Here’s what I want: A program which will keep track of both my twitter feed and my facebook feed, with pop-up notifications to let me know when one of my friends posts something new. And that pop-up should have useful information, along the lines of “Kip just tweeted: Blah blah blah blabbity blah blah…”
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be such a program out there. At least, not one I’ve found.
Twhirl: Perfect, except it doesn’t cover Feedbook. But since my sister, aunt, brother-in-law, high school buddy, and several others I know use Feedbook and not Twitter, I really want Feedbook included.
bDule: The pop-ups notifications are worthless. It says “1 New Message For Barry Deutsch,” but doesn’t tell me who the message is from, let alone what the message contains. I don’t want to have to stop drawing in Photoshop and open up a different program to see what the message is. If I was willing to do that, I could just use my browser and visit twitter and facebook directly. The whole point, for me, is to keep track of what my friends are up to without interrupting my work.
Tweetdeck has the same problem as bDule. Which is a shame, because if they only had good pop-up info, they’d be the best two programs I’ve tried.
Add Seesmic to the list of good programs with useless notifications. (Apparently having a notification that says something useful is more difficult to do than I’d imagined.)
AlertThingy has the best name, and comes the closest to being what I want. But it’s programming feels a bit clunkly compared to others; for example, there’s no obvious way to get it to show me tweets directed to me from people I’m not watching. The biggest problem is the flickering. AlertThingy’s pop-ups flicker, and — worse — when AlertThingy is running, Photoshop’s menus and “crawling ants” flicker. If I kept this program, I’d eventually be forced to gouge out my eyes in self-defense.
Guess I’ll try Digsby next, although it does a lot more than I’m looking for, which means it might be a memory hog. Feedalizr is another possibility, as is Peoplebrowsr. And Skimmer.
If anyone has a suggested program for me, please post it in the comments.
UPDATE: Tried Feedalizr. Although it claims to be connected to the Facebook account, I don’t see any Facebook updates. Nor does there seem to be any way to see replies sent to me by people I don’t follow. So I guess I’ll try another program.
UPDATE THE SECOND: We have a winner! Digsby turns out to have pretty much everything I want. And because it doesn’t use Adobe Air (or whatever that’s called), it uses less memory than almost all the other programs do.
I use gwibber but I think that may be Linux only.
Google wave (‘sposed to be out later this year) looks pretty dern snazzy.
http://wave.google.com/
It promises to package an email account, Twitter, and Facebook in one real-time interface (also with good-looking photosharing and commenting capability, games, updates from websites).
Is there Growl for Windows yet? Because most of those programs on a Mac then use Growl to ping you with the specific FB/Twitter message, rather than doing it themselves. But that just be may be a Mac-thing.
Growl is basically a pop-up notification software doodad with a promiscuous API that works well with all sorts of programs such that I have to turn off stuff I don’t want notifying me constantly like iTunes and so on. –Me talk techy one day.
I believe Tweetie will do all that for, but I mostly use it from my phone.
Meh. I don’t really care for a facebook client. I find if I want to know what people are up to on facebook, it’s best to just go there. Same thing with Twitter. For posting, I don’t really see Facebook as a microblogging service and it shouldn’t be seen that way. To post to twitter I like the super-simplistic firefox extension “Twittytunes.” It was meant as a companion for FoxyTunes, but I like it without.
Thanks for the suggestions; however, neither Growl nor Tweetie are available for Windows.
Ah. Google Wave. Google’s next step in its march to become as beloved as Microsoft. Yay.
Feedly! I’ve used feedly forever, it’s great.
In the spirit of Feedly…
Both the facebook friends status page and your twitter friends page can be RSS links. If you have an RSS reader that will pop up useful information (and can authenticate for the twitter feed), you can get around your problem. You’re not limited to “Twitter/Facebook client”.
I’m a Growl user, so I can’t help you with pop-up notifications. Maybe asking around for an RSS reader with authentication and useful pop-up messages might help?
(If you have trouble getting either facebook or twitter as an RSS feed, poke me.)
Actually, I’ve wound up being pretty satisfied with Digsby, which turned out to use less memory than the other programs I’ve tried, has useful pop-ups, and handles both Twitter and Facebook pretty well.
Feedly would require me to keep a browser open, I think? That wouldn’t work for me as well. And the RSS feed is a good idea, but the advantage of Digsby (or other twitter clients) is that I can post tweets from the same program if I want to.