OwlRead – a Google Reader for Twitter

Are you happy with your Twitter client? If so, you probably should stick to it and don’t even read this post further because switching to a new application from something you are already comfortable with should take some serious advantages offered by the alternative. I would not say that OwlRead, the new Twitter client I have discovered is really stunning and a must-have for anyone who uses Twitter, but if you are not 100% happy with what you currently have, it may well be worth checking out – at least for its broad and interesting features.

So OwlRead is quite an interesting result of work of one web developer who is also an avid Twitter user. The idea for OwlRead was born because he had a certain set of requirements to a Twitter client that no existing clients could fulfill. And what do web developers usually do in such situations? Right, they develop the tools they need themselves, secretly hoping their startups will get mass adoption as well and will make the creators rich and happy.

So what is so special about OwlRead that I now think that you should check it out? First of all, it supports grouping of Twitter users. If you follow numerous people (like a few dozens or a few hundreds – I am certainly not talking about those people who follow thousands of users only to get thousands of followers in return) this must sound like an advantage. In OwlRead you can easily split all the people you follow into smaller groups by tagging them (like family, real-life friends, bloggers, news sources, etc.) and read their tweets separately paying special attention to exactly what you want to get at any given moment.

Another good thing is that OwlRead supports multiple Twitter accounts so if you happen to have several Twitter accounts (like a personal one and the one that you update on behalf of your company or your customers), this will certainly be a huge benefit to you – though of course this is nothing special any more as there are numerous Twitter clients already that support multiple accounts.

And the best thing about this Twitter client is that it supports threaded discussions so if you are tired of clicking through numerous “in reply to” links to figure out what the conversation was about, this will certainly be helpful. Every threaded discussion here gets a dedicated page with its own URL which obviously facilitates tracking the discussion and participating in it.

Another nice feature is an advanced mode of posting to Twitter: it provides you with opportunities to choose what accounts to update, weather to use URL shorterners or not, and add special characters to your status update.

Twitter search is supported here as well – and with a nice twist at that: you can easily subscribe to the searches you are interested in (be it some hashtags you want to follow, your name or your company name) and save them in dedicated folders to check whenever you feel like doing so.

Of course the fact that it is a fully web-based application that helps you manage your Twitter presence better than you probably now do can be a limitation: after all, the vast majority of people are quite happy with the original Twitter experience and peacefully stick to it so having yet another browser tab open may sound ridiculous if you already have one open for Twitter. Of course using OwlRead must mean that you won’t keep a tab with Twitter open at the same time but still it seems to be something of a limitation to me.

The interface here was definitely inspired by Google Reader as the developer openly admits himself as he thinks that Google Reader is very suitable for reading news (obviously many people share his opinion so the familiar interface will only be welcome). And all in all, I think it is quite a good tool that can be used by those people who use Twitter as their main source of news and information.

If you are willing to try OwlRead our, the registration is simple and open to everyone: on this page you can enter your Twitter login details to start using the service – and add other Twitter accounts later if needed (OAuth is not supported for now because Twitter simply did not offer it at the time when the developer started working on the project).