I can sum up my feelings on the Twitter for iPhone application in just one word: Disappointment. When I downloaded the app I had lofty dreams of the end all and be all of Twitter applications. I trought I was going to be able to delete other Twitter applications off my phone forever because this application was going to take tweeting on my iPhone to the next level, it is after all made by the people who own Twitter to begin with surely they can do things all these 3rd party applications can’t…apparently not.
One thing you can do on Twitter for iPhone that you can’t do using any 3rd party applications is sign up for a Twitter account. The application is designed so that someone who doesn’t have access to a computer to sign up traditionally for the service can instead sign up using the application. So, for the 15 people out there who own iPhones but don’t have access to a computer, and couldn’t manage to sign up for Twitter using the web functionality on your iPhone: this app is for you.
The application offers users easy access to their Twitter feed, the ability to read @ and direct messages, add and delete followers, and search twitter in general for users or topics of interest. For the most part, everything you can do on Twitter, you can also do using the Twitter iPhone application. The application is designed in such a way that all of those things can be done fairly quickly and easily, and the interface is intuitive enough taht you’re not going to need an instruction book to figure out how to do them. In addition to the features already available on Twitter’s website, the Twitter application gives you the ability to geotag tweets, add pictures fro your photo album or take one on the spot, and the ability to shrink and add URLs to your tweets.
While the application does give you everything you need to interact with Twitter (and a bit more) I would have liked to have seen it offer the ability to do a few other things such as schedule tweets for the future, or at the very least support a few Twitter accounts at a time, both features currently available from 3rd party Twitter applications.
Have any of you tried out the new Twitter for iPhone application? What are your thoughts?
