I first learned about Tweet Marker early last month — I wish I could find the original article that I read about it — but at the time there wasn’t a decent Twitter client that supported it. Tweet Marker is a wonderful little services that developers can make use of that will sync the scroll position of your Twitter timeline on multiple devices and/or applications.
On August 9 Twitterrific added support for Tweet Marker and I decided to give it a shot. I was willing to switch Twitter clients because I had reached the point where I was only interacting with Twitter on my iPhone and the frequency of my interaction had fallen off a cliff. I couldn’t get over the fact that when I opened a client on another device my timeline’s scroll position would often be days behind Tweetbot on my iPhone. I was still checking Twitter several times a day but was rarely tweeting or commenting on other Twitter user’s tweets. But, Tweet Marker was going to change all that.
So, I installed Twitterrific on my iPhone and decided to use it as my main client for a while. After just a few hours, I gave up. I had grown accustomed to how Tweetbot worked and having to change my way of thinking to navigate the application was just too much for me. I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to enjoy timeline synchronization but I figured it was only a matter of time before Tweetbot added Tweet Marker support.
A couple of weeks ago Tweetbot finally added support for Tweet Marker. I truly believe Tweetbot is the best Twitter client available. And now it’s even better. There’s just a single switch to flip in Tweetbot’s settings and Tweet Marker will keep track of your timeline’s position. So, now when I open up Tweetbot, or Twitterrific on my Mac or iPad my timeline automatically scrolls to the position I left it at on any of my other devices.
Tweet Marker has nearly saved Twitter for me. I understand that I shouldn’t be concerned about missing anything on Twitter, if my timeline gets out of hand and I’m too behind I should be able to scroll to the top and ignore everything I’ve missed, but I can’t. I’ve never been able to, and might not ever be able to. I’m always worried that I’ll miss an important tweet from a friend or family member that might include some news or a cute photograph of my niece or nephew. I’m checking Twitter more often because of Tweet Marker and interacting with other Twitter users more as well.
I don’t think Twitter plans on implementing a Tweet Marker-like feature anytime soon — they seem to have the attitude of “if you’re too behind, just scroll to the top” — which gives me all the more reason to encourage other people to use Tweet Marker and if you’re able to, donate to the service as well. They’re not charing anyone money and the service is free, but if you enjoy it as much as I do and want to continue using it, donating is the best way to ensure that the service will live a long life.
