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title: JournoTwit - The best way to organize your tweets
content-type: article
timestamp: 1257434357
tags: review|web20|internet|software
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<p>Since I started using <a href="http://www.twitter.com">Twitter</a> on a regular basis, I felt overwhelmed by the endless stream of data generated by the people I was following.</p>
<p>The official Twitter page quickly became inadequate to manage my tweets, so I began to search for an alternative through the myriad of Twitter clients available out there, both web and desktop based. After trying out a few desktop clients, I decided to restrict the search to web clients only: between work and home, I may use up to 4 different computers and 3 different operating system, and I really didn&#8217;t fancy the idea of keeping the <em>same</em> client up-to-date everywhere &#8212; even if such client existed.</p>
<p>Over the past months I tried dozens of different web-based Twitter clients, and narrowed the list of <em>must-have</em> features to the following:</p>
<ul>
	<li>The interface should be simple to use and not too cluttered.</li>
	<li>I should be able to categorize tweets in columns (&agrave; la TweetDeck).</li>
	<li>I should be able to know, when visiting the site, how many <em>new</em> tweets I have to go through.</li>
	<li>I should be able to mark tweets as read.</li>
	<li>It should display media files (at least pictures) inline with the tweets.</li>
	<li>The interface should provide all the most common twitter actions like reply, retweet, follow/unfollow, shorten url, upload pictures etc. etc.</li>
</ul>
<p>The good news is that I found at least <em>one</em> web-based client able to do all this: <a href="http://www.journotwit.com">JournoTwit</a>.</p>
<h3>Introducing JournoTwit</h3>
<p>JournoTwit was born &ndash; as many software projects &ndash; to scratch an itch:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Probably the last thing anyone was expecting me to do &mdash; even myself, was to create my own twitter client. However, I&#8217;ve been a little fed up with not having the features I wanted and running 5 or 6 accounts, I was getting annoyed at using several different applications just to have them logged in concurrently. [&#8230;] In under 24 hours I put together a twitter client that functioned enough for me to call it my one and only. A few more days and I added in enough features that I felt it was good enough for public consumption. It is however, not perfect and I have plenty of improvements on my to do list for it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="padding-left:3em;"><cite><a href="http://www.spodesabode.com/discussion/280/journotwit-the-twitter-client-thats-not-just-for-journalists/">JournoTwit&#8217;s introductory post</a></cite> by Andrew Spode Miller (<a href="http://twitter.com/spode">@spode</a>)</p>
<p>After months of <em>public consumption</em>, JournoTwit became a feature-packed Twitter client able to compete with a lot of mainstream alternatives &ndash; albeit remaining always relatively unknown to the masses. You can call it a <em>niche</em> Twitter client, able to satisfy a few basic needs:</p>
<ul>
	<li>The ability to manage multiple Twitter accounts at once.</li>
	<li>The ability to categorize all incoming tweets automatically, according to the type of information within them.</li>
	<li>The ability to keep track of unread tweets.</li>
</ul>
<p>These three features alone were enough to make JournoTwit my one and only Twitter client. And no, it&#8217;s not only for journalists and writers.</p>
<h3>Interface overview</h3>
<p>After logging in, JournoTwit looks like this:</p>
<p><img src="/img/pictures/journotwit/interface.png" alt="" /></p>
<p><b>Note:</b> I am using the <em> <a href="http://www.journotwit.com/edge/">edge</a> </em> version of JournoTwit, a sort of development snapshot with the latest features.</p>
<p>At the top, some more-or-less intuitive icons allow you to perform all the most common <em>global</em> actions:</p>
<ul>
	<li>Tweet</li>
	<li>Manual refresh</li>
	<li>Mark all columns as read</li>
	<li>Add new columns</li>
	<li>Quick search</li>
	<li>Edit settings</li>
	<li>Logout</li>
</ul>
