Toby's Development Blog Just another PHP / Javascript Developer

I heard about Tweet Miner a couple of weeks ago via the techZing! podcast.  I have been using it for about a week now and thought I would post my feelings on it.

First, here is a bit of an introduction to the service.  Tweet Miner is a pre-beta twitter web app that allows you to quickly and easily manage your tweets so that people following you get actual benefit.  Created by Justin Vincent to allow him to solve one specific problem he was having it has only fairly recently been allowed out for the public to play with it.

The core features of Tweet Miner that I find useful or different are;

Multiple Accounts

The multiple accounts is obviously a fairly common feature of a lot of twitter apps already out there, what I like about this one though (and I admit I haven't played with too many others so this may be commonplace)  is that you can easily and quickly identify which account you are in.  This is important because obviously there are tweets that you would happily post to one group of people that you may think twice about posting to another.

RSS Feed Integration

The RSS feed integration is something I haven't seen or heard any other twitter client claim to do and it is really neat, basically you subscribe to your favourite RSS feeds via this app and then you can quickly create a tweet based on the content, it takes care of the URL shortening as well so it is just a really quick way of getting your content out there.

Scheduling of Tweets

Scheduling of tweets is something I have only just got into and I am loving it, maybe you have 10 articles you want to share with the world, but you don't want to overload your followers all at once, or maybe you are heading out in 5 minutes for the rest of the day but have some content you want to spread around, really handy and quick to do.  One thing I have used it for (which is incredibly geeky and lazy, and I promise to never ever do it again!) was to get one account to tweet another account with an @reply at a specific time to remind me to do something.  And do you know what, it worked!

Rolling Schedule of Tweets

The rolling schedule isn't something I have looked at in length because personally I don't want to use it as I am afraid as coming of as a bit spammy, but basically this feature allows you to say 'Every 60 minutes post this tweet' I guess if you know something is always going to happen at a set interval and it is useful to people then this would be a useful way of promoting that fact.

URL shortening Service

Everything has a URL shorting service built into it these days but one thing I have noticed with a lot of the twitter clients I have used in the past is that if you have a URL that along with your content breaches the 140 length, it won't get posted even if after the shortening you fall well under the 140 limit.  Tweet Miner allows you to shorten the URL in real time before posting, which has other benefits as well, like seeing you have extra space for a hashtag or a 'RT plz!'

It is a Website

This final point is probably a totally personal thing to me, but with the range of applications and firefox plugins out there that monitor everything for you, I find there is less and less need to actually browse the web anymore.  There has to come a time when tab space in your browser is less of a premium than space a long your toolbar for all these little apps.  Nothing to install and nothing to slow down firefox even more.

I am beginning to really love using this site and can't wait until it is officially released.  I strongly urge people to sign up for a free account now.