GigaOM » Echofon

Why Twitter users on Android should check out Echofon

Kevin C. Tofel — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:59:28 +0000

There’s no lack of mobile Twitter clients, and just as we choose our smartphones, picking a Twitter app is very personal decision. Having said that, I keep coming back to Echofon. I originally chose it because of one key aspect: It syncs Twitter activity across iOS and the Mac OS X desktop client. The OS X client is now at the end of its life as the developer is focused solely on mobile apps now. And now there’s an Echofon client for Android that offers the same great sync feature: With Echofon, you’ll never re-read tweets if you have both iOS and Android devices.

Echofon for Android has been in public beta since the beginning of November and that app is still available in a free, ad-supported version. If you like the beta, you can opt to pay $4.99 for the Pro version which is now available in Google Play. Here’s a look at the client on an Android device:

Support for all the Twitter basics are in there: in-app image view, a Jump to Top option, the sync feature and Jelly Bean notifications; helpful if your Android device is running Android 4.1 or better. You can reply or retweet, for example, directly from the Android notifications pane. That’s a nice time-saver. Even better is a full-featured widget that puts Echofon on an Android home screen: It shows the number of unread tweets, mentions, DMs and lets you compose new tweets with a button tap. And a quick left or right swipe moves you between different views.

I keep coming back to the sync function as a key advantage, however. It gets old when you switch to a different mobile device and have to reread various mentions, interactions or direct messages. With Echofon, I don’t have to worry about that as I hate reading the same content over and over.

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Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 06:55:54 +0000

Social media technologies continue to permeate marketing and enterprise collaboration, even if investors felt let down in the third quarter by their consumer-facing businesses like Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga. So B2B technology offerings in support of marketing and collaboration will soon steal all the social tech attention. This quarterly wrap-up analyzes these events, and provides a near-term outlook for trends, technologies and companies to watch in the next 18 to 24 months.

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3 Alternatives to Twitter for Mac

Alex Layne — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 19:30:08 +0000

Reactions to the design of Twitter for Mac have been mixed; some love it, and some hate it. Luckily, the official client isn’t the only game in town, even if you’re just limiting yourself to what’s available in the Mac App Store. Here are two other options available from the store, and one hidden gem you’ll have to grab from the web.

Twitteriffic

Twitteriffic for Mac was recently updated to 4.0, and it features a new interface inspired by the iPad version of Twitteriffic. When you click on someone’s picture, you get an iPad-style pop-up that shows that person’s profile. Twitteriffic is full of neat flourishes like that. When you compose a new tweet, a text field slides down from the top. When you get new tweets, a small purple notification bar appears at the bottom. It’s a great-looking client.

Unlike Twitter for Mac, you can hide the sidebar and the toolbar so that all you see is the tweet stream, providing an uncluttered view. Strangely, the controls to hide those elements are under the Window menu, and not in a separate View menu where I’d expect them to be. Also strange is that there’s a keyboard shortcut to hide the sidebar (Cmd-L), but not one to hide the toolbar.

Twitteriffic is available in the Mac App Store for $10, but you can download a free, ad-supported version from their website.

Echofon

Echofon has been around for a long time on the iPhone, and its user base is loyal. The Mac client offers a simpler alternative. It’s not as flashy as Twitteriffic, but it has more features, such as Highlights, which notifies you whenever a specified word appears in your stream. If, for example, you want to track what’s going on in Egypt; you could add the word “Egypt” to the Highlights pane in Echofon’s preferences, and a Growl notification would pop up every time Egypt is mentioned.

Echofon is available on the Mac App Store for $10, but there’s also a “Lite” (ad-supported) version for free.

YoruFukurou

YoruFukurou (“Night Owl”) can best be described as the power-user’s Twitter client. It has a tabbed interface, and you can add your own tabs, which can either be filters, searches or lists. It’s also very customizable. You can change the colors of every type of tweet, say if you wanted to change the color of selected tweets, you could do that, to any color you wanted. One of the neater features of YoruFukurou is the ability to easily paste the currently playing song from iTunes or the current page from Safari into the compose field.

It’s not as simple as Echofon, and not as good-looking as Twitteriffic, but it has the most features out of the clients mentioned here. YuroFukurou also has the most native look to it, so if you’re a HIG kind of guy, you should give this one a go.

