TwitterFox: Finally, a good Twitter client

Ok, so I said that the day I meet a decent twitter client I will actually blog about it. This day has come. For the past week or so, I have been using TwitterFox extension for Firefox and I must admit I like it quite a bit. I use FireFox as my main browsing and development platform (Greasemonkey, nuff said) and now I can use it to keep up with twitter.com friends as well. 

Twitter: The Worlds Biggest Waste

There is absolutely no way to rationalize twitter. It is a spectacular waste of time, it is unreliable, it is annoying and impressively useless. But I have started to use it more as I’ve gotten progressively more busy and trying to fit 20 hours of work into 6 comes with certain sacrifices – no IM on the work PC, no b/s newsgroups, no forums, basically getting work done means having to give up all the social stuff that makes working in IT so much fun. I know, woe is me, but soon enough you’ll all get your monkey and we’ll hire enough staff to deal with the rest and allow me to spend more time on freeones. Umm, freeones.

[ continuing roughly 20 minutes later ] Oh, right, twitter.com. Ok, so here is what I like about it. It is like a permanently-offline instant messenger client. My Mac at work is used primarily for social business, and I hit it up once a day, between 1-2 PM, and clear through all the mail, instant messages, etc. It is what I use to let people know I am indeed alive. Now, Audium generally has anywhere from 50-80 tabs of IMs that got collected overnight, and three out of four people are not online. This is where twitter serves a purpose. I can see what everyone is up to without looking at their status on MSN messenger. People tend to be just as open on twitter.com as they are on IM, except there is no expectation of instant response (or a response at all) so its a very good way to see what everyone is up to. It also has a lot of content that you would otherwise not see anywhere else, since all the cool kids are using it. For example, keeping up with WordPress development, Seth Godin’s thoughts… clear, concise. I can continue redneck jokes with Tim Barrett for hanging out at Fox & Hound (Tim runs the Vladville PR department). And then there is Robert Scoble and 18,000 worthless updates a day on the flavor of his farts.

So you take the good with the bad, and TwitterFox lets me stay tuned without the hassle. (I dumped the Vista sidebar widget because it crashed and fell apart so often).

If you’d like to follow me, I’m http://www.twitter.com/vladmazek but I also syndicate the updates on www.vladville.com (look at the right hand side, under Newsletter)