Now, I use Twhirl for tracking and responding to Twitter too.

Lack of Thread Monitoring

My biggest compliant or frustration with Twitter is the lack of "thread monitoring".

Here's the issue:
I'm following @smazurov on Twitter, and I see that he's posting comments on Twitter to someone that I'm not personally following. Example below is @smazurov is posting to a comment made to @xbrowne:

Now, since I'm NOT following @xbrowne, I can't see the original post that @smazurov is responding to unless I go directly to @xbrowne's twitter post.

I relate this to the equivalent of buying a movie ticket and only getting to listen to one actor in the movie. You miss all the other conversational context in which that actor is relating too.

Personally, I use Quotably.com to track conversations on Twitter. This is what Quotably is able to do for the conversation mentioned above:



Now I can see what Twitter post @smazurov was responding to, in addition, I can see what other people are involved in the quac-blocked conversation.

So the killer app for Twhirl is to provide the conversational thread monitoring in Twitter on Twhirl.

In the meantime - it's Twitter Me Insane. I'll keep spending my day between Twhirl, Quotably and Summize to try and get a real picture of what's happening on Twitter.

BTW, you can follow me on Twitter at:

http://www.twitter.com/jamesoclark

and stalk me Friendfeed at:

http://www.friendfeed.com/jamesclark