<p>Next to this global toolbar, there&#8217;s a list of links, each corresponding to a column. Clicking a link toggles the visibility of the corresponding column.</p>
<p>In each column, tweets are displayed in different column according to their state:</p>
<ul>
	<li>Read</li>
	<li>Unread</li>
	<li>Selected</li>
</ul>
<p>You can select one tweet at a time by clicking the <strong>+</strong> icon. This toggles the tweet-specific actions:</p>
<ul>
	<li>Reply</li>
	<li>Send a direct message</li>
	<li>Save as favorite</li>
	<li>Retweet</li>
	<li>Translate</li>
</ul>
<p>Pretty intuitive and easy to use, so far.</p>
<h3>Default columns</h3>
<p>When you login, you&#8217;ll notice that all your tweets are <em>not</em> presented in the traditional, disorganized single-column stream layout. Instead, they are <em>sorted automatically</em> into different columns, according to their type:</p>
<dl>
	<dt>My Feed</dt>
	<dd>All the tweets <em>you</em> sent. By default, this column is minimized.</dd>
	<dt>No-Mention</dt>
	<dd>All tweets containing your username without the &#8220;@&#8221;, i.e. every time someone mentions you sneakily, without sending you a reply.</dd>
	<dt>Messages</dt>
	<dd>All the direct messages you sent and received.</dd>
	<dt>Mentions</dt>
	<dd>All the tweets containing your twitter username (with &#8220;@&#8221;), such as replies to your tweets.</dd>
	<dt>Statuses</dt>
	<dd>All the tweets posted by people you follow that do not contain any link or cannot be categorized through other columns.</dd>
	<dt>News</dt>
	<dd>All the tweets posted by people you follow containing links to articles or non-multimedia web pages.</dd>
	<dt>Retweets</dt>
	<dd>All the retweets posted by people you follow.</dd>
	<dt>Visual</dt>
	<dd>All the tweets posted by people you follow containing links to pictures or videos. Where possible, media is displayed inside the tweet.</dd>
	<dt>Audio</dt>
	<dd>Same as above, but for audio items.</dd>
	<dt>Chatter</dt>
	<dd>Attempts to collect all conversations involving you or people you follow.</dd>
</dl>
<p>Surprisingly, these default columns are enough to make your Twitter experience easier and more manageable, without configure a single setting. They&#8217;re obviously not perfect: some images are not resolved automatically, for example, but it works well otherwise.</p>
<p>Still this may not be enough for your needs or maybe simply not the right thing. No problem: JournoTwit is extremely flexible when it comes to organizing and sorting out your tweets.</p>
<h3>Adding new columns</h3>
<p>All columns except for <em>Mentions</em> and <em>Messages</em> can be modified as you see fit. These two columns cannot be modified simply because there&#8217;s nothing you <em>need</em> to modify it, if you think about it. But they can be deleted, of course (and re-created in a blink, if you delete them by mistake).</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s go through the slightly geeky process of creating a column.</p>
<p>When you click the <b>Add New Columns</b> icon on the top-left corner you&#8217;ll be prompted to further clarify whether you want to add a&#8230;</p>
<ul>
	<li>Set of Columns: i.e. the default columns provided by journotwit <em>or</em> a single column containing all the tweets. Useful if you mess things up and you want to start over again.</li>
	<li>Preset Column: choose from many different columns according to your needs, from different tweet types to memes (#followfriday, #musicmonday, etc.).</li>
	<li>Custom Column: create your own personal column, according to your specific needs.</li>
</ul>
<p>Because the overwhelming majority of my readers is composed by geeks, I&#8217;ll just describe how to create a custom column, so that you can fully understand the power of this tool, in the right hands.</p>
<h3>Adding a custom column</h3>
<p style="float:right;"><img src="/img/pictures/journotwit/custom_column.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>The creation of a custom column doesn&#8217;t take long, but there are quite a few things you can configure. First off, you have to specify whether you want the column to collect <em>local</em> or <em>global</em> tweets: local means the people you follow, while global means everyone on the planet. Simple enough.</p>
