An idea for a truely seamless Twitter client
Since my Twitter reach is not exactly epic, and since I would like someone to actually implement this, I’m posting it here. The idea, which can be implemented fairly simply by those more adept at Android/iOS programming, is simple: a Twitter experience that goes from device to device, picking up where you left off. I’m only going to discuss a seamless Twitter here as the idea applies to any social media or news feed, so you can substitute Facebook, Reddit, or Fark for Twitter.
If you’re like me you probably have a computer with Twitter open somewhere. You’ll get notifications on your cell phone or tablet, and when you go from one to the other, you have to scroll back down the Twitter feed to figure out where you left off, or you have to read in reverse order until you reach something you’ve already read.
For me, I manage a couple of brands on Twitter at work and home, and I also try to keep up with my friends on Twitter. This means other than days when I’m swamped, the chances are that I’m on Twitter on multiple devices, and on multiple devices I’m probably struggling to figure out where to start reading from again. I’ll also routinely have to clear notifications on each device from which I access Twitter, and will walk in the door to see a few devices blinking at me for notifications I dismissed hours ago elsewhere.
The solution is fairly simple – a client that keeps track on a remote server of the last hour/minute/second of the post that you were looking at, and also of the time of the last dismissed notification. When you go to the next device it just checks to see where you last were and positions you there. Notifications similarly could be stored as last dismissed notification time, if the time is more recent than what your tablet at home is trying to notify you of, dismiss it via the client rather than the operator.
All that has to be stored server side is a username, and a timestamp for last read and a timestamp for last dismissed. A push and pull of less than 100 bytes each time a client was activated does not require a powerhouse backend server farm either, and could probably be done with a decent hosting package. It wouldn’t take much finagling to create a web page interface as well.
That’s the idea – now someone take and run with it, or if they have already, please point me to it so I can take this down. Applications like Fabrik reader and Google Books implement this already, so why isn’t it common in the social media world where it would do a lot of good?
