Tweetie was King of the iPhone Twitter World

Early this year I have been researching on numerous Twitter Apps for my personal blog and for my consulting work. This includes having a keyword search column of all sorts of variations of “Twitter App” and listening to what the Twittersphere has to say about all the apps.

After listening to the Twitter community for 2 weeks, it was very clear that the best unpaid iPhone Twitter App was Twitterfon, and the best paid iPhone Twitter App was Tweetie. During the time I happily used Twitterfon because I had not yet spent a single dollar on iTunes, and I was proud of it. I guess there was just nothing appealing enough for me to go through the hassle of taking out my credit card.

However, after a few more weeks of people CONSISTENTLY praising Tweetie, I finally broke, and I spent my first $3 on iTunes for Tweetie.

It was great. Tweetie had an incredible user-interface and design. It supported multiple accounts which was becoming necessary for me (most alternatives didn’t), and it has a lot of nifty features that I enjoyed such as geo-searching. Tweetie was worth the $3.

The Twitter Desktop King Challenges Tweetie’s Home Court Advantage

Then six months passed by (whew…WAY too fast), and a lot of things changed in the online world. Amazingly, one thing that didn’t change was the constant flow of people who kept on tweeting about how much they loved Tweetie.

On the other hand, another app that was praised often during this entire time was TweetDeck, a Desktop Twitter Client. TweetDeck dominated the Desktop Client market with it’s multi-column views, group functions, and other powerful functions.

Tweetie has already tried to expand its battlefield to the Desktop Client space by introducing it’s own version and has been doing quite well. TweetDeck’s constant weakness was the inability to support multiple accounts on Twitter. However, with the last release TweetDeck is trying to take home the crown with two very important items: supporting multiple accounts, and the TweetDeck iPhone App.

Can the iPhone TweetDeck destroy Tweetie in its own base? Or would home court advantage keep Tweetie at the top? Here’s an analysis of how these apps compare with each other.

(Note: even though TweetDeck keeps crashing on me, these are problems that will eventually be solved, so we are only going to factor in feature differences between the two iPhone Clients.)

Tweetdeck vs Tweetie Setting up: Time & Money

If you just got your iPhone and wanted to try out Tweetie and TweetDeck on it, you will notice one of the biggest differences between them: Tweetie costs money, and TweetDeck is free. For some people, that’s game over there. TweetDeck is the winner.

However, if you do happen to go through all the purchasing part of the Tweetie, the setup is extremely easy. You simply add your Twitter Accounts into the phone and it all works.

TweetDeck, on the other hand, requires a more labor intensive setup before you can use it. First you should register for an account, because it is important that you sync with your Desktop TweetDeck to take advantage of all the groups and such. Then you start adding accounts and syncing columns.

Overall, the entire setup process is a bit more complicated than Tweetie.

Even though TweetDeck has a NICELY designed setup interface that helps you go through the entire setup process with relative ease, Tweetie is still the winner in terms of Setup if you can give up the cost of a boba drink for it.

Tweetdeck vs Tweetie Design: Function & Form

In terms of design, Tweetie and TweetDeck takes entirely different approaches. Tweetie has always been known for it’s elegant, clean, and slick design. It strives to get a balanced feel of having just enough features to maximize on the user experience. Using Tweetie just makes you feel good, while getting everything you need done easily.

TweetDeck’s design philosophy is entirely different. Starting from the Desktop App, TweetDeck believes in integrating very full and rich features sets into an interface. It adapts to its usual dark interface, with innovation again coming in with the multiple columns that the user can switch back and forth with usual iPhone keystrokes.

TweetDeck is obviously a lot more cluttered than Tweetie, especially with pop-ups showing up at the top and the left bottom whenever there is an update. With all that clutter, TweetDeck definitely gives you a “function over form” feel.

One thing TweetDeck deserves credit for is the way you can move around your columns. Once you are in “column selection mode,” if you press and hold a column for a couple seconds, it will zoom out into a space where you can freely move the columns around. This is a huge improvement to the slow and tedious process of moving the columns around for its Desktop counterpart and it looks pretty slick.

Overall, design is Tweetie’s forte, and even though TweetDeck does an incredibly good job managing all the features, Tweetie is still the winner in this space.

Tweetdeck vs Tweetie Viewing Tweets: Tank & Skateboard

When it comes to Viewing Tweets, I believe the most important feature is Grouping, especially when you follow over 200 people.

This is where the power of the column system of TweetDeck comes in. On the iPhone, you can easily stroke left and right to see all your groups and what they have to say. They also made a huge improvement in how you can add group members.

Unfortunately, Tweetie does not support the Grouping function at all, making it only useful for checking mentions of you or tweets that happened in the last five minutes.

Another very useful feature in reading tweets is with the Search function. Both Tweetie and TweetDeck has this function. However, TweetDeck has an unique advantage in that it actually saves your search results. This means that you can search for the brands or topics that you care about and access it whenever you want.

On the other hand, Tweetie only allows you to make a search at that very moment. If you are at an event and want to search for the hashtag #event, once you search for something else that is interesting, you have to do it all over again.

One feature that Tweetie has that TweetDeck does not is trending topics viewing. Tweetie can automatically find the hottest topics on Twitter and display them to you. This is very useful if you want to see what are noteworthy news on Twitter at any given moment.

Overall, with it’s multiple column innovation, TweetDeck wins the tweeting viewing battle by offering many features and the ease to switch back and forth between different timelines. Here’s a video of how it works:

Tweetdeck vs Tweetie - Tweeting

In terms of creating tweets, both apps have the basic feature set there in terms of replies, retweets, DMs and all that good stuff. Since you can find more relevant tweets to view easier with TweetDeck, it naturally flows that there would be more opportunities for you to tweet in response to tohers, given TweetDeck a small edge here.

However, Tweetie still has a very power feature that TweetDeck does not have: posting links from Safari On Tweetie, you could actually grab links from Safari and send them out to others. Here’s a video of how it works:

Having the awesome link feature, Tweetie is still one step ahead of TweetDeck, hence being the winner on this section.

Tweetdeck vs Tweetie Best Combo: Microphone in one hand, Megaphone in another

So based on the analysis above, it seems like Tweetie has moderate advantages over TweetDeck over most sections, while TweetDeck has a major win on the Viewing Tweets part. Which one should you use then?

I cheat a little bit. What I do is I use TweetDeck as a Microphone, and Tweetie as a Microphone. This means that when I want to tweet to people or do a quick check up on something, I use Tweetie since it is clean and fast. But when I want to absorb everything in the Twitter world about the people and topics I care about, I use Tweetdeck as a power radar. Then I can easily find the relevant tweets that I want to reply to. Besides TweetDeck crashing on me every once in a while, this method is working out great and is recommended.

Tweetdeck vs Tweetie - Which one do you like better?

Is it TweetDeck or Tweetie? Or something else? I look forward to you sharing your thoughts and ideas.