With Twitter no longer sending SMS updates except in India, Canada and the US there has to be a lot of interest in other ways to get updates on a mobile phone.  As long as you have unlimited or cheap data you can easily follow your Twitter friends using the mobile web.  Twitter has a mobile web based client at  m.twitter.com.  It’s rather bare bones but Twitter has an API and third parties have used it to create rich mobile web Twitter clients.  I’ve previously  covered Twistat (twitstat.com/m) and Twapper (m.30boxes.com/twapper) and just found Slandr, (mobile:m.slandr.net) another mobile web based Twitter interface.  It was launched in May so it’s not really new but I hadn’t heard of it until Jonathan Jensen at Mobile Industry Review mentioned in a a post on His Favorite Twitter Tools.

What really sets Slandr apart from the other mobile front ends is its exhaustive feature set.  Compared with m.twitter, Twapper, and Twistat only Slandr offers:

• Quickly reply to a tweet via an icon so you don’t have to type @someone.
• Send direct messages via another icon, Slandr adds “d username” so you don’t have to.
• Search, powered by Summize, provides full text search of tweets plus search for  from:, to:, @ #, etc.
• You can update your location and view friend’s locations of a map.  If you just type a city though  Slandr  defaults to the US.  It puts MIR’s Ewan MacLeod in London – Ohio!
• Local, View public tweets within a three mile radius of your location.
• Events, lists nearby events.

Slandr also borrows some useful features from Twitstat; it shows each sender’s avatar or photo with their tweets. there is an option to view only direct messages and a star icon next to each tweet saves the tweet in a favorites bucket for later review. Unlike Twitstat, the favorites feature in Slandr is implemented without JavaScript so it should work on all phones.

Slandr doesn’t seem to work if you aren’t logged in.  There are features like search and viewing public Tweets that ought to be usable without login.  The links to these functions do appear before you log in so I think they are supposed to work. However, Slandr bombs with a PHP error when if I try to do anything before logging in.

Based on feature set alone, Slandr is the best mobile interface to Twitter I’ve seen to date.  Mobile usability is generally pretty good.  The only real issue is that the typical page size is a little high at about 35KB thanks to the avatar images, which can’t be turned off. Ready.mobi gives the Slandr homepage a score of 4 on a scale of 5 but the homepage has no images and is only 9KB.   I got an out of memory error from the Openwave browser on a Motorola i855 as soon as I logged in. 35KB isn’t huge by any means and Slandr should work well with many recent phones.  If you’re a Twitterer and Slandr works on your phone I highly recommend it.

Mobile Link: m.slandr.net

Ratings: Content: Usability:

Filed in: Mobile Site Directory – Technology/Mobile/Mobile Social

Related Posts:
Found on the Mobile Web #14 (Twapper)
Found on the Mobile Web #16 (m.Twitter.com)
Found on the Mobile Web #38 (Summize)
Found on the Mobile Web #40 (Twitstat)