<p>Then comes the juicy geeky part: search terms and tags. Simply type a valid <a href="http://search.twitter.com/operators">Twitter Search query</a> in the textbox, so something like this:</p>
<p><code>from:jonobacon OR #ubuntu -jaunty</code></p>
<p>&#8230;will hopefully fetch all tweets posted by <a href="http://www.twitter.com/jonobacon">@jonobacon</a> or tweets about Ubuntu, but not related to the Jaunty Jackalope release. You can also add more text box and thus perform more search queries within the same column.</p>
<p>Then you can filter by tweet type, enabling or disabling Statuses, Visual, Links, Audio, ReTweets and Chatter. Useful to remove the noise (if you follow <a href="http://www.twitter.com/brentspiner">@brentspiner</a>, make sure you disable <em>ReTweets</em>&#8230;).</p>
<p>Finally, you only have to configure a few more settings:</p>
<ul>
	<li>Whether you want to be alerted with a <em>beep</em> when there are new tweets in this column.</li>
	<li>Whether you want the column to display tweets, a tag cloud or even an image slideshow.</li>
	<li>The name of the column.</li>
</ul>
<p>That&#8217;s all. Simple enough. As a side note, the &#8220;No-Mention&#8221; column is nothing but a custom column in disguise: if you try to edit it, you&#8217;ll see it&#8217;s nothing but a search for &#8220;<em>username</em> -<em>@username</em> -from:<em>username</em>&#8221;.</p>
<h3>Other features and advanced settings</h3>
<p>For the tweakers, JournoTwit also exposes the a set of global settings you can modify to enhance your experience or disable annoying behaviors (depends how you look at it):</p>
<h4>Behavior</h4>
<ul>
	<li>Unhide column when new tweets arrive? (default: yes)</li>
	<li>Hide columns on Mark as Read? (default: yes)</li>
	<li>Play alert sounds? (default: yes)</li>
	<li>Animate when new items arrive? (default: yes)</li>
	<li>Default #hashtags and search bar to a local search? (default: no)</li>
	<li>Ignore Tag Coulds when marking all as read? (default: yes)</li>
	<li>Ignore Slide Shows when marking all as read? (default: yes)</li>
	<li>Warn when deleting columns? (default: yes)</li>
	<li>Automatically translate tweets using Google Translate? (default: no)</li>
	<li>Show &#8220;Did You Know?&#8221; messages on refresh? (default: yes)</li>
	<li>Slide show transition time(s) (default: 5)</li>
</ul>
<h4>Display Adjustment</h4>
<p>If you are unsatisfied by JournoTwit&#8217;s default look and feel, you can change the fond size, the color theme (there are 18 possible choices) and even match the color of the icons with the current theme.</p>
<h4>Black Listing</h4>
<p>Straight from the contextual help:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>&#8220;Here you globally black list a #hashtag, such as #microsoft, or a search phrase such as &#8220;Windows 7&#8221;. Remember to separate them with a space and that you can block on a per column basis too.&quot;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is just what you need when you want to filter out pointless tweets. Use with care though!</p>
<h3>Conclusion</h3>
<p>Maybe it&#8217;s just me being a geek, but I think JournoTwit nailed it when it comes to making Twitter more productive: everything <em>just works, and fast</em>, unlike some of its more feature-boasting competitors. I have been using it on a daily basis for weeks, and I&#8217;ve never missed a single tweet since (unless <em>I explicitly wanted to do so</em>).</p>
<p>That being said, there are a few small features I&#8217;d like to see:</p>
<ul>
	<li>I&#8217;d like to be able to mark <em>single tweets</em>, not entire columns, as read. In this way, when I go on vacation and come back, I can catch up with unread tweets more gradually, like I do with Google Reader.</li>
	<li>I&#8217;d like to use shortcut keys to navigate the interface, like with Google Reader.</li>
	<li>I&#8217;d like to configure tweets so that they only show up in one column, not in more than one (for example in Chatter, My Feed, and Mentions at the same time).</li>
	<li>Support for Twitter Lists&#8230;</li>
</ul>
<p>I already told <a href="http://twitter.com/spode">@spode</a> about some of these, and he said he&#8217;ll look into it, we&#8217;ll see what happens. Anyhow, just <a href="http://www.journotwit.com">give it a try</a>, and see if you like it!</p>