clear view of people you’re interested in, while not letting any single user display more than one tweet at a time. Only their most recent one shows. If I see something I want to follow up, I go to a browser tab I keep loaded with my Twitter home page (which can be loaded by clicking the word “Twitter” at the top of the sidebar). Clicking on any user’s name in the display will take you to their personal timeline in a browser window. Using Flock like this requires very minimal setup, just logging in once to your Twitter account through an interface provided by Flock. If you don’t log out again, it will remember you and open correctly each time you launch the browser.
Flock is available for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. If you’re interested in seeing what I talk about when I’m not blogging here, you can follow me at twitter.com/davepeterson. And thanks to Neal Campbell for suggesting I turn a short comment I left on his blog into this post.
Topics: Applications |
April 11th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Dave, this is exactly what I needed. Thanks for sharing!
April 11th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Excellent post. I used Flock on my PC, and I totally forgot to grab it when I switched to Mac. Going there now. Thanks!
April 12th, 2008 at 11:43 am
I like this approach, but for some reason Flock isn’t updating the sidebar.
April 12th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
@Mary - If you’re logged in to Twitter through Flock, I’m not sure what’s up. I checked the Flock preferences, FAQ and User Guide (here’s the section of the online guide that is pertinent to using the Sidebar: http://tinyurl.com/6gguyr ), but couldn’t find anything that sounded like it addressed failure to update. Has anyone else had this issue?