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Sometimes less is more.  It's a cliche, but an accurate one.  Such is twirl, an AIR-based twitter client.  Twhirl (a really hard word to type, btw) has lots of features, most of which I don't need.  Its also missing some basic features that I need.

The irony is that, like twitter, a product with few features that still dominates, twitterific is still a better client than twirl.  i.e.

twitter : pownce :: twitterific : twhirl

Twitter, with its small feature set is still better, and more popular, than pownce or jaiku (two technologies that have more features, but are still inferior and much less popular).  Twitterific, with its elegant feel, is still better than feature-packed twhirl.

Twhirl Pros

1. Multiple twitter accounts - I tweet as myself, but also as my daughter.  I put cute things she says in there, mainly just for myself and wife.  It's a bit of a pain to switch back and forth, so it's nice to have multiple twhirl windows open for each account.  I also know a certain someone who occasionally tweets as his wife by mistake.
2. Lots of display options - You can customize the color pallet and font easily.  You can apply filters, and you can select from several different view panels such as timeline, replies, friends, followers, direct messages, and archive.
3. Search - twhirl leverages existing services TweetScan and Terraminds for searches.
4. Retweeting - If you're into forwarding tweets, it's easy with twhirl.  Just one click.

Other than Pro #1, I don't use or need those extra features.  #2 is nice, but I just selected the one that looked like twitterific.    Search would be nice, but those two services don't work that well.  Terraminds was not even up as of this writing.

Twhirl Cons

1. Unread vs read messages not easy to distinguish - A tiny white dot in the corner is the only way to detect an unread tweet in twhirl, while the whole message is bold in twitterific.  It's much easier to visually scan with twitterific.
2. No real keyboard shortcuts - Yes, it has *some* keyboard shortcuts, but for things that don't need shortcuts.  The shortcuts that I miss are "Reply" and "Mark all as read."  If I used retweet, I'd probably want that, too.  Also, while I can scroll up and down using the arrow keys, that action doesn't cause the tweets to be marked as read.  I either have to click on them or click on the mark as read button.  In general, there is just too much clicking required.
   
3. Cluttered display - This might just be personal preference, but twitterific will display either the twitter id or the "real" name of a person in the header.  twhirl's display is more like the web display.  It puts the twitter id in with the tweet and appends the date stamp along with the "real" name.  See the attached image.
4. AIR is clunky - Maybe it's AIR and maybe it's twhirl, but the application has a slow and unsteady feel to it.  It's not horrible, but it's not as crisp as twitterific.
5. Breaks MacOS click behavior - In Mac OS X, if you click on a window that doesn't have focus, that click is not passed to the application.  The idea is that you don't accidentally click on something that you didn't intend to when you switch focus to another window.  This differers from Windows behavior which does pass the click to the application.  I expect that this behavior is a by-product of using AIR, since AIR also runs on Windows.  Still, it's annoying to have an application behave differently that every other Mac app.  Also, this problem is magnified when you consider that your clicks might lead to the next problem...
   
6. Web links open new windows, not tabs - Even though Firefox is set to open new links in a new tab, URLs launched through twhirl open a whole new Firefox window.  Not only is this not what I want, but it's also slower.  Is this another AIR-ism?
   
7. Does not pop down - Twitterific will pop up when there are new tweets but then pop back down if you don't click on the window.  Twhirl just stays up until you manually make it go away.  Anyone who actually gets work done knows that sometimes you just have to ignore twitter.  Not only does the window not go away, but all of the twhirl windows open up for all of the accounts you have open.  So even if my daughter's account doesn't receive a tweet, it still opens up when my account does.
8. Does not pop up - Depending on how you minimize twhirl it may never pop up.  If you close it with Command-H (Hide) then it will pop up with new tweets.  However, if you use Command-M (minimize), or the _ icon on the bar, then it won't pop up.  Twitterific disables minimize, I believe.
   
