Digsby's new look on Twitter

The other day, Digsby introduced DEMOfall09 to visitors, and soon to its alpha testers, a new approach to working with Twitter.

In their blog, the developers have noted that Twitter has long outgrown the framework of the service, in which people just tell others what they are doing. Now it’s rather “an ongoing global conversation ” (“continuous conversation of global proportions”), which means you need to take into account new aspects of its use.

Here is a list of major changes:

• The interface of the application, which fits in one column, and does not occupy the whole screen.
• The ability to view tweets in chronological order (thus, you can follow the progress of other people's statements in the order in which they appear, and not vice versa, as is done in the Twitter web interface itself and in many Twitter clients)
• Digsby keeps track of the number of unread tweets (this option can be turned off), while it is possible to mark read tweets, but not necessary - this is done automatically.
• Whenever you open a window with tweets, Digsby starts displaying them from where you left off last time. Thus, you can read everything, without missing a single message.
• One of the most long-awaited features is the ability to manage the rapid flow of information using groups and filtering by them. At the same time, the tweets of the “chosen ones” will not be duplicated in the general stream (this is also optional). Also tweets from groups can be displayed in pop-up windows.
• The ability to reply and quote others (retweet) is now available directly “on the spot”: in a message block or directly in a pop-up window.
• Long links are now shortened automatically (enthusiasts can still do it manually).

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It is also important to note that the old “timeline” (the sidebar to the left of the contact list) has a very traditional look and still shows tweets from the last one.

To get the most complete picture of how it all works now, I recommend watching the CEO dotSyntax, LLC presentation . - Steve Shapiro.

There will always be many opponents of any changes. This proved to be true for the new Twitter-functionality Digsby. Her blog announcement is literally replete with diametrically opposed reviews on this subject: from puppy delights to accusations and insults. Nevertheless, the developers were able to find a stronghold of rationality in this storm of emotions, and the very next day they released an alpha release in which many of the wishes of users were taken into account.

Of course, some innovations contradict the “traditional” approach to using Twitter. However, bad or not - it's up to you;)