Five Free Must Have Twitter iPhone Apps
April 15, 2009
I have a confession to make. I love free apps for my iPhone! I hate paying even $0.99 for iPhone apps because there are so many great free ones out there. I’ve been doing some research to find the best free twitter iPhone apps and these are the five that I think everyone should have.
- Twittelator
Twittelator is the best all-around free twitter app I’ve found for the iPhone. It allows you to do custom searches and it saves the search each time you do a new search. It gives you quite a few different categories of tweets to browse, which Twittelator calls Groups, including featured Tweets, your own tweets, friends’ tweets, everyone’s tweets, favorites and more. It gives you twitter profiles with stats too.You can not only use follow, unfollow and favorites from this app, but you can also bookmark twitter accounts that you aren’t sure you want to follow but you want to be able to find again. The one thing it seems you can not do easily is retweet.
According to the info icon in the free version of Twittelator, Twittelator Pro has even more features for those of you that don’t mind shelling out a few pecos. Pro gives you the ability to use dingbats and upload your location and search nearby. The most important feature is that it allows you to control multiple twitter accounts on your iphone. It also allows you to email and retweet tweets unlike the free version. Twittelator Pro is $4.99 in the iTunes app store.
- Twitterfon
Twitterfon has a simpler interface than Twittelator and not quite as many Groups of tweets to read, but it does have a lot of the features you would look for in an all-around Twitter app. The tabs available in Twitterfon are:
- Friends – To read the tweets of the people you follow
- Replies – To read tweets that are public replies to you and include @yourtwitterusername in them
- Messages – To read your direct messages
- Favorites – To read tweets you’ve marked as favorites
- Search – Twitterfon includes a nice basic search that allows you to search for terms of interest.
All of the above tabs let you know when you have more messages. The best part about Twitterfon is that once you click on a tweet you are given a lot of options. You can reply, favorite, retweet or visit the included link in the programs built-in browser. You also have the options to see the tweeter’s profile and stats, follow them or unfollow them and see their public timeline. These are actually the features that may make Twitterfon a better Twitter app than Twittelator.
- Retweet
Retweet is just exactly what the name suggests. It is an app to see tweets that have been retweeted and retweet them yourself. It keeps a count of the number of times a tweet has been retweeted too. It allows you to see tweets from the last 30 minutes, 3 hours, 12 hours and 24 hours.Cons – Retweet doesn’t have a lot of added functionality which does make for a very simple interface, but some of the lacking features stand out as things I really need to have when using this app, like the lack of ability to favorite a tweet that’s been retweeted. Maybe I would like to come back to a tweet, but I don’t think it would be of interest to everyone. Instead, if you want to come back to a tweet you find in this app you almost have to retweet it, so you can find it again in your own updates. I would just suggest being careful when using this app so you don’t overload your followers with retweets.
Pros – It is a very helpful app for finding materials that others have found interesting enough to retweet and materials you want to share with your followers.
- TwitterTrend
TwitterTrend is an app that finds the hot, rising and emerging trends on twitter. Right now, it is telling me that Adam Lambert and American Idol are hot, iPhone app is rising, and “consumer prices fall” is emerging. Here is what Twittertrend says about it’s algorithm:
- Hot: Most popular topics in the last 24 hours
- Rising: Fastest rising topics in the last few hours
- Emerging: New topics just emerging in the last few hours
This is a great app for finding out what people are talking about on twitter. Using this tool allows you to make sure your tweets or blog posts are relavant to current events.
- Twitterlink
This is a pretty cool little app once you figure out how to use it. You install it on your iPhone then create a javascript bookmark to this app in safari on the iphone. Then, it allows you to find sites you want to tweet in safari and launch them from your Twitterlink bookmark. The cool part is it automatically gives you a short URL to tweet. This twitter app has only one function, but it is an important function and it does it well.
Other apps you should be using with Twitter:
- ShoutNow - Put your voice messages on twitter as a link.
- pic.im – use this tool to tweet pictures you have on your iPhone.
Are there any other twitter iPhone apps you’d recommend? Let us know by posting a comment.
