whatever happened, happened

Disclaimer: I promised to write a review of 20couch and got a free copy from its developer. I’ve been using it along side with Tweetie for Mac for nearly 2 months.

20couch is, as Matt himself puts it, ‘the bastard child of Twitter and Google Reader’. Indeed this Twitter client has a very similar interface to Google Reader and quite a few nice characteristics.

The good

• Built with CakePHP. Has plugin support (huge win!). Since the developer is very involved with CakePHP development (go check out his CakePHP Digest series, book and plugin), I could learn a lot about the framework by reading his source code.
• Multiple accounts support, ability to subscribe to keywords and/or hashtags, and so-called ‘Ninja Follow’ feature (follow someone without actually following him). The first two are nice to have, while I find no use for the last one.
• Threaded conversation display, inline image preview and rudimentary short URL expansion.
• Ability to selectively mark tweets as read (e.g. those older than 6 hours/1 day/1 week, you get the idea).
• Ability to ‘mute’ someone for a pre-defined period of time.
• Frequent updates. Since it was shipped in mid March, there have been 9 updates and the developer is VERY responsive.

The not-so-good

• More like a ‘Twitter reader’ rather than a full-blown client. Has yet to support favoriting tweets, following and unfollowing other users, viewing user profiles, etc.
• The mobile-optimised version is usable, but a native app is more than welcome.
• The first few versions were quite buggy. I ran into quite a few problems when trying to install/update it on WebFaction, which went away when I switched back to A Small Orange. While most of those bugs have been fixed in subsequent updates, some annoying ones still remain (e.g. Marking tweets as read sometimes doesn’t work as expected)

Verdict

I was mainly drawn to it because of 20couch’s plugin support. Having the ability to customise a Twitter client to my liking is something I has wished to do for a long time. Currently I have 2 ideas in mind: 1/ a link-extracting plugin running on the whole Twitter stream to make sure I don’t miss a thing and 2/ a filter to remove boring/spammy tweets. Hope I’ll find some spare time to implement them soon.

In terms of price, like a few other self-hosted PHP scripts (Mint, Fever), 20couch costs $30. If you need a highly customisable Twitter web client, go for it. Otherwise, desktop apps like Tweetie for Mac is more than enough.

**tl;dr: linkroom is my latest creation and it’s in private beta. Read the second paragraph to learn what it does. DM me if you’re interested. **

Here’s something I’ve been working on for two weeks now: linkroom, yet another web app built on top of Twitter API. It was inspired by laterstars, and obviously involved with links.

So what the hell is linkroom? To put it simply, linkroom stores latest links from your Twitter stream. linkroom reads your timeline, finds all links and imports them into its database. You can then have a glance at those links, decide which ones to read and which ones to ignore. And that’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Why would you need linkroom? Frankly, I don’t know. I only know for myself. I need linkroom because my Twitter timeline is a gold mine. I read nearly all tweets, click on a large portion of links and enjoy repeating this process every day. Sometimes I was left behind by the sheer number of tweets and miss some breaking news, like those about Microsoft Courier. So I want an automated way to put all links in front of my eyes and help me catch up with things I care about.

linkroom was built to help me cope with information overload, not to make my situation worse. So linkroom doesn’t automatically import links. It only does so when I explicitly tell it to. I could Do this as frequently or rarely as I want. To linkroom, only the latest links are relevant. Those buried deep down in my timeline are ignored.

linkroom works like this: For each link in your Twitter timeline, it displays the title and the person who posted this. Hover the title and it shows the full URL. Hover the person’s screen name and you could read the tweet containing the current link. From these factors, you decide whether you want to read the article this link leads to or not. You know you don’t have time to read every link, so be selective. Mark it as interesting to add it to your reading list, ignore it to make the link go away, or if you can’t make up your mind, add it to the end of your reading list so that you could check it out after finish reading other stuff.

When you’re done with this task (it generally takes me less than five minutes to go over a screenful of links), your reading list is ready for consumption. If you like reading on the screen, click linkroom’s bookmarklet to access the first item in your list. Click one more time to read the next one. Rinse and repeat until you’re done. Or, if you prefer reading in Instapaper, subscribe to your account’s RSS feed.

Some fancy stuff I’ve implemented in linkroom:

• Short URL expansion: Admit it, those convenient bit.ly or is.gd links are cryptic when it comes to guess what they are about.
• Fluid.app integration: Growl and sound notifications.
• Visited links detection: Guess which links you have read and mark them as such.
• Customisable rules: Choose to whitelist or blacklist those you enjoy or don’t bother checkig out.

Still there’re some stuff I haven’t covered. But those 500 hundreds words are enough to make my hands hurt (I’m typing them in Writeroom for iPhone like usual). So, TTFN.

If you’re interested in becoming a beta tester, DM me or reply to this post.

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