9. No spellcheck - Twitterific leverages the auto-spellcheck feature that applications using text windows get.  Perhaps it's an AIR limitation, but twhirl doesn't do this.  I need this feature.  I suck at spelling and typing (count the errors in this blog!) so I really need a spell checker.

Speaking of poor writing, read this part of the twhirl documentation.  Scroll down to the "connection settings" section.

So, the verdict is that twhirl is not for me.  Yes, they could fix some of these problems, but the one's linked to AIR might take longer to resolve as Adobe works to get AIR more widely adopted.  For now, it's back to twitterific for me.

Here's the screen shot comparing the two twitter clients.  Note that there are two twhirl windows for my two twitter accounts.  The top window has the message area hidden.

Since a Twitter post is called a tweet, what is a Pownce post called?  I "pownced" that question, but the audience was too small.  I'm hoping to get more answers here.

Possible Pownce "Tweet" Names

• poonce?
• pownce?
• ponch?
• punch?
• paunch?
• pinch?
• poop?
• pop?
• poot?
• puff?
• pump?
• pout?
• peet?
• pee?
  

With Twitter broken (not delivering all tweets), a few of us have been trying Pownce.  We tried Pownce once during its beta, but it didn't catch on.  Our return trip hasn't been much better, but perhaps I'll write about that later.

tinyurl.com is down today and it's wreaking havoc on services like Twitter and other's who leverage it.

Here's good article from Steve Rubel that I found while searching for the cause the outage.  Not surprisingly, he also used the term "single point of failure" to describe the situation.
 

A hot topic of the day (and yesterday) was this article entitled The Death of Email.  Likewise, this follow-up story.

Summary: Teens and tweens don't use email, so it will die.

I think they said the same thing about regular snail mail when email became popular.  It's still here, and so will email be.

That's not to say email's usage won't decline.  It will.  Just like postage mail usage has declined.  But there is a still a need for postage mail and there will always be a need for email.

The reason kids don't use email is because they don't need it.  They also don't need a filing cabinet to hold their tax returns, house deeds and insurance policies.  But they will.

Kids also don't need (although they do want) a drivers license.  What do filing cabinets and drivers licenses have to do with email?  They provide what email does online:

• Identity
• Archiving

These two features are what email provides and what kids don't need, yet.  What the kids don't need from email is communication.  They've got that covered.  But when they start to need a confirmed identity and safe storage of important information they are going to find that SMS and IM don't cut it.

Now, it's just as likely that something new will come along to replace email in terms of identity and storage.  There are already things like openID and numerous online file storage systems, but none yet that combine them like email does.  Something like Facebook, or one of the coming Open Social sites, could probably write something like this.  But Facebook still requires an email address to sign up! 

I looked into replacing email as the primary means of communicating with my hockey team, but we're either all too old, or it's just too soon.  Probably both.

So, email won't die.  It will just become the "right tool for the right job" as other communication tools become more mainstream.  If humans ever colonize space (hey, we're talking about the future!) then "what's old is new again" will occur and email (space email!) will likely be used to send messages across the long distances where instant communication isn't possible.  And future historians will look back at this blog and recognize me as the genius that I am.

I haven't traveled for business in a while.  I made the following mental notes:

• Cat on a leash - always an omen of a good flight.
• Excuse me, can you not hold your coffee over my computer?  kthxbai.
• You don't need to pre-board, punk.
• Noticed computer-to-computer WiFi network called "Free Public WiFi".  Riiight.
  

On the plus side, my room is sweet, or should I say "suite."  Score one for the Bradford Homesuites in Colorado Springs.

Today's Scoble lament really hit home with me.  Riding the web 2.0 social networking wave is harder for a 40+ year old than a 20-something college student.

