Rafe's Radar

With respect to my cranky co-worker Charles Cooper, and reversing even my own Oprah/Kutcher-prodded twitterrant the other day, Twitter is an important platform for publishing and marketing, and it needs to be discussed as such, not brushed aside.

The free platform, originally used for not much more than finding parties with free booze at South by Southwest, has become important enough to business and commerce that a media company (CNN) just acquired the branded CNNbrk account complete with followers. In other businesses around the world, meetings are happening where product marketing and branding execs are trying to figure out how they can exploit the platform without being branded, themselves, as corporate tools. I have been in such meetings.

There is real business happening on Twitter. Yet Twitter itself is still run too much like an experimental start-up. There's too much about the service that's unbusinesslike for businesses to rely on it.

For example, I was recently locked out of my Twitter account due to a password snafu. It was resolved, I must note, extremely quickly, after I e-mailed Twitter technical support. But it wasn't clear to me that Twitter as a company had any actual responsibility to reply to me as quickly as it did. It wasn't obvious that there was a guaranteed service level or response time expectation. This is a platform I'm supposed to be devoting real marketing dollars toward?

Then there is the issue of branding and account names on Twitter. Some people, like me, were lucky enough to be born with unusual first names and were also on Twitter early enough that we we able to grab our "brand." Others have had, or will likely need to do, back-room deals to get their names, since buying and selling accounts is, technically, against Twitter policy.

Still others--at least two people I know--have used their connections at Twitter to snare the use of registered but inactive user accounts. The Twitter name space is a market with unenforceable rules and no transparency. Owners of small brands cannot feel safe that their branding on Twitter will be protected. Twitter's posted policies are a good first starting point, but there's not enough here to bank on. … Read more

There was a time, not long ago, when the power Twitter users were gaga for Twhirl. This Air app gave (and still gives) you quick access to different views of your Twitter network, as well as your FriendFeed stream. But Twhirl didn't last as the go-to client once the Twitterati discovered TweetDeck.

This service has the big advantage of giving users a multicolumn dashboard of everything going on in Twitter that they might care about, all at once on one screen. It also let users set up ad-hoc groups of people to follow, and search terms to track. It's the Bloomberg terminal equivalent for Twitterheads.

TweetDeck is not the only multicolumn Twitter client, however. On Tuesday, Seesmic, which publishes Twhirl, released a preview of its own new multicolumn client, Seesmic Desktop. It's going up against another new client, the Mac-only Nambu, as well as the relatively unknown AlertThingy, which supports more non-Twitter services than any other Twitter client.

Heavy Twitter users would do well to consider these other apps. They might also want to reconsider Twhirl, which, while not strictly multicolumn, is multiwindow, and allows users to set up a dashboard page of their microblog activity on multiple accounts and networks at once.

As you can see in the chart after the jump, social network butterflies will likely be best served by AlertThingy, which supports a ridiculous number of services. However, it has a clunky search feature and an inelegant system to shorten links. FriendFeed fans should keep Twhirl on their radar. In this group of products, it has the best support for that network. (Personally, I use Twhirl to keep on top of FriendFeed, althought I don't use it anymore for Twitter access.)

For power Twitter users, the new Seesmic Desktop has promise. It has a better interface for managing saved searches and groups than TweetDeck, and it's the only app in this roundup that lets you use your Webcam to snap pics for upload to Twitter (via Twitpic) directly. The preview release available now has bugs, though, and it also lacks a filter feature, which is an important tool to use alongside search to control the content you see in Twitter columns. I'd wait a while before adopting this app.

Nambu is a strong product for Mac users. It does all the important things that TweetDeck does, except access services other than Twitter, and it adds support for displaying content from multiple Twitter accounts at once. It is easy to tweak what you see on-screen, and has the most Mac-like interface of these products.

We can't consign TweetDeck to the dustbin of Twitter apps yet. It is still the the multicolumn Twitter client I recommend for Windows users. It's stable, attractive, easy to use, and flexible. A publicly-availble beta version also supports Facebook; the only other app in this collection to offer that is AlertThingy. I'm keeping TweetDeck on my desktop as my primary Twitter client for the time being. I have an an eye on Seesmic Desktop, though. It shows great promise.

Update: There's a new version of TweetDeck.

Download links: AlertThingy | Twhirl | TweetDeck | Nambu | Seesmic Desktop … Read more

Nearly three years ago, a video demo of a new desktop user interface, the BumpTop, captivated YouTube viewers. A year later the creator, Anand Agarawala, was called to the august TED conference to present. Now the BumpTop software is here, ready for you and your Windows PC. I gave it a spin.

It's certainly very cool. In many ways it is a better desktop than the one that comes with Windows (even Windows 7) or OS X. But as cool as it is, it feels like a toy. That's because the locus of modern personal computing is not … Read more

The mini-Demo conference at the Web 2.0 Expo is the Launch Pad, where five start-up companies pitched to a small panel of experts (Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, Matt Marshall of VentureBeat, and Anand Iyer of Microsoft) and a moderate audience spread out across a very large hall. Of the five pitches, I found four very smart (read the summaries to figure out which one didn't get my nod) and of those, one appeared to be a genuinely new idea. That would be the first company in this run-down. (The audience, though, liked Nitobi the best.)

80legs is building … Read more

Don't let the attention-grabbing headlines elsewhere fool you. Twitter still has not announced a business model. There are no Pro Twitter accounts. There is no TwitterWords advertising program. You still can't buy plush toy Fail Whales from Twitter.

Twitter is engaged in a few experiments that are providing value to other companies, such as letting Federated Media use its content for its Microsoft-sponsored ExecTweets site. But this is not the big Twitter revenue model people are waiting for.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams continues to tease us on the topic.

"We will make money, and I can't … Read more