Journotwit - a new Twitter client

I'm slightly surprised that I've not seen much (read any) mention of Journotwit, since it's rather a nice client. It's browser based, like Brizzly, but it does have a desktop and mobile app attached as well. It's quite a complex interface, in comparision with the native Twitter client, but if you're familiar with Tweetdeck and variants it won't be hard to work out. It looks like this - or at least my version does, since I've tweaked it a bit.

(I've blurred most of the tweets, since some are protected).

As you can see, there are a number of columns - your entire feed, mentions (of you), feed cloud (of the people you follow), direct messages, your tweets, and then four other pre-populated columns with contents defined by the application - news, audiovisual, statuses and chatter. I'm not entirely sure how they sift those, and I haven't found them particularly useful.

Each column can be moved, resized, marked as read or deleted. Columns can easily be created - just click on a hashtag and a column is created for example. This is really useful if you just want to follow a particular conference or event quickly, then delete it when you've finished - a couple of clicks and you're done. Other functionality that I really liked was the ability to follow conversations more easily, as you can see tweets that are in response to others:

Running a search creates a new column that you can quickly scroll through. This searches the entire timeline but you can add in local: to perform a search within your own feed - perfect for a half remembered tweet! Clicking on a specific account also creates a column, bringing all their recent tweets together. When you're done looking through, just delete the column or minimise it so you can come back to it later to catch the recent tweets. Contacting someone is easy - just click on the green + sign and it expands thus:

When you've read a column, you can just click the tick box to mark all as read, or leave it as is. If you click as read this then minimises the column to the top of the screen:

This is very useful if you run a lot of searches - the search column will minimise until there's new data and then you'll see how many new tweets there are in brackets and you can then take a peek and see what you've got. If you're using Twitter as a news resource (and clearly from the name of this app it's aimed at people who do) this is going to be extremely helpful.

You can take this much further though. A new column can be created to follow anything in particular - say a breaking story, and you can limit the content you retrieve to your local stream if you wish, you can exclude specific words or indeed individuals, and very importantly you can decide the type of tweets you want. Options here include ReTweets, visuals, audios, links, or chatter for example. 

Journotwit supports multiple accounts, though unlike Brizzly it doesn't do Facebook. However, it doesn't support lists, which is a real nuisance as far as I'm concerned, since most everything I do on Twitter is linked to lists, and it doesn't bring across any stored searches from your Twitter account. Until they sort that out, I shan't be leaving Brizzly, but once that's sorted it's going to be very tempting indeed.

Comments

[Mickey]

It looks quite slick, and I hadn't heard about it either -- thanks for sharing.

However, it doesn't seem to support Twitter Lists, which I live on. Am I missing them somewhere in there?

[Phil Bradley]

Hi Mickey,

No, you haven't missed them - as I mentioned in my last paragraph, that's what's stopping me moving across to it wholesale. Fingers crossed that they include them shortly, eh?