Hopefully you read yesterday’s post about Twitter, because this one assumes you know what Twitter is and why it’s useful for law students. So I’ll take it as read that you read that post, signed up for an account if you hadn’t already, followed me, and now are asking what are some good tools to use. I have three, two for the iPhone/iPod Touch and one for the Mac. I won’t dwell on them, but other good choices are TweetDeck, which uses Adobe Air so it works on everything (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) and TwitterBerry, the most mature Blackberry client.
Tweetie (Mac and iPhone) Tweetie started as an iPhone app but migrated to the Mac and the result is two apps that both work extremely well on their platforms. The user interface is not identical, but relatively consistent between the two apps. Both have everything you would expect in a Twitter client. Specifically for law students, key features start with very concise and intuitive handling of @reply conversations, so arranging a night out on the fly is not that difficult. The Mac client has a global hotkey which allows you to pull up a quick entry panel, allowing you to tweet about your professor while not breaking your rythym of note-taking. And the iPhone client handles photo tweets very well. Tweetie for Mac comes as an ad-supported free version and a $20 ad-free variety. Tweetie for iPhone/iPod Touch is $3 at the App Store.
Birdhouse (iPhone) Birdhouse is a slightly different sort of app. Available only for the iPhone/iPod Touch, Birdhouse is a self-described notepad for Twitter. Tweets can be written online or off, stored, rated, edited, and ultimately posted or delted. Any tweet you publish with Birdhouse can be unpublished, edited, and republished with Birdhouse. No reading here; Birdhouse is all about writing and editing tweets. Birdhouse is for tweets that you think might need to be workshopped a little bit, tweets you want to capture but don’t want to necessary post this second (i.e. rage tweets), and for not losing any gems that pop into your head. Birdhouse is $3 at the App Store. I could go on, but I’ll let the introductory video explain more:
Try these out and let us know if you like them. And if you have other great Twitter tools that can be useful for law students, let everyone know in the comments.
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I’m finding Reportage helpful for following specific accounts. The radio station interface makes it easy to tune into specific people and catch up on tweets I might have missed. While not my primary iPhone twitter app, Reportage has potential and I hope it will improve in later upgrades.