Twitter

Who knew Twitter would become so popular when it made its debut at the 2007 SXSW Conference? The micro-blogging social startup was fueled by the fire of SXSW and has become a household name in the digital industry ever since (even though the site launched nine months prior to the conference). The Twitter app allows you to follow your interests and develop new ones with a mobile version of the social-networking mogul. 

The official Twitter mobile apps for iPhone and Android debuted in 2010. It’s easy to obtain short and quick bursts of information from individuals or brands that you actually care about. Twitter boasts real-time search capabilities, trending topics, and of course tweeting and retweeting. You can easily browse and search for your interests.

The concept and design of the app is simple for acute social users such as yourself, but is also easy to use as a novice. You can easily scroll up and down to review your Twitter feed, or tap on one of the four options in the bottom navigation bar. You can also follow or unfollow, send a direct message, reply and retweet with the tap of a finger.

The Twitter mobile app gives you everything you’re looking for in the service with a clean, organized user interface. The navigation bar is divided up into four sections. Home allows you to access your Twitter feed; Connect shows you who you have been mentioned by or who has retweeted your tweets; Discover boasts the popular hashtags of the day (and you can search for an infinite amount); and then there is the Me page that is dedicated to your personal Twitter profile. Here you can access your tweets, direct messages, lists, saved searches, followers and more. You can also quickly see things that are trending at the top of the screen, or just pull down everything to update the feed (however, we wish it did this automatically).

While this is a no-frills way to deal with Twitter, you still get some cool functions, like the ability to include photos from your phone in your Twitter updates or add GPS location tracking to them. Compare this to what you can do with an app like TweetDeck (follow multiple Twitter accounts in different columns on the page, as well as Facebook, for example), and the Twitter app feels a bit simplistic. The Twitter mobile app is stable and useful—everything you could ever really need with your own Twitter profile.

We love Twitter, which is why we also love to use other Twitter clients such as Tweetbot or Tweetcaster. (We even got to interview an app developer of Tweetcaster, so check it out!)

Reviewed: May 23, 2011 | Kelsey Trabue

Also featured on: 4 Good Apps for Twitter Addicts