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Twhirl is a relatively new Twitter client that packs just about everything you need for twittering into one Adobe Air based application.  While Twhirl of course handles all the basic things you need out of a Twitter client, I feel it really shines when you start using the additional features and usability enhancements.

Some of these features include:

• Runs on Windows (200/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX
• Ability to connect to multiple Twitter accounts
• Ability to simultaneously post to Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku
• Extremely easy to install and configure
• Embedded services include Tweetscan, is.dg, Snurl, TwitPic, and Terraminds
• Timeline filtering
• Automatically checks for new version
• New tweet notification windows
• Localized to English, German, Italian, and Spanish

Installation

To install Twhirl, visit Twhirl’s website and on the right side you’ll see links to download Adobe AIR and Twhirl.  If you don’t yet have Adobe’s integrated runtime environment (AIR) installed, follow the instructions you see to install it.  Once AIR is installed, click the download/”install now” link and you should see the AIR application installer begin to download and install the Twhirl application.  Follow the on screen instructions to complete.

Configuration

When you load the application for the first time, you’ll need to set up your Twitter account(s).  Enter your screen name, and another box will prompt you for your password.  You will also see a few additional tabs.  The first being “Colors” which allows you to modify Twhirl’s visual theme.  The second is “Language” where you can select between English, German, Italian, and Spanish.  And the final tab being “Update” where you can check if a newer version exists.

Sending Tweets

99% of your time using Twhirl will be spent looking at the main Twhirl screen after you successfully connect.  From this screen you will see the “river” of new tweets rolling down as they arrive.  You can also post tweets by typing your message in the input box.  Please make not of the TwitPic and “Shorten URL” icons on the right of the input box for a couple very useful tools.

Additionally, you have 9 view types that you can choose from in the drop-down.  These views range from the standard “Timeline” view with is the tweets from those you are following, viewing the archive of your own tweets, viewing your followers’ bios, searching tweetscan.com, and a few more very useful views.

Gripes & Suggestions

I’ve already covered many of the upsides to using Twhirl, but I do have a few gripes and suggestions that I hope the developer can address in future releases:

• When you lookup profiles inside Twhirl, you should be able to at a minimum, click a link that takes you to the user’s Twitter account.  Optimally, I’d like to have the information on how many followers the user has, and how many people they are following.
• When starting up the application, only notify me of direct/reply tweets I haven’t yet read, not all of them.
• Add TweetBurner.com to the list of short URLs.
• Add a Quotably link to each tweet.

Conclusion

Twhirl is my 5th Twitter client over the past 4-5 months, and really, the majority of that time has been spent on Twhirl because it has been my favorite, by far.  I have stuck with it because it offers all the essential functionality I need out of a twitter client, and then some.  It also happens to be the first Adobe AIR application I have actually had a good experience with and it gives me hope for the future for this platform.

Also, check out these reviews for other Twitter clients

• Twitterfox: A Twitterfox Review
• Twitterific: A Review of Twitterific
• TwitterBerry: TwitterBerry, combining BlackBerry and Twitter
• Twitterfeed: A review of Twitterfeed
• Twitbin: Twitter and TwitBin - Microblogging Made Easy
• The Guide to Being a Drunken, Debaucherous Twit
• Netvibes: Using Netvibes for SMO

written by Derek \\ tags: adobe air, twhirl, twitter

So I had my ‘Mahalo moment’ yesterday, but, is it what Jason & Mahalo expect?

For those looking for a good place to get an idea of what Mahalo is good at, here are some pages to get you started that I stumbled across or others suggested.  Please add some more links to pages in the comments to help people, like myself, who were completely clueless at what Mahalo was good at or useful for.Good Mahalo links

• Social Media
• How to Write a Resume
• Auschwitz
• Phantom of the Opera
• Maya Angelou

In conclusion. I think Mahalo, in it’s current form, has a purpose and an audience, and that happens to not be the tech-savvy crowd who is serviced very well by Google right now. In time, I think Mahalo will have the content tech-savvy users will want, but, will they provide an intelligent mechanism to get to it? Hopefully. Google & Wikipedia need some competition.

written by Derek \\ tags: mahalo

Some people have been wondering how much having Jason Calacanis link to your blog in his twitter feed (twice) and his blog?  Well, some initial numbers from the last 24 hours…

• About 70 new Twitter followers.  With each of his two tweets directed at me, I instantly gained about 15 new followers, and then the rest scattered in throughout the rest of the day.
• 910 new visits to my blog with 1.36 pages/visit
• The viddler video now has 650+ views from my blog, and another 600+ views on the viddler site.

Any other statistics people were wondering?

written by Derek \\ tags: jason calacanis

The journey continues…

So, I think I have a pretty good idea of what Mahalo can/can’t do at this point and I have a theory as to why the ‘TechCrunch 100,000′ (as Jason calls us) have such a problem with the site.  That’s a post for later though.

written by Derek \\ tags: mahalo

After railing on his site enough, I promised Jason Calacanis I’d take a fair look at his latest startup (Mahalo.com) and say something nice about it, well… once I was actually about to find something.  So here’s the first video of my experience hunting around Mahalo.com for a “positive” and not just looking at it as polluting the internet with more spam.

As you can see, the hunt will continue for yet another day.  By the end of the week, I’m determined to at least find something.

