Wap Review

A full featured, "mid-sized" client similar to Twitstst and Slandr with avatar images and quick access icons for replies, direct messages, retweets and favoriting. It also lets you follow new Tweeps and has a full-text Twitter search to help you find new people to follow. But the best thing about Dabr for me is that, unlike Twitstat and Slandr, it works in Opera Mini without the need for horizontal scrolling.

Tweete is a light weight (14KB) client that should work well on old or low end phones and/or slow networks. In spite of it's low page weight, Tweete manages to include a lot of features; quick action icons for direct messaging, replies, favoriting and unfavoriting. Tweete also lets you follow new Tweeps and offers the fairly unusual feature of being able to delete one of your own Tweets.

A reader sent me a link to a new Twitter mobile web client called Tuitwit.  It was created from scratch by Indonesian developer Judotens Budiarto and is running on Google App Engine. It's optimized for basic and mid range phones with a default page size of about 25 KB, including images and style sheets.  Page size can be reduced to as little as 6 KB by turning off images on the Settings page. 

For a new release Tuitwit is remarkably full featured with support for themes, Twitter OAuth, emoticons, Twitpic, photo uploading, long tweets, geo-location, favorites and Twitter search.  Tuitwit also has a couple of features I haven't seen before in a mobile web Twitter client; Google maps integration and muting

If your Tweet is 120 characters or less and it includes your location, Tuitwit adds a link to a Google Map centered on where you are. You set your location in Tuitwit by inserting "loc(place name, address, city, state, country)" in your Tweet. Most of the location fields are optional, for example loc(San Francisco, USA) works.

Muting lets you hide Tweets from overly chatty friends without un-following them.

Like Tweete, Tuitwit is highly configurable. By turning on all the optional features and increasing the default seven tweets per page to 30 or so it becomes a rich mobile Twitter client for full-web smartphone browsers or Opera Mini.

I'm pretty impressed with what Judotens has done with Tuitwit. My only reservation I have about Tuitwit is scalability.  Because it's based on Google App Engine, theorethically it should be infinately scalable.  But in the course of using it for a couple of hours I've gotten several HTTP 500 errors and server unavailable messages. That might just be the notoriously flaky Twitter back end acting up or it could be some start up bugs to work out.  The good news is that by retrying I was always able to get Tuitwit to work.

Twitter's own mobile site. It's a little different than Twapper (below). Twapper lets you eavesdrop on anyone's public Tweets as long as you know their username; while Twitter Mobile requires you to login with your own username and only shows Tweets from you and your friends.

Twittme is the newest mobile Twitter front end.  That makes at least six now. What sets Twittme apart from the rest is that it that allows creating Tweets longer than 140 characters.  The "What are you doing" field in Twittme accepts up to 240 characters.  Tweets longer than 140 are sent as two successive Tweets.  Several desktop clients do this but Twittme is the first mobile web one I've seen that does. Twittme has a couple of other features that set it apart from the crowd, there are links under each tweet in the the timeline that let you share it on Facebook or by Email.

Initially, Tweetme was missing a few features found in the best of other mobile clients but it's added support for OAuth and made Twitter @IDs and #hashtags in the body of Tweets clickable links. I often click on IDs, especially in retweets.  It's the main way I discover new people to follow. Being able to click hashtags is also a big plus as it's a great way to follow live events and to see what others are saying on  a topic.

 

An attractive "Middle Web" Twitter front end. Has an average page size of 350 KB and a dependency on JavaScript. Halo4 looks and works great in the iPhone, Android, Web OS, and Maemo browsers or Opera Mini or Mobile on a phone with a page width of 320 px or greater.

A new "touch web" optimized Twitter client. I like the attractive dark theme. But on my Android phones (Sapphire and Evo) text doesn't wrap properly and horizontal scrolling is required unless I zoom out to a point where text painfully small. This even happens on the Evo's 480 px wide screen! I'm guessing this works well on the iPhone, though.

Slandr is another mobile web based Twitter interface. What really sets Slandr apart from the other mobile Tweeter 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.

Another mobile web front end to Twitter. Very similar to Twitter's own mobile version and to Twapper. All three let you post and read tweets from the Twiterers you're following. Twapper displays a lot more tweeks than the others and includes the Twitterer's picture with every tweet making it's pages a little heavier but still under 20KB. Like the other two mobile web Twitter clients, Twapper doesn't let you search for new people to follow which seems like a missed opportunity.

Much as I love Twitter, the signal to noise ratio is pretty high. A major source of noise is when multiple people you follow retweet the same item.  Worth Retweeting? is a simple Twitter mashup designed to help you avoid excessive retweeting.

The way it works is that you enter your Twitter user name and the user name of the Twitterer you are thinking of retweeting. Worth Retweeting? then shows you what percentage of your followers also follow the other user. The idea is that if you have too high a percentage of common followers there is really no point in retweeting that person.  The only problem is at what percentage of common followers is retweeting a bad idea?  If 90% of my followers also follow the other person, retweeting is mainly going to contribute noise but what about 50% or 30%.  Where would you draw the line?

 

Twitter for WAP" lets you follow what people are saying on Twitter using the mobile web instead of SMS. Test drive it with prolific bloggers/twitterers Steve Rubel, Dave Winer and Scoble m.30boxes.com/twapper/steverubel+scobleizer+davewiner

Post a photo to Twitter directly from your phone, view a public timeline of Twitter photos and photo "Hall of Fame". Source: Oh! Mobile Directory