YuroFukurou is available as a free download from its website.

What’s your favorite alternative to Twitter for Mac? Or do you think Twitter for Mac the best Twitter client out there?

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Echofon 3 for iPhone Supports New Twitter Features

Simon Mackie — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:00:32 +0000

Echofon, naan studio’s Twitter client, is available as native Mac and iPhone applications, and as a Firefox extension. The latest version, Echofon 3 for iPhone, has just hit the App Store, and looks to be a nice mobile client that supports all the latest Twitter features including lists, retweets and geotagging, so I thought I’d take it for a spin.

Out of the box, Echofon has a well-designed, simple UI that makes it easy to use. Once you’ve set up your accounts (just a matter of supplying your credentials), you’re presented with a well laid-out home screen that has your Twitter stream, navigation buttons along the bottom of the screen (for home; @ mentions; direct messages; lists; and search), while you can compose new tweets by tapping the button top right. The “Menu” button (top left) lets you switch between accounts and set up account options.

Tapping a tweet gives you options to reply or retweet. Tapping “retweet” gives you two options: “Retweet” or “Retweet with Comment.” The former uses Twitter’s new built-in retweet functionality, while the latter provides for an “old style” retweet that enables you to add your own commentary. It’s good to see both styles being accommodated, but it’s a little annoying that you have to select which one to use each time, if you have a definite preference.

The composition screen is equally well-designed, and handily allows you to rotate the screen for a landscape keyboard (formerly a Pro-only feature, now available to all users). This screen includes a useful display of the number of characters left available and buttons for searching for usernames of the people you follow, adding a photo, discarding the tweet, and geolocation tagging (if geolocation is enabled on your account).

List support also works well. Tap the ”Lists” button to get a view of your lists (both those that you’ve created and those you follow). You can also create and edit lists on the go.

Echofon has other nice touches, too, including desktop sync — if you’re using a desktop version of Echofon, you can sync unread tweets between the clients.

Echofon is available in two flavors: Free (ad supported, iTunes link) and Pro ($4.99, iTunes link). Pro users don’t get the inline ads, and also get push notifications from non-Echofon users.

I’ve been using TweetDeck on my iPhone because I need to keep an eye on several Twitter accounts, but although it’s improved over time it still has a tendency to crash and suffer from inexplicable annoying slowdowns occasionally. Echofon seems much more stable and snappier in use, but I’m not sure I like the way that it mixes tweets for multiple accounts as much as TweetDeck’s clean, separate columns that you can quickly switch between, so I’m not ready to move over just yet. If you’re only managing one Twitter account, though, I’d definitely recommend checking out Echofon — it’s a nicely designed, easy-to-use client that works well.

Are you an Echofon user? Let us know what you think of it below.

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Jajah Lets You Make Calls via Twitter

Jennifer Martinez — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:16:38 +0000

Jajah is privately launching in beta today a voice-over-IP solution that lets people make calls for free via micromessaging site Twitter and other Twitter-related desktop and mobile applications. This is another effort by Jajah to get its VoIP service onto a popular application; last year, the company forged a partnership with Yahoo to offer its voice services to Yahoo IM users.

When 140 characters isn’t cutting it, simply send a tweet to the person you want to talk to using the format “@call @username.” Jajah will then call your phone and once you pick up, will connect you to your friend. To use Jajah’s @Call service, however, both you and your friend must be registered in the company’s beta group and the person you’re calling must follow you on Twitter. For now, calls can only be two minutes long and only U.S. numbers are supported. Jajah keeps users’ phone numbers private, so you don’t have to worry about anyone getting their hands on personal contact information. The @Call service is compatible with a host of Twitter applications, including Seesmic, Echofon (formerly Twitterfon) and Twitroid.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Jajah isn’t the only company to bring VoIP to a social site. Earlier this week, Vivox privately launched in beta a web voice service for Facebook that lets people have a voice chat with any of their friends on the social network. Users have to download a plug-in to use the service.

The launch of these voice services for social networks have generated a healthy amount of buzz on the web, and only time will tell whether Twitter and Facebook will embed them into their platforms. While these click-to-call services aren’t the sexiest of applications, they’re useful and continue to encourage us to live our social lives on the web.

Image courtesy of Jajah

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