iPad + Twitter

After a few days with the iPad, there's no end-of-honeymoon feeling. Drat: I'd get much more traffic and attention if I loudly proclaimed my unhappiness. Nothing makes some people more annoyed than being satisfied with an Apple product. You bought the hype! You'd buy anything Apple makes! Look over here, there's something that does the same thing, and it's cheaper? What do you mean, it's ugly? I don't even know what that means! And so on. Reasonable detractors are one thing, but people who HATE Apple are as weird as the people who loathe Microsoft.

I mention this only because the next sentence will make strike some people as the stupidest thing they've read today.

My favorite app so far is Tweetdeck, for Twitter.

Hands are thrown up, eyes rolled: oh, yeah, that's why people need to spend $500, so they can tell people what they had for lunch. Hah! Good one! Yes, that's Twitter, all right, people sharing lunch menus. Why, what did we do before? Right: we sent telegrams. HAD BLT NO MAYO STOP APPLE PIE AFTER STOP RESTAURANT OUT OF TOOTHPICKS STOP USED FORK STOP OUCH STOP. But then telegrams went away, and people sat alone in a state of ignorance for decades. Oh, they could pick up the phone and tell someone, but somehow "lunch" didn't meet the standards for a long-distance call. But then came Twitter!

Uh huh. Most of the things I read on Twitter fall into two categories: A) aphorisms and observations, which may be personal, political, or random feints at pop culture, and B) links to stuff. It's interesting. There's lots of information I'd never get otherwise. Twitter, in other words, is useful, and Tweetdeck is ideal for using it. I never liked the version they had for desktops and laptops; too many panes, too much real estate. When people talk about using another screen to take advantage of Tweetdeck it's a sign you are taking Twitter a bit too seriously. But on the iPad you have two panes, one for the people you follow, one for mentions or DMs. The top third's blank, but when you click on a tweet's link the site is loaded in another scrollable pane. The way I use Twitterific looks clumsy by comparison - one pane, switch between views, links open a browser. After a while you have 239 tabs open.