AppFlow

Streamlining twitter with Echofon

Echofon

When it comes to twitter clients, there is a lot of choice out there.  Already on AppFlow, we’ve reviewed Tweetie and TweetDeck, both with their own way of providing you with quick, streamlined access to your twitter feeds.

Today, however, it’s the turn of a twitter client that has managed to convert me in a matter of hours.  There is a Mac, iPhone and firefox version of this app.  It’s neat, quick, and really easy to use.  Allow me to introduce: Echofon!

The Interface

There are a number of things that you want from the interface of a twitter client.  You want to have all of your little notifications, but you want the majority of the window to be focused on  what is important – your tweets.

Echofon Interface

Echofon does this brilliantly.  The top bar contains your buttons for your ‘All Friends’, ‘@Mentions’, ‘Direct Messages’, ‘Lists’ and ‘Searches’.  These buttons update to let you know when something new is going on under that section.  Any @ mentions are highlighted in green in the main window and indicated by a green line on the scroll bar.  This is very useful for quickly scrolling through your ‘all friends’ feed to find mentions in context.

Notifications

Keeping up with Conversations

Like many twitter clients, Echofon offers you a convenient and easy way to keep up with your conversations on twitter.  A ‘conversation’ is a series of @ replies between users.  Echofon recognises this and displays a blue speech bubble next to a tweet that it has detected as part of a conversation.  Clicking it shows the conversation in it’s entirety.

Conversation Mode

Keeping a finger on the pulse

There are certain things that get your attention in the ‘all friends’ feed.  When your sitting at your computer it’s easy to glance at a tweet to see if it interests you.  When you get back to your computer, however, you may have over 50 tweets to leaf through.  This would be time consuming to read each one so, let’s face it, we all just leave them!

Twitter have recently attempted to fix this problem through the use of lists (also supported in Echofon), but Echofon has it’s own, special way of notifying you to potentially useful tweets – highlights.

Highlights

Highlights work in exactly the same way as @ mentions in the ‘all friends’ feed.  Echofon highlights them in green and places a green line on the scrollbar indicating their location in the whole feed.  This is very useful for finding just the interesting tweets in a list of many!

I’m Syncing!

By downloading the Echofon Pro App for your iPhone or iPod Touch, you can sync your read and unread tweets to your mobile device.  This is surprisingly useful, as it means that if you read something while out and about – it doesn’t appear as ‘unread’ on your mac (and vice versa).  Echofon iPhone also has a whole host of other features that make it a very nice addition to your twitter experience!

Conclusion

Echofon is a twitter client with a few neat features up it’s sleeves to make your tweeting experience one that is quick, easy and generally pain free.  The app is beautifully designed to be as small as possibly, and yet still has amazing functionality.

Echofon Mac is completely free!  As is Echofon Firefox!

Echofon iPhone has a free, ad-supported version (with less features) or the full, Pro version, available for £2.99.