If you haven’t hopped on the Twitter bandwagon yet, then you’re late to the game. It’s the best way to get easily consumable bits of information fed to you on a regular basis, as well as find out what weird things celebrities do during their off time. But with all that data out there, it can get a bit overwhelming at times. When hearing your Tweetdeck chirp every 30 seconds on your Mac gets irritating or having to scroll through five pages of Twitter for iPhone with your thumb gets tedious, maybe there should be a different option. Something simple.
That’s what Trickle is all about. Get your tweets one at a time, in a nicely consumable bite. It’s like the perfect snack of information. But is it worth the money? Let’s find out after the jump.
Setup
Once the app is launched on your iPhone, setup is fairly easy. Start off by logging into your Twitter account, then adjust the look of the display to your preferences. If you want to turn on rotation, go for it. If you want to display the big buttons on the corner of the app, you can make that adjustable as well. Better yet, you can determine how long it is between tweets, which is pretty important.
Setup your Trickle and get ready to receive your tweets.
What It Is
Trickle is designed as more of a background tool than an in-your-face app. Ideally, your iPhone is setup in a dock with Trickle running. The display stays on as long as the app is running, with new tweets filtering in every 1-5 minutes. So don’t expect this to pop in with new messages when they come in, because Trickle is all about being passive rather than active.
See? It says it's a passive app right there in the About Us page.
This makes reading your tweets quick and unobtrusive. Imagine setting your iPhone in a dock by your computer and then doing your job all day. It makes reading your feed fast, and it doesn’t interrupt your work flow like other desktop options. You won’t be picking up Trickle for when you want to read all of your tweets, but it’s great for a quick break from work.
What It’s Not
Well, it’s not Twitter for iPhone, which is not only the officially sanctioned Twitter app, but pretty impressive in itself. Instead, Trickle goes on the premise that keeping up on Twitter can be time consuming, particularly if you have a large group of people that you’re following. If you catch up once an hour, that can be several dozen tweets, and if it’s longer, it can be 100 or more. If you’re using a feed program on your desktop, then you’re always getting interrupted, which is counterproductive.
Tweets display on a black background.
And that’s what makes Trickle different. It’s not going to hound you every second, but instead will slowly give you the tweets as they come, and not necessarily in any particular order.
There’s another issue too, and that’s the linking – or lack thereof. If you read Twitter for the great links to news stories, pics or videos, then Trickle isn’t going to work for you. Since it’s designed for passive use, there is no ability to click a link and check it out on Safari. You can favorite a tweet if you like it, or even retweet it out to the world if you hold down one of the corner buttons. But otherwise, this is a view only situation, and there is no real interaction.
Do I Need This?
Let me explain my typical Twitter regimen and then I’ll answer the question. Every day, I wake up, pivot around to put my feet on the floor, and I check my Twitter feed. A few minutes later, I check e-mail, then I’m off to start my morning. As the day progresses, I sneak off to see what’s new on my feed as I have time, and sometimes I’ll even try to catch up to old stuff, which is more than a little bit futile.
I’ve spent some time with Trickle now, and it fits quite nicely into that schedule. Instead of checking throughout the day, my iPhone sits on its dock, Trickle running the whole time, and I check in when something new pops up. It’s not obtrusive enough to get in my way, and if I do see something I like, I can’t be tempted to click on a link and lose myself in the Internet because it’s just not a possibility. Instead, it all just works. And better yet, if my iPhone isn’t nearby, I can use the iPad as a display as well. Nice.
Is it the app for everyone? No, not really. But for me, I find the constant flow of stimulus pretty nice — almost like a stock ticker for my computer. It forces me to resist temptation while still keeping me informed at the same time. It’s a different way of looking at Twitter, that’s for sure, but it’s one that works for me.