I just recently started using twitter. I enjoy using it to chat with my friends (cheaper than text messages) or just send random bits of nonsense into the depths of the internets. Originally, I was using twitter's mobile web interface on my iPhone but it lacks a few features that, particularly on the iPhone, would make it really shine. I recently stumbled upon Pocket Tweets. It's got a really sharp, iPhone formatted UI and it has all the features I was looking for. Unfortunately, after trying it out for a week or so, I've gone back to the vanilla twitter setup.
What happened? The problem I have with Pocket Tweets is that the page is too heavy. I takes too long to load. Even when I'm on a Wi-Fi network it loads very slowly. On EDGE, it's glacial. Worse than that, the page will hang as it's loading up the twitters. I find myself having to refresh the page multiple times to get it to go.
I was hoping that the page, once loaded, would have some handy-dandy AJAX kung-fu to auto-refresh the twitters so I can see messages as they come in. Unfortunately, it doesn't. I have to refresh the page and it's back to the long wait. The same problem happens when I post a message - the page says the message was posted but it doesn't show it on the screen. I have to refresh the page to confirm the message went live. Refresh, refresh, refresh.
Ultimately, the slim profile of the twitter mobile page outweighed the better feature set but extremely sluggish performance of the Pocket Tweets page. Hopefully, they'll be able to work their web mojo and improve things a bit. If they do, I'll definitely give it another shot. Until then, I'll just keep posting random ramblings through the twitter mobile page.
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