P.S. This is my first experience using Viddler and wow… Much nicer than YouTube.  YouTube certainly has its purpose on the internet and I think there is room for both.

written by Derek \\ tags: mahalo viddler

CNN Link

Their justification for allowing two companies to merge when there are no other competitors is that XM/Sirius really does have competitors aside from terrestrial radio, and they’re the internet and iPods.

I’ll roll with that as far as non-live content.  Sure shows like Stern are live, but that can easily be offered as a podcast later that day and the listening experience be just the same.  But when you are talkig about live events, like NFL games, that’s where I totally disagree with that decision.  Now there is only one non-terrestrial radio service as a medium, and that is XM/Sirius.  No competition for contracts, no competition for suscriber fees, etc…  Those can’t be offered as podcasts (yet).

Oh well, I’m not, and don’t plan to subscribe to either, so guess I can’t complain much.  I’m sure the XM fanboys are bitching that “Great, now XM is going to suck just like Sirius” and the Sirius fanboys are saying the same thing.

written by Derek

 

A little over a month ago I sent out a tweet that essentially said mahalo.com was worthless, had no value, and looked like "content throw up." Well, as you can probably tell, I’ve never really seen the value in Mahalo.com and I’m sure this isn’t what Jason Calacanis (Mahalo’s CEO) wants to hear considering he expects Mahalo.com to have 30%-50% of web searches within 5 years.

So today I read a post at seobook.com about how, according to Google’s definition of spam sites, Mahalo.com should be classified as search engine spam.

Final Notes on Spam When trying to decide if a page is Spam, it is helpful to ask yourself this question: if I remove the scraped (copied) content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is there anything of value left? if the answer is no, the page is probably Spam.

So that led me to think about comparing this Mahalo page on "Best computer speakers" to this average spam scraper result page on "Best computer speakers." (FYI, the latter of which that pollutes the internet and gets blocked from search engines) What’s the difference? Not a whole lot. Neither page gives me the information I’m looking for, but they both link to the information I want.  Both use affiliate links to generate revenue for themselves, and neither contains much, if any, original content. 

On the upside for the scraper site, it actually provides links to 20 different sites that can help me find the best computer speakers, and I can use my own judgement to determine the best one and click it.  On the flipside, Mahalo only provides affiliate links to Amazon and 4 other review sites, which further distances me from my goal of finding a variety of sources to buy my new speakers.  And based off my shopping experience over the last 10 years, I really like PriceGrabber, which the spam site has a link to, but Mahalo doesn’t.

This is obviously a multi-year endevour for Calacanis and Mahalo appears to be far from ready for primetime.  I’m really interested to see what Calacanis will have his army of undervalued & volunteer scrapers do over the next couple years to keep themselves in the game, and especially from being blocked by the search engines they are competing with. 

Hey Jason, just because you are paying people to create your pages instead of having automated scripts create them, doesn’t make it anymore valuable to the user.  What really makes pages valuable is a majority of original content and not just providing links to the original content.

written by Derek \\ tags: calacanis, Google, mahalo, search engine, spam

St Patrick’s Day is no doubt the greatest holiday out there. I love irish rock, and I love the experience of all day bar-hopping. So, here’s 6 songs to get you in the mood for some St Patty’s Day drinking.

Flogging Molly - Drunken Lullabies

Flogging Molly - Laura

Flogging Molly - Devil’s Dance Floor

The Pogues - Dirty Old Town

The Pogues - Love You Till The End

The Pogues - If I Should Fall From the Grace of God

written by Derek

Due to Yahoo Buzz, this TechCrunch article appeared on the Yahoo.com homepage, and wow… 1000+ comments later it’s almost as if mom & dad went away for the weekend and the kids trashed the house.  Talk about some of the most clueless commenters ever.

TechCrunch did a follow-up that analyzes Buzz’s impact two weeks in.  Yahoo says they’ve sent 16 million users from the site in those two weeks and have given pretty much every site it links to record traffic.  TechCrunch, a highly trafficked Tech news site could hardly stay up.

It’ll be interesting to see the implications of Buzz and how many servers it can melt.

written by Derek

About 18 months ago I wrote a blog post, iPod Killer… Found.  In that post, I

analyzed what would finally kill the iPod, and the requirements I said needed to exist on this mythical device was:

• Media player
• Good quality video camera
• Large amount of storage space
• Doubles as a cell-phone
• Easy access to a store to get new media (free and purchase)
• Always-on broadband internet access
• Allows access to media sharing services like Flickr and YouTube
• Exchange integration with “Push” email
• Access to GMail, Hotmail, and Yahoo accounts
• Has to be “cool” and easy to use

And my prediction for who it would be?  Microsoft + Yahoo.  Oh man was I wrong. C’mon, Microsoft had the most feature rich mobile OS at the time, they had to be the top contender, right?  Not even close.  Windows Mobile is pretty much exactly the same as it was back then, and they really missed the boat.  I didn’t even figure Google into the equation, and they stand a much better chance to beat out Microsoft with Android.

Well, it looks like the iPod has finally been replaced by its cousin, the iPhone.  I just finished watching the Apple SDK announcement presentation and it’s very clear that it is going to be a revolutionary platform for mobile devices.  Don’t believe that?  Venture capital fund Kleiner Perkins will disagree with you too.

It’s just a reminder that you have to innovate to stay on top.  Nice work Apple.

written by Derek \\ tags: apple, Google, ipod, Microsoft, yahoo