Twittangle - Great client to manage your tweets

Since a lot of people ask me why I'm on twitter so much and why I tweet so much, I thought I'd start by giving an intro to my twitter usage. I'm a big fan of social networking so when I heard about twitter, I at least wanted to give it a shot.

I started using twitter May of this month even though my account was created a few months before that. At first, I wasn't sure what to use it for. I didn't see the point of using another tool just to give updates on your life, I already use facebook for that. Also, I prefer facebook status updates because they only go to my friends, not the entire world and all interweb crawling tools (And hopefully facebook keeps it that way).

First thing I discovered while messing around with twitter was the news tweets. CNN, Globe And Mail, Reuters, BusinessWeek, et al, the media outlets I most frequent for my news were all there. And I instantly saw the opportunity to improve my personal productivity. Instead of having to go their individual websites and browse for interesting news, they would just tweet it real-time and I'd get to read news right away. It helped me stay on top of news. I was a happy man.

Desktop clients like tweetdeck and seesmic served my needs then well. I had one column for friends, on column for news, one for sports.

I then begun to explore further and saw an opportunity to stay on top of articles/blogs in areas I was interested in, not just the generic CNN, Globe And Mail news, but my specific personal interests such as Technology, Software, Clean Technology, Solar Energy, Canadian news, Entrepreneurship, Investing, and most recently, Smart Grid. I started following people who tweeted about those topics. Wefollow.com is a great way to find some of the top people in each area. I also began retweeting articles I found interesting, and in turn networked with people interested in the same areas I was. To me, this was a way to be the "first to know" about anything new in my areas of interest.

Two to three months later, my followers list and friends list grew beyond my ability to stay on top of tweets like I was able to earlier. And there are people with 1000 times the number of followers and friends I have. My tweetdeck and seesmic desktop clients would keep hitting 700MB in memory usage and eventually crash. This sucked because I'd miss on all the tweets since the last crash. For a while I actually went to just using www.twitter.com. Another pain point was managing my group list across multiple clients and multiple machines (home pc, work laptop, work pc).

This led me to the following realization:

1. I needed to clean up my friend's and follower's list. Having a targeted, closely-knit network would serve me better, in terms of the tweets I would be seeing on my feed.

2. The twitter client I use must be online so my I only need to work on grouping my friends once and I can access my twitter from any machine.

3. I needed a good view of all my different twitter friends groups. I could only create 10 groups using desktop clients such as tweetdeck and seesmic and the online version of seesmic didn't have a good user experience for multiple clients.

4. I wanted to be able to search my list quickly and find people. E.g. I have a question on Solar Panels, I want to be able to quickly find all my twitter friends who have expertise there.

5. I wanted to be able to differentiate how valuable certain twitter friends are to me from others. E.g. within a group of all my twitter friends who tweet about Clean Technology, some have better tweets and/or are more influential in the industry. Also, this is useful for doing #FollowFridays

I then spent 2 weeks just focusing on the above 5 points. I didn't tweet at all for 2 weeks. I tried countless twitter clients. I read many articles. I'm now at a point where I feel like I am done with all the above five and want to share my findings.

1. Cleaning up friend's and follower's list

Quantity isn't as important as quality when it comes to your twitter follower/friends list, especially when it becomes so hard to manage getting tweets from 500+ people. (And there are people following millions of people!). I went to my followers and friends list one by one and decided who I should follow and who I should block.

Also, I'm not a fan of auto following, auto replying, auto DM. In fact, I block people who do. I now spend 1-2 mins deciding whether I want to follow someone who is following me and do not shy from blocking worthless twitter accounts (like obvious internet marketing, or the fake accounts with photos of attractive women)

And for the remaining points I want to share how Twittangle meets my needs

2. Twitter client must be online

This is fairly obvious. Twittangle is online only. http://www.twittangle.com

3. Good view of my twitter friends groups.

It took me quite some time to figure how to group all my twitter contacts. In the end, I came up with this grouping. And as far as I can tell, twittangle has no restrictions; I can view them all at the same time

Also, the UI to scroll horizontally is really snippy. I like it a lot.

4. Searching my friends list

Since all my friends are divided into groups, it's easy for me to say, find all the contacts who tweet about or are from Toronto

5. Differentiating how valuable certain friends are

Twittangle allows you to specify how much you 'like' a twitter friend.

I’m not clear on how to use this though. I asked @twittangle but have not heard back. I’m guessing it’s a future feature.

Twittangle is still in beta but I've had no problems using it. I've filed three bugs on things I've noticed, and here's the feature list I would recommend:

1. Being able to do group conversations with your twitter friends. Kind of like facebook's wall to wall. That would allow you to remember all the tweets you have exchanged with a certain friend

2. Being able to search for friends in multiple groups. Currently I can see all my friends in a certain friends group. I want to be able to do a query which says "Find all my friends in group B and group C that have tweeted about wind energy"

3. Being able to search for key terms within my feed. Example, I want to search for all the tweets containing #mkt from people I am following. Often times you want to find an old tweet because it contained something you want to refer to.

When lessons learned make sense

A few weeks back I wrote a blog titled "Breadth vs. Depth" talking about the importance of having depth and how it helps you accomplish more.

I've been reading a book called "Predictably Irrational" By Dan Ariely talking about how we make irrational decisions. There's a couple of things he talked about which I could relate to, and other concepts were new to me.

I am normally not an impulsive buyer. I used to be but I came up with a 3 day rule. Basically, if I feel like buying anything over $50, I wait 3 days and if I still feel like buying it, I go ahead and get it. This helps me filter out 99% of impulsive decisions. Interestingly, Dan Ariely talked about a similar concept, called the "ice-glass method". The idea is to put your credit card in a glass of water and put that in the freezer. And whenever you impulsively decide to make a purchase, you must wait for the card to thaw and by then your compulsion to make the purchase dies away.

Secondly, he talked about an experiment with MIT students who were asked to play with a program that had three doors, one red, one blue, and one green. The participants could enter any of the rooms by clicking on the door and when in the room, each subsequent click would earn them a certain amount of money. However, moving from one room to another required a click and there were a total of 100 clicks. Furthermore, one of the doors would permanently close if not used for 12 clicks. In the end, Dan observed that most students tried to keep each door open, even though they were better of staying in one room and clicking as fast as they could. The parallel of this to life is how we like to keep our options open instead of just picking one option, staying with it, and accomplishing something. It was a good reconfirmation for me after having written my "Breadth vs. Depth" blog.

It also got me thinking about theory vs. practice. There are some things you learn from experience and they tend to stick with you for longer. Even though a lot of times you realize it took you months to learn something so simple like "Don’t make assumptions", the general sayings foolhardies repeat without really knowing what it means.


I want to get an MBA eventually. When I think about it, I begin to appreciate why it's recommended to wait a few years, get some solid life experiences and then do your MBA. Just like reading Dan Ariely's book made more sense after I had already had already learned some of the lessons in the book, and the remaining concepts that were new to me made much more sense, an MBA is similar. Also, if the book has 10 lessons and I am able to relate to 2 of them, the remaining 8 lessons will make much more sense. Similarly, an MBA will make more sense when I have accumulated enough interesting life experiences.