Recently, for various reasons, I started two additional twitter accounts besides my own, one professional and another a parody of sorts among friends. I’m a heavy user of Tweetdeck (TD), both on my Mac and my Droid, but TD doesn’t handle multiple accounts very well other than personal ones. I’m giving Hootsuite a try this week and after two days, it isn’t doing a good job of winning me over.
Some observations and comparisons to TD:
1. No background processes. If you want to attach a photo with that tweet you’re stuck waiting until that photo uploads before going back to check your timeline or do anything else within Hootsuite. My phone service is through US Cellular. Much to my dismay, they have yet to launch 3G service in St. Louis and surrounding areas. That photo is going to take five or more minutes if I’m moving around. Not okay for my twitter use.
2. Again with background processes. If I load up a user’s profile, it loads the entire profile and various attributes like how many followers, tweets and etc, before I can look at something specific like their timeline, mentions, favorites and etc. On my edge network that just isn’t fast enough.
3. Waiting to refresh. Maybe it’s user error, but Hootsuite doesn’t refresh my timeline within a short amount of time since the previous refresh. I’ll hit refresh, but it won’t display new tweets even though I’m watching them go by on TD on my Mac. Imagine waiting five minutes or more during a big event you want to interact about on twitter.
4. Monitoring multiple accounts. Hootsuite wins here. I love the tabs grouped with the different account feeds. Much easier to get to jump around to the different things you want to see rather than the endless columns you would need in TD to accomplish the same task.
5. Mention alerts. Hootsuite does a good job of allowing you to set alerts for the different feeds you follow when you get a new mention, DM and etc. One thing I wish it had was individual control over different streams rather than grouping them all to the same update interval. For example, I may only want to check the mentions of the parody account one or twice a day, rather than every 15 min. like I would want for my personal account.
6. Bugs. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve noticed unless you have all your twitter accounts at the top of your list of social networks, when you go to follow someone within the app you can’t select different twitter accounts if say your foursquare or facebook account is above it. Hard to explain without a demo, but it’s one thing that baffled me for awhile. This goes along with my third point of being probably unintentionally not user friendly.
7. Not saving my location. Say I’m catching up on my timeline from overnight when I wake up and I follow a link that was tweeted around 2am and then go back to finish following the stream, rather than take me back to my spot at 2am, it takes me to the latest tweets forcing me to backtrack hours again. Tweetdeck does this too after straying from your timeline getting to different users and profiles. It will take you to your main feed rather than your last spot. Both apps need to work on this.
8. Ow.ly & Ht.ly. I can’t stand ow.ly links. Weather you want to post an image or a link to somewhere, you are forced to use Hootsuite’s link shortening service rather than bit.ly, yfrog, twitpic and etc. Ow.ly is thought of the same way lockerz is to me (stupid), which is why I will never use that service. Something about the names just rubs me the wrong way. Thankfully Hootsuite has made it an option to use their “social bar” it used to put on all shortened links or not. It’s a matter of preference here, but I like bit.ly and the services it provides over Hootsuite’s ow.ly.
9. No widget. This isn’t an issue for you Apple users, but Android users love their widgets. TD has a nice bar widget I put on my lock screen so I can see at a glance if I have any mentions or updates in the various columns I have if I have it set to auto-update. I also can access the column I want right from when I wake my phone up rather than going through menu options like in Hootsuite. Hootsuite has no widget options. Big turn off for Android users.
Those are the big points after two days of use. If there is any serious user error on my part, feel free to let me know in the comments as well as your experience using Hootsuite vs. TD. I know there are some major differences using TD on iOS vs. Android (I hate TD on iOS.), so keep that in mind if the apps differ from platform to platform.