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Birdhouse, a Twitter publishing app from Sandwich Dynamics, is available for $3.99 at the App Store.
Alright, tweeters, you all heard the guy at Nielsen Online -- you're nothing but a bunch of fad-hopping slackers. You only got into Twitter because of Oprah, or Ashton, or that guy claiming to be the Pope. You tweeted for four days or so, then you packed it in and left, tired of doing your part to keep the Almighty Conversation alive and fresh.
Was that too harsh? Maybe that was too harsh. Fine, not everyone starts getting sick of Twitter a week or two after using it -- just a little more than half do that, according to Nielsen. The rest stick with it, compulsively checking back every few days/hours/minutes to see exactly what's going on in the minds of people just as into tweeting as they are.
For some, that may be "cookin sum spinach." For others, it's "peeling a paper tree! die, nature, die!" However, for a select few, Twitter is not a channel for the mere flushing of poorly constructed brain droppings. It's a way to broadcast the deepest, most profound ruminations of the day, each forged after much consideration, commiseration and brooding. For these tweeters, every one of the 140-or-fewer characters in the message deserves as much detailed attention as a master tailor gives to each stitch in a fine pair of trousers. Granted, I can't recall ever seeing a tweet like this in the wild, but hey, it's a big world.
For these fastidious few, there is Birdhouse, a Twitter publishing app that lets you organize your not-quite-ready-to-tweet missives.
Write, Revise, Publish
Once you download it, start using Birdhouse by adding your account -- you'll have to go directly to Twitter.com to create one if you don't already have one. You can use Birdhouse to manage multiple accounts.
Once this is done, you'll see your draft menu. Each entry represents a not-yet-tweeted tweet. Say you have the seeds of an oh-so-pithy observation on Arlen Specter rattling around in your head. It's interesting, it's got a solid point, but it's just not quite Twitter-worthy yet. No problem -- open a new entry and jot it out in one of these Birdhouse draft spaces. It'll even count down your 140 characters as you type.
The draft panel gives you some options. If you've perfected your remark, you can publish it immediately (or unpublish it, if you find you've made some horrible error). If it's just too inane to tweet at all, you can trash it. If it's OK but still needs work, you can save it for later. Buttons on the bottom of the panel let you assign stars to your tweet-in-the-making, so you can easily sort out your truly brilliant work later. You can also see when it was created and last modified and see which account it was originally created under.
Birdhouse will also keep a history of the tweets you compose using it and allow you to sort by time or star rating. You can also email a complete list of your Birdhouse-made tweets to yourself and others.
The Essence of Twitter
Two things I think Birdhouse needs: 1) A feed so you can read posts from those you're following. This would make it into a complete Twitter app, not just a publishing app. 2) Landscape typing. I think just about every app that uses a keypad should have a landscape typing option, but that's just me.
Other than that, Birdhouse is well made, easy to understand, and comes complete with short tutorials to familiarize new users with its functions. Its layout is clean. Even its icon looks nice sitting there on the iPhone menu. But it is not a practical app for all users of Twitter.
Birdhouse is really only practical for those who want to get serious about what they tweet. It's for tweeters for whom half-baked ideas, misspellings due to rushing, and anything less than the perfect zinger simply will not do. It's for those who don't want to rush headlong into the message, even if that message is broadcast over a medium generally known for propagating disposable bits of info.
That's not to say that all tweets are trash. Sometimes you'll find a real, honest Deep Thought, or a link to an article or video that's truly amazing. But will you really care if anyone notices that you misspelled "amazing" on Twitter, or that your 103-character treatise on summer squash clearly could have used some proofreading and revision?
Perhaps you do. Perhaps that's what Birdhouse is trying to change. Maybe if more people used Birdhouse, it could raise the bar for Twitter discourse -- if more people saved drafts of tweets and thought harder about what they posted, it might be a richer read overall. But nothing's really stopping people from thinking before they tweet anyway, and it's quite apparent that many would rather not. It just doesn't seem to be what Twitter's all about -- it's about spontaneous, unrehearsed shout-outs, which can once in a while be just as hilarious, interesting, infuriating or boring as anything someone bothered to put some real work into.
Bottom Line
So, who might really use Birdhouse? E-marketers, professional promoters, and anyone looking to use the service as a means to sell something. If you want to load up your draft menu with a series of well-timed and well-revised announcements to make a coordinated bombing run on the Twit-o-sphere and promote your new Webby startup, this is the tool for the job.
If you need to protect your reputation as a world-class Twitter wit, this may be the app for you as well. Birdhouse has seen plenty of positive reviews on the App Store for reasons like these.
However, anyone who just likes to jabber on Twitter for the sheer hell of it should probably grab a free client like TwitterFon and just start tapping away.
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