Thoughts on the Official BlackBerry Twitter Application
With RIM’s closed private beta release of their new Twitter application last week, the team and I have been putting the application through the paces and have come up with a rather broad list of observations, necessary enhancements, and suggestions.
First off, let me say that it’s my opinion that this application has great potential. For one, I love the message integration. Other than YATCA, I’m not familiar with a client that integrates, and unfortunately, YATCA integrates EVERY tweet. A nightmare for anyone who follows more than a few dozen people.The overall UI is quality. I only wish that RIM would have learned from those who went before, as many of the early folks ( Ubertwitter, SocialScope and the like) had several of the same issues. I am hoping that the fact that RIM intends to release this to the masses in a month or so, that rapid enhancements are made. I’m sure many of these below are on the list for future development, and this is RIM’s first dive into this. I’m guessing that this was released merely to test their network etc, and get initial feebback.
On to the details. I’ll break this down into “Must Enhance” and “Wishlist”
Must Enhance
- More user defined options. Both Tweet Genius and Ubertwitter allow you to set the size of the tweets, enabling you to maximize your screen with more tweets should you desire.
- Shortcuts! Refresh, retweet etc need to be functions easily accomplished without going into the menu.
- Need to be able to pull down more than 100 tweets at a time
- Needs support for URL shortener
- Support for Twitter lists
- Different colors for @replies and direct messages in the timeline
- I’m sure this is on schedule, but device lag is pretty significant at this point, must be improved
- Ability to store avatars on SD Card, speeding loading of timeline
- When viewing a full tweet, only reply seems to be an option, no retweet. Seems to only be available from the timeline
- Maybe it’s a pet peeve, but many of us prefer the actual time stamp on tweets in our timeline, not “ posted 4 min ago”
- Ability to add comments while retweeting, without a cumbersome workaround.
Wishlist
- Multiple account integration without having to sign out, and sign in another account. Ubertwitter is by far the best option at the moment.
- Could save some dashboard space by combining search for people and search option tab.
- Ability to click on an avatar and view the picture in a larger format
- Ability to edit your profile, change your avatar from the app.
All in all, I think this is a very good start. Many of the quality features of other Twitter clients are incorporated with this, and with many of these needs I’m certain things are already in development. While it may be the case already and we’re unaware, there are so many outstanding 3rd party application developers, I am surprised RIM doesn’t hire some up for projects such as this. But in any event, I’m excited to see the progression from now until official release. Those who have this, we’d love to hear your comments!
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Or create a second “spam me up” account… Actually that’s what I did.. Use my “that are really important tweets for me” Account with YATCA and the other ones I use with the RIM TwitterClient… 
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