Twitter

If you’re like I am, your Twitter stream is probably public. For me, the value of Twitter is its ability to let me share news and comments that current and potential clients may find useful. I also use it as a way of interacting with clients if our regular communication channels are down.

So I certainly don’t say anything using @chcs (my company Twitter account) that can’t be public. I also have a personal Twitter feed, @HamiltonChas, that mostly focuses on my comments regarding local politics. I also tweet using @GrowTrains, an account that reflects my interest in improving passenger train service.

Most of the people I’ve talked to compartmentalize their Twitter activities this way. Many of my WWD colleagues have several accounts, each of which focuses on a different aspect of their professional and personal interests. Third-party Twitter clients like Tweetdeck, Brizzly, Nambu and Hootsuite, make it easy to manage more than one account.

Others, however, don’t like this approach. WWD writer Scott wants to see our personal lives — he states”Telling me in your bio that you don’t post personal tweets guarantees I’m not going to follow you back. Aren’t you interesting?” I certainly hope so, but I’m not sure that my clients want to hear me babbling on about the upcoming election in Seattle, or about how we need high-speed trains.

But now that my tweets will be included in search engines, having multiple Twitter accounts will make it possible to make one or more of them private, should I decide to do so. However you use Twitter, make sure that its privacy controls are set in a way that’s appropriate for your needs.

Facebook

I doubt that too many people will be upset by the addition of Twitter messages to Bing and Google, since Twitter’s own search and services such as OneRiot have been around for a while. Facebook searches may prove more controversial.

It’s likely that most people think of Facebook as a much more personal communication outlet than Twitter, since generally, people have Facebook’s privacy controls set to display content only to those they’ve “friended.” And as I wrote about this morning, one can even give different levels of access to certain people — my “personal friends” group can see more of my Facebook activities than my “business contacts” group can.

But I certainly hope that Facebook will give us a way of opting out of having our status messages show up in search engines. At this point, it’s unclear how Bing’s Facebook searches will work (they aren’t live yet). Google will reportedly take a personalized, opt-in approach, only showing status messages of your Facebook friends if both you and your friends tell Google which social networks you use.

It’s also not clear how Facebook Pages and Groups will be searched, although they are generally more public, and mostly used to encourage interaction with fans, or advocate for causes.

So in the coming weeks, web workers will want to evaluate how we balance our privacy against the marketing boost which might come from having our comments appear in Bing and Google searches.

Will you let search engines index your status updates?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• In Q3, NewNet Focus Turns to Business Models and Search
• Report: NoSQL Databases – Providing Extreme Scale and Flexibility

The Spaces function is one of the nicer features that I discovered in OS X when I started using a Mac as my main machine a couple of years ago. Spaces allows me to open programs in multiple virtual desktops, then move between them using mouse movements or hotkeys.

Space 1 (the default workspace) is where I do most of my work. My browsers (Firefox and Safari) live here, along with Dreamweaver, Photoshop, iCal, Address Book, and Mail (which I still use, despite my earlier comments, as it’s the best way to manage multiple email accounts and move messages between them). Adium lives here, too, taking up a few pixels of space on the left of my wide-screen monitor, as my colleagues and I use instant messaging to communicate frequently between our home offices.

Space 2 is dedicated to a Remote Desktop Connection to my Windows XP computer. There is still some software that’s Windows-only, so I keep an old XP machine around. If preferred, you can set up a virtual Windows machine in this space through Parallels or other virtual-machine software.

Space 3 is where I put the communications that I look at when I have some extra time: RSS news feeds, Twitter and Facebook. For RSS feeds, I use Prism, which turns Google Reader into its own desktop application. For Twitter, I’m currently using Nambu, but am testing a bunch of other software, as Twitter apps seem to be progressing very rapidly. I’m not sure why RSS feeds aren’t more widely used. Dawn has written several great posts on how they can help improve efficiency. Updates from Facebook and LinkedIn can be collected via RSS. Even Twitter updates can be turned into RSS feeds with Gtweet.

Space 4 is used for fun stuff, notably Songbird, so that I can control what I’m listening to while working.

You can control the layout, mouse shortcuts and hotkeys for Spaces from “System Preferences > Expose and Spaces”. You can also make certain programs always start in a particular space. Finally, you can move between these spaces using Control+(arrow keys), a combination that I actually had to look up as I was writing this, as my fingers have it so memorized!

By keeping different kinds of programs in different Spaces, I can focus my time more effectively, but easily switch to other tasks on the fly.

There are similar programs for other systems. Windows and Linux users, which do you prefer? How do you organize your desktop(s)?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

Things started off well, since Tweetie offers a full-featured, ad-supported free version in addition to a $19.95 (currently on sale for $14.95) ad-free version. I can live with one ad per hour in my tweet stream in exchange for a great free program. Heck, half of the tweets of those I’m following are probably ads anyway.

