If you have spent any time at all talking to me or reading this blog, you know that I am a huge Twitter fan. Twitter has become the number one buzz word of the Web over the past few months. Everyone is talking about it. Now I have to say, that even though I use it and convince others to use it, there really is a lot of room for improvement.
Twitter users apparently agree and are therefore trying to enhance the Twitter experience in any way possible. Some of these ideas really do make tweeting more enjoyable, and others just complicate things. Lately, a new service was introduced that begs the question “How did no one think of this before?”
The name of the service is Topify, and you can follow the developers on Twitter here and here.
So what does it do?
Topify enables you to perform basic Twitter functions like following users, or replying to DMs all from your email inbox. Sounds pretty obvious, right? Yea, well it is. When someone follows you, you receive an email notification with some basic information that was missing from Twitter’s email notification. Topify tells you who they are, how many followers they have, how many people they are following, where they are located, how long they have been on Twitter, their Website, and their last tweet.
Here is the best part!
You can choose to follow them back by replying to the email or not by deleting it. You can also reply to DMs via email without ever opening up Twitter. They really did a great job here.
Why do I need this?
Well, I could think of many reasons one would want to use this service, but I will share the one reason that I love it so much. I very often tweet from my iPod Touch or my mobile phone. Now I do not need to go into the disadvantages of today’s mobile browsers, but Topify enables you to totally skip that step and just perform the action from your inbox, brilliant!
The aspect that I love most about Topify as a service or a company, are the people. What I mean is that the developers are accessible via Twitter. They listen to your feedback and implement your requests (if they are good enough). They are both really nice guys and you can see based on the daily improvements (love the new highlighted text in the email) in the Topify service that they are really trying, and that they care.
Click the image to see it in its original size
I am really excited to see where Topify goes and how they improve the offering even more!
-Hillel
Hi, I have a love / frustrated relationship with Twitter. Do you not wish that all these great features were accessible from a single service, i.e. Twitter? Imagine if the Facebook UI was reliant on third parties building one using the Facebook API. You would end up with 20 fragmented interfaces with various degress of functionality. I am more selfish maybe, but I would love Twitter to be built around my needs. I use it to help cure a terrible addiction (as I describe here http://connectedthought.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/mytwitter2/) but find the experience hard to manage. Yes some features maybe complicated, but I think Twitter has so much more to offer the wider community other than a stream of consciousness. Maybe I could convince you to join my campaign to get Twitter to build my version.
I hear what you are saying, and even argued this exact point a few weeks ago. What I was told then and am telling you now is, I think Twitter is what it is due to its simplicity. The reason Twitter will “beat” FB is FB is too much. Also, don’t forget that this is not an application, it is a service that implements itself in your email. Use Digsby on PC, TweetDeck on Mac, TwitterFon on iPhone and you are set 🙂
@hilzfuld – thanks for the review! We’re excited just like you about the future stuff we’re going to release 🙂 Glad to have you onboard as a beta user.
@Andy – the way I see it is: there’s no one way of using Twitter (and not any other service/product). Twitter staff can’t create all the features for all the users (and it will create bloatware anyway), so they allow different people create their own view of Twitter, while not disturbing others with unneeded features.
that is so cool!