Twitter is pretty straightforward as is. I am not sure that it needs any additional simplification to be readily usable by anyone. I think Twitter is at or close to, or maybe just past, a tipping point where a lot of people, maybe even most, by now have heard the name, but most of these people have not tried it or if they have, they say they don’t get it. (Case in point: how many times did a non-user bring Twitter up in conversation at grandma’s over Christmas?) And as Twitter goes more and more mainstream, I think programs like Tweetree will only help spread Twitter’s use even further into the non-tech crowd.
One of the aspects of Twitter that makes it hard for new users to grasp, I think, is that you only see one side of any given conversation. (Unless you are following both participants.) Part of what Tweetree does is to show you both sides of the conversation in a threaded view. Very nice; no more having to hunt down the other side of a conversation you may be interested in reading. IF that were all Tweetree did, that would be great, but there is more.
The other nice thing Tweetree does is show you what someone is linking to in their tweet. Let me explain that a little. Twitter limits each tweet to 140 characters, so if I want to tweet about a cool website and provide a link to it, for example, I would probably use a service like TinyURL to shorten the link down and conserve as many of my 140 characters as possible. (Copied links can be very long.) Shortening the link is convenient for tweeting, but it gives the reader no idea what the link is about, or where they may be heading to out on the web by clicking on it. It’s this: http://tinyurl.com/7o7ypx instead of this: http://tweetree.com/home. Tweetree gives you some idea of what the link is all about below the tweet by displaying something like the latter. And if the user is linking video, or pictures, Tweetree just goes ahead and embeds them right under the tweet as well. Another great innovation.
As I was sitting here thinking about this post, the thought jumped into my head that well, Tweetree is so nice, and possibly gamechanging, that I wonder if Twitter would be interested in buying it. Then I started having an internal debate in my head about whether the Twitter folks would even be interested; does Tweetree go too far from the original vision of Twitter? Is Twitter designed to be just as it is now, forever? Is it application or infastructure? Is it the skeleton you hang add-on programs like this onto, or will it incorporate innovations like Tweetree right into Twitter itself? (Tweetree and Stocktwits are the two great add-ons that come immediately to my mind, but I would love to know about more in the comments.)
Who knows. I can not answer those questions, and I am not actually sure I even care about the answers anyway. But I can tell you that Tweetree can make using Twitter a little easier.
And, you can follow me on Twitter here.
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Tweetree seems interesting at first. It strikes me as immediately useful for folks like me that carry on multiple parallel conversations when I’m on.
Downside is it adds a layer to the experience. Now for most folks though, it’s probably a game changing application, allowing them to not feel like they are drowning.
Good to hear your thoughts on this.