The long awaited 4.0 update for the twitter iOS App is here and with it, comes all of their new Facebook-envy goodness from twitter.com.
But seriously, the Connect and Discover features made it in to this version of what’s shaping up to be one of the most polished (if not disappointingly simple-in-a-good-way) iPhone apps about.
Connect is Twitter’s replacement for the @mentions list and becomes more like an activity stream. This has been much-needed since Twitter created the new ‘Retweet’ functionality meaning that users aren’t mentioned in their re-tweeted tweets. Connect shows you your retweets, replies and follow activity – chronologically. It’s interesting to see the follow-effect of a good @reply conversation with one of the Twitter weblebrities. Even if the conversation itself is ‘both shallow and pedantic’.
Discover is cool & could potentially grow in to a new core feature for Twitter, with greater aggregation of the content under links and potentially even demand-driven mini-articles explaining context. Discover shows you what is trending in a more visual way than the old list; showing you the key tweets in the graph that have led to it trending e.g. The inception tweet, the largest distribution tweets (most retweeted) and so-forth. The idea is to show the development and origin of a trend to quickly get a more accurate view of what the trend is ‘about’, rather than thousands of tweets from users trying to come up on the trending search, OR… Even worse ‘Why is XYZ trending’. In fact; they should be gone altogether!
Twitter’s recent iOS5 integration was obviously a massive win, but actually account control has gotten more confusing as you manage your account notification settings and user settings in two completely different places!! That said, Twitter has once again stolen the hallowed home screen spot for my Twitter app of choice! It’s the best ‘straight-up’ twitter experience going for personal users of Twitter.
