Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Early review of #TwitJump...my newish #Twitter #App and #Toolbox

Recently, I began using TwitJump to manage my twitter activity.

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TwitJump.pdf (128 KB)

So far, it has been super helpful for a couple of reasons:

1. I can plan ahead and schedule my tweets in advance. This allows me to not overwhelm my followers at once with my daily tweets, but rather stream them out in a less intrusive fashion.

2. TwitJump has a nifty little URL shrink tool, which helps me condense the links and preserving my precious character count.

3. It provides some analytics on my clicks, retweets, and so on. While Twitter has some of this built-in, the extra detail provided by TwitJump enhances my understanding of who is following me and which topics tend to get the most attention.

4. It allows me to set alerts and gives me recommendations for other channels/people to follow, based on my expressed interests.

5. It merges multiple Twitter accounts, allowing me to pick and choose which account I tweet from. I don't use multiple accounts, but I could see this coming in very handy.

6. It has an easy media upload tool.


Out of full disclosure, I know the people behind TwitJump, which is why I decided to give it a try. However, TwitJump has been receiving some good press on its own. TechChunks ranked it the #6 best free iPhone App, right behind Google Earth, Skype, Pandora (one of my favorites), Facebook, and WordPress. I don't care who you are, that's some good company.

Now, here are some things I would love to see improved on TwitJump 2.0 (@twitjump, @fundinguniverse, @lawalexander, @brockblake).

1. It seems a little buggy. I've noticed if I don't pay close attention when shrinking URL's sometimes the last few digits will drop off. So I find myself spending time double-checking the shortened URLs.

2. The iPhone App seems to function a little better than the web interface, and I think it is better designed. In fact, I love the iPhone App interface and wish the web interface were as easy to use and navigate. Why not align the two more so that the UIs are more congruent and easier for customers to toggle back and forth? I haven't figured out how to modify the schedule of my tweets in queue. I can do it easily on the iPhone App, but not through the web interface.

3. I'd like the ability to create longer posts directly through TwitJump rather than going to my other blog interfaces. If I could create Posterous-esque posts right inside TwitJump, which would post both to my blogs and then automatically get dropped into my Twitter queue via TwitJump (and syndicated to any other linked accounts and social tools), it would save me the effort of using multiple services, and keep my eyeballs inside TwitJump. Here's the killer app...allow users to save drafts of posts, including media content. Always been a pain through Posterous, although other services TypePad, Blogger are better with this.

Good work TwitJump team...stay on the ball and you might carve out a solid niche of followers.

 

Follow me on Twitter @clintcarlos

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