How To Get The Most Out Of Twitter On Your BlackBerry

The reason why Blackberries are wonderful mobile devices is mainly because of their multithreading capabilities and push services, something I find extremely useful for my daily activities while on the go and that definitely boost my productivity (check why I prefer the BB Bold over the iPhone).

For these reasons, Twitter is a service which fits perfectly with the nature of those devices, being a realtime service which requires realtime interaction with users, in particular when it comes to discovering news and new, interesting content.

I tried several Twitter apps on my Blackberry Bold but there is a huge gap between those apps and the one that is, in my opinion, the best in class: Socialscope. I installed it in January this year (alpha version) and they added lots of new features since then.

Today I received a big gift: version 0.9.5.4, not released yet, but obtained thanks to the wonderful guys at Ubiquitous Systems, inventors of Socialscope. I’ve been testing it out since this morning and my verdict is: it rocks!

Tabs

Socialscope is a tab-based application. You can have multiple tabs for: multiple twitter accounts, Facebook, replies, direct messages, user profiles, searches. You can easily switch from one to another and a little red ribbon informs you that that tab got new updates.

Forwarding

In this new version the “retweet” option has been replaced with “Forward”. When you click on it, you get three options: 1) retweet, 2) send to email, 3) send by SMS. This means that you can retweet that message as well as forward it by email or sms to your contacts. i find this very useful because I find lots of links that I’d like to share with other people who are not on Twitter and I always have to wait for being back at my desk.

Profiles

Now you don’t need to open your browser to look any twitter profile, but it opens them right within the app. Again, very useful, and you can also browse the user’s followers if needed.

Keywords’ Monitoring

One of the features I was missing while on the go was the ability to keep an eye on some keywords I use to monitor on my Mac desktop client. Now you can simply open a new tab with does a twitter search for that keyword.

Push

Ok, not really push, but you can set the interval between refreshes. I use to refresh manually, but you can easily set 1 hour or 2 hours. I don’t recommend shorter intervals since this could run out of battery very quickly. Whenever you get new messages, replies or direct messages (you can choose all of them or just some) you get a notification with an icon near to the emails’ one. Again, very useful.

There are tons of new features with this new version of Socialscope:

- Save Status Updates
- Twitter Profiles
- Save tabs between logouts
- Native Twitter Search
- Native Reply Messages
- Save Search as tabs
- Groups
- Direct Messages Interface
- New Icon
- Option to use Escape to go to Tabs
- Cleaner interface
- Comment on Facebook Updates from within app
- Friends and Followers lists
- $ticker searching
- Rounded corners on pictures
- Read/Unread tracking
- New Message Notification on tabs
- New Update notification in ribbon bar
- Album Preview for Facebook Picture Updates
- Many backend changes
- N&P short cuts work in detail view

… and if you want to get the most out of Twitter on your Blackberry, Socialscope is the right app for you. I would also recommend it as a great Facebook app, too. Now you can leave comments to Facebook status updates from within the app, too.

Apply now for an invite and you will receive soon the passpartout for one of the best apps for Blackberry, ever.

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Tagged as: BlackBerry, BlackberryBold, facebook, luca filigheddu, Social network, socialscope, Twitter