Today in TechAlternate Apps: Echofon vs. TweetDeck
Twitter is a mainstay of online social life. The streamlined service makes conversations fast and easy in 140-character sound bites, complemented with the occasional picture, YouTube link, and even the court-induced apology. Twitter's ongoing domination of the internet continues with its recent deep integration with iOS 5, announced at the recent WWDC keynote.
Using Twitter on a personal computer is still a little rough. You need a web browser open and must return to that browser to check your Twitter account occasionally. Desktop Twitter clients alleviate that need by keeping an eye on your Twitter account, updating itself with new posts and even popping up new message notifications on your screen. Twitter clients offer options that aren't native to Twitter's website, like allowing you to "mute" specific followers.
Echofon and TweetDeck are both enormously popular Twitter clients for Macs. (TweetDeck has a Windows version, but Echofon does not.) Echofon's service is free, although you can also buy the client for $20 to do away with ads. TweetDeck is a free service that was recently purchased by Twitter.
Echofon and TweetDeck both allow you to run a desktop client to monitor your Twitter activity, but the two clients approach that task in different ways. Let's see how the Mac desktop versions of both apps stack up.
Muting a friend
As your Twitter social circle grows (especially into the thousands), it can be difficult to keep up with everyone. The signal-to-noise ratio starts favoring the noise, and it's incredibly likely an annoying spammer or two has crept into your Twitter feed. You will quickly wish you had a way to mute someone; you don't necessarily want to stop following them, but you do wish you could strip them from your feed.
Echofon's solution to this problem is fast and elegant. Simply click the person's name and choose Mute. That person is now stripped out of your feed, without the socially awkward need to stop following them. You can do the same with hashtags, so if an annoying hashtag game has popped up in your social stream, you can cut it out entirely.
TweetDeck filters out users and phrases using Filters, which you can find under Settings. You can filter out individual users or any mentions of specific words. For example, if you're burned out hearing about the latest Friday video, you can filter out the words "Rebecca Black."
Echofon's interface for muting is faster and simpler than TweetDeck's. However, TweetDeck has more power behind Filtering, since you can exclude search terms instead of just users and hashtags.
Mentions, searches, and columns
Echofon's interface is clean and simple. You view a single column's worth of Tweets at a time; this could be your basic Twitter feed, tweets that Mention you, your List view, or a keyword search. This layout keeps things fairly simple and makes it easy to tab to Echofon to check in without suffering data overload. Since the tab header for each possible column counts up the number of unread messages, you shouldn't miss any content.
TweetDeck lays out each of these columns side by side, so that you're viewing a huge page of Tweets. You can design new custom columns based on search terms, users, and hashtags. These columns get organized however you'd like, and it's easy to delete columns that you don't want.
The difference between Echofon and TweetDeck's approach to handling columns is mostly a matter of aesthetics. Echofon's is cleaner, simpler, and more elegant. By comparison, TweetDeck's display gives you all of the information up front in a powerful display that's completely under your control.
Picture and video handling
Echofon handles images with the same grace it does everything else. It displays a thumbnail on the right side of the Tweet, so that you have some idea of what you're about to see. If you click an image link, Echofon will open the image in an extra window. If the link's a YouTube video, however, the client opens a web browser for you to view the video.
TweetDeck has no in-client preview for any media, which means you're clicking blind and trusting the people you follow not to prank you with horrible links or videos. Both images and videos get an in-client window to view inside TweetDeck, though.
Echofon's media handling is simply better than TweetDeck's. It's a small difference, but having an in-client preview before you click any link makes Echofon much more convenient. Of course, if a truly offensive image shows up in your Twitter feed, you'll see the preview without any chance to avoid it; then again, in TweetDeck, you'd be clicking on the full-size version without any warning.
Which to choose?
The choice between Echofon and TweetDeck comes down to whether you want a simple, streamlined client or a powerful, robust client. Echofon feels much faster and easier than TweetDeck, but it doesn't offer the same control over views, filters, and search terms. The only place where Echofon has a leg up on TweetDeck is image previews.
It's worth noting that TweetDeck offers integration with other social networks, like Facebook. Echofon just doesn't have any such service.
If you're a light Twitter user, we'd suggest Echofon. If you want all of your Twitter information as soon as you pull up the client in multiple columns at once, TweetDeck remains king.
Post by Michael Gray
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