Tweetree: A Better UX For Twitter

I was twigged to Tweetree, which is a minimal web app that replaces some of Twitter’s functionality. It lacks support for direct messaging, the history of your own posts, and other things. So, it isn’t intended — at least at this point — as a complete client app replacement. But what it does is worth looking at.

In particular, it allows you to look at the ‘full conversations’ going on in your Twitter stream, or the streams of others. Here’s a conversation that Hugh McLeod had recently (note: the ‘full conversation’ link appears in a tweet when you mouse over):

Tweetree - Home, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Notice that the app expands the image that he provided as a URL in one tweet.

Here’s some of my Twitter stream.

Tweetree - Home, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

At the top, you can see that I responded to @khartline’s need for mothering, @astrout wants a Roomba, and various folks have provided links that Tweetree expands for the user. Replying to someone’s post is easy: you just click on the ‘reply’ in the Tweet, but that only shows when you mouse over it. It occasionally gets confused when trying to piece together conversations among people not using the tool directly.

(Note that the auto-expansion of shortened URLs will devalue one of the reasons that I use bit.ly: the service tracks click throughs for me. If people hit on the expanded URL, bit.ly won’t get a click through.)

I hope that the folks at Twitter will incorporate some of the thinking in Tweetree, at least as an optional view.

While we are on that subject, I would like to make the case for a consolidated view in Twitter, available only to the user, of all sorts of tweets in one stream: direct messages sent and received, @replies, and all the posts of all that I follow. Pretty please?that