Twitter Clients

I use a netbook 95% of the time, so screen realestate is in short supply. I have been looking for a twitter client that meets my needs, and so far, these are my experiences.

Twhirl - liked it, until it stopped working. Like the read/unread status. Like that it doesnt push tweets off the end of the screen. Dislike: lack of being able to follow a conversation back, to see what people were replying to. Dislike: Lack of groups
status: still installed, in case.

Twitterfox - liked it, but after starting to follow more people and following more people, became harder to use.
status: still installed for busy days

DestroyTwitter - loved it, until it started dropping tweets. LOVE being able to see what people are replying to. LOVE exclusion of terms. LOVE groups.
status: still installed, pending uninstallation

TweetDeck - too big for lappy. cant change font size, cant change size of tweet boxes.
status: immediately uninstalled

Seismic Desktop - too big. No need for the side panels that take up SO much room, no need for the boarders either, that do NOTHING.
status: immediately uninstalled with cry of triumph when it was gone.

Trillian Astra - good LORD no. hard to manage, hard to read, hard to configure.
status: immediately disabled


Gonna try twhirl again - hoping it doesnt stop working <3

Twitter (yeah yeah, you knew it was coming)

Alright, so twitter has taken away the option to see replies to people that you don't follow.

This means that if i say:

@someoneyoudontfollow you don't see this in your twitter feed.

This is how i have had my settings since the beginning, there are people that i don't care to see replies to, and it would make my feed enormous -- and whenever i want a tweet to be for everyone to see, i structure it in such a way that their twitter name is not the first part of the tweet, ie:

You would see this tweet, @someoneyoudontfollow

So i am not super upset about the whole situation -- HOWEVER, i don't think that choice should be taken away. If you want to see EVERYTHING that someone says (which is available by going to the twitter website and looking at their feed) you should be able to do that. You shouldn't have to access twitter.com for functionality that is already there.

The other problem that this raises is, when people try and get around the filtering of replies, i now HAVE to see tweets that i have chosen not to see.

I stopped following JoeQ because i like following Bendis, for the most part, but their back and forth was just intolerable, so i dump the Q, and now i don't see Bendis' tweets at him. However, if he started doing the:

.@JoeQ hey, here is an inside joke, we are so great and funny, want to go for beers and talk about how we are great??

then i would see it, and be sad. So this whole situation pretty much screws over the people that DO want to see the tweets, and then they try and get around that (which i can totally understand) which screws over those that DON'T want to see the tweets.

Come on twitter, remove your head from your sphincter and restore choice.

[little update] it was suggested that "head up their ass" was a little extreme, and really, i was just being silly. I dont think that taking away choice is a good idea, even if they made the option default ON for new users to keep them from being confused and overwhelmed. My concern is a selfish one, that if people start trying to get around the filtering, my feed is going to grow exponentially and become unwieldy.

#whycapes

I have often thought about why i like superhero comics almost exclusively.

I recently asked for some recommendations for other books from the kickass @madmarvelgirl from fantastic fangirls (Caroline).

She asked me some interesting questions that i actually had to think a lot more about than i thought. Why do i like the books i do, what do i like about them, average questions to get a feel for what to recommend.

I think that i like comic books because while bad stuff happens to the comic heroines *usually* nothing TOO bad happens, and they always kick everyone's butts. Good triumphs in the end, wrongs are made right, all that good stuff.

I think it became apparent to me why i like the books that i do, when i read the Spider-Man / Black Cat story by Kevin Smith. In it, there is a terrible scene where you assume that Black Cat has been raped. I had an immediate reaction to this, and it wasn't good.
I tried to figure out why i was so mad, or what the feelings were that i felt when i read it - it was betrayal. In the books that i tend to read things like this - real life terribly bad things - don't happen. I don't have to worry about having my guard up against them, I can just sit back and enjoy, secure in the idea that everyone gets what is coming to them.
I felt angry and betrayed on many levels. I felt like this was a stunt (it was, even within the book itself), i felt like it didn't need to happen -- it was just Smith saying "that's right, i am so edgy!" and it was cheap. The situation is handled poorly on so many levels, from people telling Black Cat what she HAS to do, assuming she is fragile and crazy, they are dismissive of her, I found it very hard to read. For someone who talks about his wife being a feminist, i dont know how he wrote that crap.

But anyway. In comic books the women are strong and beat up the bad guys, they can fly and are not pinned down by ordinary drudgery (cept for Spider-Man, but then, i dont read his book ;)). They can take matters into their own hands, heal wounds if any are inflicted, and are generally fabulous. That's why i read superhero comics.