MacExcellence
My Ultimate Social Networking Client/App
Fri, December 18, 2009
“In search of the perfect Social Networking App…”
I'm a guy who likes to find the perfect app for the given task. The search usually starts out fun enough, and then devolves into frustration. I've searched for the perfect GTD app, the perfect Time Management app, the perfect Billing and Account Management app, the perfect…well, you get the idea.
Considering the social networking maelstrom of Facebook–as-Business-Tool, Twitter (is it anything but a business tool?) and LinkedIn (the original social networking business tool), plus any variety of other SocNet ingredients you care to add to the pot, "there's an app for that" might not be exactly what you want to hear.
I wanted an app to harness all the tools I use, which right now consist of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I've tried virtually every iteration of Twitter app available. Some are beautiful. Like TweetDeck. And Tweetie. And Tweetr. And Twitteriffic. They all strike me as variations on a theme, and I keep finding them lacking in one way or another, and go back to my search. I used Seesmic Desktop for a while, but it was limiting and never felt quite right, being all Adobe Air and all. It always felt like a nice, fancy Java app, and I am…well…distracted by Java apps. Facebook is Facebook, there's an app for that and, ultimately, it resides at the .com by the same name. LinkedIn? Same song.
What's an OCD/ADD App-Happy searcher to do?
What's Old Is New Again
Well, there's HootSuite. I'd created an account back when, but its main failing for me was that it's a website, not an app. Feature-wise it was ok, but not quite ready–for–primetime. On revisiting it, however, it now does almost everything I want it to do. Let's see…
- Aggregates Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. ALL of them…Check.
- Allows me to choose which account(s) RT's and Replies and Posts are from…Check.
- Allows me to post to multiple accounts from a single-entry…Check.
Allows me to follow the thread of a Twitter conversation so I can easily recall what that "reply" is actually about…Check.- Provides a built–in URL shortener…Check.
Note: The built-in shortener is owl.ly This bugged me at first until I realized that HootSuite's integrated some nice tracking services via Owl.ly, so I can track the success of my tweets, see how many folks have retweeted, clicked, etc. Nice. 
Allows me to have multiple saved searches (Twitter)…Check.- Allows me to Follow/Unfollow/Friend/Unfriend from within HootSuite itself…Check.
- And some features I never knew I wanted (or needed) but absolutely love:
- Scheduled Tweets.
- Twitter Lists: Import, create, manage, all within HootSuite.
- The ability to assign "team" members to manage your Twitter account(s). Perfect for a business account that needs more than one pair of eyeballs.
- Customizable columns for your friends, groups or topics of interest.
- Feed your RSS from your Twitter Stream.
- Ping.fm integration
It's got pretty much everything I want, except for one feature that I really liked in Seesmic Desktop: the ability to word-shorten a post. You know, "to" becomes "2," "for" becomes "4," etc. Not that I'm a fan of this as a norm, but when you need to squeeze out a few to fit your 140 characters, it can be invaluable, especially since I am decidedly not up on the norms for doing so. But short of that, it really does everything I need it to do.
So why do I resist it?
Oh yeah. It's a WEB app. I'm not a fan of using my browser as an app-base.
I house my Gmail accounts within Apple's Mail.app.
I use a client for Pandora listening.
Et cetera, et cetera.
What's even older is even newer…again
And then I remembered what was a hyped up bit of technology about 18 months ago: turning a web-app into a real app! (cue Pinocchio.) I checked my disabled Firefox add-ons, and there it was: Prism. A splinter of the Mozilla project, it never seemed to generate as much traction as buzz, and I disabled it after playing with it briefly.
Re-enabling it was a snap.
Then I visited the HootSuite Homepage.
Then I chose "Convert Website to Application" from the "Tools" menu.
After saving the "shortcut" in my Applications folder, I had an app that I could launch independent of my browser. It could live in my Dock. It would run in its own memory space. It could be set to launch at startup. It would not be accidentally closed if I closed all my browser windows (big one). Its preferences (mostly font prefs here) could be set independently of my browser. When I Cmd-Tab to it, it's just there. Waiting. The first time I launched it it prompted me to login. I checked the little "Remember Me" dingy and it's never bothered me again. Launch and I'm in.
Here's a nice bit: If I close the main app window (OCD, recall — I like to keep things tidy) when I Cmd-Tab back to it…it RE-OPENS! Sweet Mother's Milk, I love this setup! I realized that the reason I was having a problem embracing the app was the same reason I had embracing all web apps: they're intrinsically tied into my browsing experience and my brain somehow wants to categorize them differently. Social networking is not browsing, and my brain was out ahead of me on that. With the browser abstracted to an app form–factor, it all worked better for me. It finally clicked into my workflow.
Now it just works. Click on the Dock icon and my HootSuite APP (thank-you-very-much) launches.
The image above shows my Dock icon to prove it.
(And, yes, that's my Google Wave app a couple of icons down! Maybe that will be another post.)
I highly recommend that you give HootSuite a revisit if you're still searching for what works for you. Try it out as a Prism app. (Learn more about Prism.)
You might be pleasantly surprised.
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