When I went to college in the 80s I could email my dad.  That was pretty much it besides other students.  Today, I've got the whole extended family using email (even grandma).  They also read my blog about my daughter, but they don't use RSS feeds.  I use the blogdrive.com service because it can be configured to send email to people when I post.  Otherwise, they'd never know to check.  Web 2.0 is about interaction but the family doesn't get that part.  They don't leave comments on the blog.  I might get an email from my mom that she liked the latest blog and pictures, but that's about it.  Twitter, Facebook, etc., are all foreign words to them.

Last night I spent part of the night explaining what Twitter was to my wife, and that I'm not having an affair with Veronica Belmont because I subscribe to her twitter feed.  She's a work in progress, my wife.  I finally got her to enable her IM client more regularly so that's helped to cut down on the one-sentence emails

I also captain a hockey team and our roster averages about 39 years old.  I use email and evite to coordinate the team.  I was looking to use some other Web 2.0 tools but after an impromptu survey I found that my team was as ignorant as my family when it came to new technology.  Besides email, the next "best" tool people used was IM, but only about 25% of the team.  Again, no one used Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku and the like.  Many of these guys work in high tech, too.

The same can be said for my college friends.  I still see many of them when I play in my band.  Email and Yahoo Groups are enough for them.  Most of my social networking friends are from Sun and the blogger community.  That's not a bad thing, but it would be nice to be able to tell an inside joke every once in a while.

So, am I just ahead of my time?  Will my family and friends catch up like they did with email?  Or am I just an old man playing with kids' toys?

Expect to see this headline within a year:

My daughter learned to play duck-duck-gooseat school and then wanted to play at home with just her and me.  It's really not the same game with just two people.  Such is Twitter.

Twitter has its uses but it only works when everyone plays. A lot of Sun bloggers twitter, but (and no offense) none that I really want to follow.  I like to read John Clingan's blog, but I don't need to know that he's stuck in traffic.

The truth for me is that almost none of the people that I would twitter with use twitter.   Like everyone, I have family and friends I stay in contact with, along with my coworkers, ex-coworkers, my band, and my hockey teams.  Each group has a different method of communicating and staying in touch.  Some could use twitter, but not all can or will.  With so many methods out there today for communicating (phone, email, IM, and just plain old conversation), it's hard to add another one.

So far, the best use of Twitter has been to follow some blog sites that also have Twitter feeds.  However, I can already see the amount if noise rising to the point of uselessness.  Twitter also goes down often.  And my often I mean every day.  You will tired of their LOLCATs error pages quickly.

I also tried Jaikuat the recommendation of some bloggers.  While it does have a lot of nice features it also has some drawbacks. The best feature it has is called channels.  Like and IRC channel, you can broadcast your message to just the channel and only people who subscribe to that channel get the message.  This is perfect for sending a message to one circle of friends that another circle wouldn't care about.  I could send a message to my hockey team without bothering my family, who doesn't care that the game time moved.  Unfortunately, Jaiku doesn't allow people to create their own channels yet, and the few channels they created have a VERY high noise to signal ratio.  In the end, it wasn't worth subscribing to any Jaiku-created channels.

Another good Jaiku feature was the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds, so you can pretty much follow any feed out there, including twitter.  This is a double edged sword in that you can quickly overload yourself with too many feeds.  Also, the feed reader is slow and can delay the receipt of messages.  So, you really have to balance out what's important to receive using Jaiku and what you just want to load into a regular feed reader.

The last Jaiku feature that I liked was a simple one.  On Twitter you are http://twitter.com/user but on Jaiku you are http://user.jaiku.com.  The difference is that I can search for old Jaiku posts easily using Google's "site" parameter.  e.g., I can search for "foobar site:user.jaiku.com" and find any post with "foobar" in it from that user.  I don't think I can do with with Twitter.  If there's an easy way to search Twitter, let me know!

And, of course, no one I know well uses Jaiku so I was in the same duck-duck-goose boat as Twitter.

Here is my comparison between Twitter and Jaiku.

In the end, I'll stick with twitter.  I may even write some tweets, but I don't know who I'm even writing to.  I'm http://twitter.com/kevinchu.

Tags: twitter | jaiku