Twitter by its very nature is not data intensive; 140 characters is not very demanding of whatever device you’re using. Even repeated over and over it isn’t an issue. What I did (and continue to) find to be a huge issue is the fact that most tweets are link driven which is clearly not a problem when on a broadband connection, but definitely an issue for me when on my mobile device.
Even on an iPhone 3GS running full 3G the problems are plentiful: overall speed is an issue (not just the download but the consumpton), the lack of flash is a pain, and many of the things I do with content – like adding to Evernote, Delicious, printing to pdf, grabbing images/screenshots and so on – is near if not totally impossible. Ultimately, mobility has shifted my paradigm for consumption of content.
Then there was my 2 week trip to Provence in the South of France and the egregious data-roaming charges. I didn’t want to be disconnected but also didn’t want to come home to a >$1000 phone bill nor completely sacrifice my significantly better iPhone user experience. For the most part, I did my mobile browsing on a Blackberry Bold (which was a horrendous experience) and used Twitterberry which was fine but paled in comparison to Tweetie on the iPhone. As for the iPhone, I turned off all auto downloading like syncs and push notifications, set email to manually sync so I could do it over wi-fi, and chose to not use the browser. When I wanted to have a better experience reading my Twitterstream I launched Tweetie on the iPhone.
What I found with both the Blackberry and my data-limited iPhone in France, then here in NYC, was that I continually wanted to flag a tweet so that I could then go back and read it later from my laptop with broadband.
Lacking real options, I first started copying tweets to an Evernote note but found that frustrating as I had to keep switching between apps, ultimately losing my reading place in my twitterstream (annoying). Then I took to using Twitter’s favorites as my “solution”. While that works somewhat, it’s less than ideal to say the least: they’re almost always not my favorites, it’s a public stream which for something like a “stuff I want to read more about” list isn’t optimal, and the workflow for going back and reading them isn’t efficient ( I’d periodically load up my twitter favorites page and go through and knock them out then de-fave them). Ultimately, it was just frustrating.
I finally realized that Tweetie had integrated Instapaper. I had used Instapaper a long time ago and just didn’t see a need for flagging pages to be read from my laptop’s browser when I could just as easily just read them and be done – What was that about David Allen’s “if it takes 2 minutes or less just do it” rule? That said, the mobile paradigm shifted my thinking about Instapaper, why do something in an inferior way when you can quickly flag it and do it better later? Why spend 1+ minutes loading a page on your iPhone only to discover that it has a flash piece or there’s no mobile version and you’ve just downloaded a 500KB page, and end up SOL? That same page could load in 5-10 seconds on your laptop and work as expected, and probably read it in half the time due to the form factor.
Instapaper pro (paid iphone app) also has a download for offline reading option which is total bonus because if something is mostly text based, I just sync Instapaper when on wi-fi and I’m good to go for my next subway/plane ride or data-roaming shit-show.
So, Tweetie’s iPhone app with built-in webkit – if I choose to actually browse – so I don’t have to leave the app and lose my place in my stream, and don’t run out of windows since mobile safari allows for 8 windows, and single click Instapaper support, combined with Instapaper’s app iPhone app with offline reading, and Instapaper’s super-easy to use Web site which automatically archives links as I click on them to read them is my killer workflow.
(iPhone + Tweetie + Instapaper) * (laptop + Firefox + plugins) = Huge time saver and better UX. Rock.
Why Twitter needs a read later option or How I stopped using favorites & learned to love @tweetie + @instapaper
August 18, 2009 By Leave a Comment
