Tweetree Blog

So what is Tweetree in one sentence?

It’s a web-based Twitter client that gives context to replies, and follows links to show embedded content like pictures and videos.

What does this look like in practice?  Here’s a few tweets from Dave Winer on twitter.com:

Here’s what those tweets look like on Tweetree:

There are two main things going on here:

1. When Tweetree sees a reply (typically a twitter message that starts with “@username”), it sees which message this was in reply to, and shows that “tweet” as well.  This gives a lot more context to all those replies, so you don’t feel like you’re just seeing one half of a two-way conversation.  In the case where a reply is in reply to another reply, you can hover over the tweet and click “full conversation” to follow up the tree even more.
2. All links that appear in tweets are analyzed.  More and more often I find people posting links in their messages.  A brief test that I ran over a 24 hour period found that close to 25% of the tweets on the public timeline contained links of some kind.  Most of the time, links are shortened with services like tinyurl.com and bit.ly, to keep the messages within the 140 character limit.  This means that you usually have to click the links to see where they go, and what kind of content they contain.

Minimally, Tweetree will show the title and root URL of all links it finds.  In many cases though, we’re able to embed additional content for things like images and videos.  Currently, the services we support include Twitpic, YouTube, Flickr, FriendFeed, Qik, Seesmic, Blip.fm and more.  We plan to support even more as time goes on.

This all started from a post written by Dave Winer called “The space between Twitter and FriendFeed”.  While Twitter provides a great base for microblogging, it lacks the visual richness that a site like FriendFeed provides.  We hope Tweetree will help fill this “space between” these two sites.

You can see anyone’s Twitter stream on Tweetree by visiting tweetree.com/<username>.  For example, my page is http://tweetree.com/cwalcott.  You can also do searches.  A fun one to periodically refresh is for twitpic: http://tweetree.com/search?q=twitpic.  If you choose to login to Tweetree with your Twitter account, you can see your friends stream as you would on twitter.com, and post through Tweetree. (Incidentially, we’re planning on supporting OAuth for Twitter as soon as it’s released.)

To follow new features as they come out, you can subscribe to this blog, and also follow us on Twitter (http://twitter.com/tweetree).  We’d also love to hear everyone’s ideas, so we’ve setup a Uservoice page at http://tweetree.uservoice.com.

About us: We’re a Boston-area consulting firm called Draconis Software, focusing on Rails, Java and iPhone development. You can learn more about us at http://dracoware.com.