Like many of you, I’m addicted to reading Twitter. And not surprisingly, I’m also addicted to reading feeds. So you’d think I’d love reading my Twitter feeds in FeedDemon, right?
Unfortunately, no. The problem is that Twitter feeds are plain text – no hyperlinks, no images, no nothing. As a result, reading Twitter feeds is a bland experience in any feed reader. For example, here’s how an item in a Twitter feed looks in FeedDemon 2.x:
That’s a boring way to view a Twitter stream, so I’ve spruced things up in FeedDemon 3.0:
As you can see, there are a number of improvements. First, URLs are automatically hyperlinked and benefit from the short URL preview feature I mentioned last week. Author names and @replies are automatically hyperlinked as well so you can click to view that person’s Twitter stream. I’ve also added hyperlinking of #hashtags – just click to go to a Twitter search page which shows all tweets with that same hashtag. And since Twitter isn’t meant to be a read-only service, I’ve added a “Reply” icon to enable replying to a specific tweet.
Last but not least, I’ve also added profile pictures. Unfortunately, you’ll only see them if the feed is in a folder that isn’t synchronized, and then only when you’re subscribed to the Atom version of the feed (they’re not included in the RSS version). Hopefully the Twitter folks will make it possible to determine a user’s profile image from their username, since that would enable always showing the profile image.