Let me just say right away that Tweetie’s interface is gorgeous. It looks and feels like a Mac app, and it has a commitment to minimalist design that I very much appreciate. If you’re looking for desktop eye candy, Tweetie is definitely your client. I especially like the scrollbar and the way it handles multiple accounts in the left-hand sidebar. There are lots of other advantages as well:

Global Shortcut for New Tweet

Another big plus is the ability to set a global shortcut for composing new tweets. My MacBook is now set to open the composer whenever I press Shift+Command+T, which helps me get tweets out much faster than with any other program.

Easy Image/Link Sharing

I also love that you can drag image files to the composer window and Tweetie will automatically generate yFrog, TwitPic, Twitgoo or Posterous links for it. You can also set your URL truncation service, with the ability to choose from five different providers.

Threaded Conversations

Quick and easy access to threaded conversations, both public and DMs, is another nice feature. Clicking on an @reply will show you that public conversation thread, in the same window and without any other tweets. DM conversations look like iChat sessions. I appreciate the visual distinction between the two because it helps me know what kind of conversation I’m viewing at a glance.

Despite these and other things to its credit, Tweetie just doesn’t have what it takes to replace Nambu as my primary Twitter client from a web working perspective. The reasons are many, and though some might seem minor, taken together they draw a clear distinction between the two apps:

No User Groups

Tweetie 1.0 doesn’t support custom user groups, which is a must for a Twitter client if you’re following more than 100 people, especially if a fair number of those people tweet with any kind of frequency. Without dedicated user groups, you’ll miss out on important stories and links, and you’ll have a much harder time compartmentalizing your Twitter usage.

No Copying Text from Tweets

This might only be handy if you’re a blogger or writer looking to collect quotes from Twitter, but I’m sure there are other reasons a professional might want to do this. Having a built-in retweet button is great, but I want to be able to select text from directly within my Twitter-stream and copy that so that I can save it to another source. Ironically, I realized I was missing this feature while preparing to write this article.

No Column View

One thing that I got used to when using TweetDeck, and was pleased to find Nambu also maintained, was a column view option that let me organize different types of filtered tweets next to each other in the same window. Sure, with Tweetie, you can view searches (though not @replies, unless you search for your own @replies) in a new window, but it lacks the clean organization of a multi-column setup.

So what do I really think of Tweetie, in the end? The design snob in me wants to love it, declare my devotion to it, and never look at another Twitter client ever again, but the pragmatic web worker in me can’t justify using it for more than casual purposes. If you’re only following a few people, and you use Twitter for personal rather than professional purposes, then by all means, get Tweetie. But if, like me, you care more about what’s under the hood than the bodywork, stick with Nambu for now.

Have you tried Tweetie? What did you think?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

At the end of last month, fellow WWD writer Imran Ali posted a wish-list for lifestreaming apps, those efficient little consolidation tools that are supposed to help make sense of the social network mess we’ve got ourselves into. There’s no doubt, as Imran suggests, that these apps could be doing a lot more than just putting everything in one place, which is really what most actually do when you get right down to it.

I was optimistic that maybe Nambu would provide something out of the ordinary, but it remains to be seen what kind of cross-service interaction will appear, since the current Nambu beta only supports Twitter accounts. Future versions will implement support for identi.ca, FriendFeed and Ping.fm, but they aren’t accessible in Nambu’s preferences as of yet.

Still, even without support for additional services, Nambu is a very useful little program with a feature-set that’s sure to please Twitter users who dislike TweetDeck’s cluttered interface. It more closely resembles an instant messaging application than most Twitter clients, and it offers IM-like features as well.

Tweets appear in descending order from most to least recent, as you would expect, and appear in a much more OS X-friendly graphical style than TweetDeck’s stream. There’s a filter field at the top of the app window pane, and a collapsible composition field at the bottom, with buttons for quick posting of pictures to pic.im and instant URL shortening. You’ll also find buttons for retweeting, replying and sending a direct message along the top left of the interface.

What’s that? You say you miss your columns from TweetDeck? Have no fear, Nambu supports those as well. You can implement multi-column mode via the “View” menu, which allows you to add columns for things like private messages, replies (or “mentions,” in Nambu, which is actually a more accurate description), sent messages, searches and trends, and more. While checking out this view I also noticed that Nambu supports in-line threaded messaging, which is something I’ve been missing in TweetDeck.

Multi-column view can take up a lot of screen real estate, and might not appeal to everyone because of this. That’s where “Outline” mode comes in handy. Nambu looks more like EventBox in this mode, with a list of links to your sent messages, groups, mentions, search and other areas you might normally use columns for.

It’s a beast of an app, and thanks to easy switching between multiple Twitter accounts, it’s become my weapon of choice for professional tweeting. So if you’re on OS X and TweetDeck isn’t cutting it, or even if TweetDeck is cutting, take Nambu out for a spin. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Have you tried Nambu?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast