Our TwitBin Experiment

Sometimes these things seem like they’ll be the perfect solution to a problem.

CATS problem was streamlining internal communication. We use GTalk to communicate unilaterally. But we use e-mail to communicate to the entire team. Problem: We get 100s of e-mails a day. How can we easily ping the entire team on quick messages/links/etc. — without having to wade through the ocean of e-mails?

TwitBin looked like it would accomplish exactly what we wanted:

1. It was a Firefox add-on. That meant you could easily access it from your browser.

2. Once we created individual CATS Twitter accounts, we could privately follow each other — the idea here was we wouldn’t get bogged down with tweets from following other people.

Here are the problems we found:

1. There is no indication when a new tweet arrives (similar to how you might be alerted to a new e-mail). So you have to constantly check for new messages.

2. Ads, Ads, Ads. Seriously…

3. If you already have a Twitter account, you likely have your computer remember your username and password so you can automatically log in to your Twitter account. But if you have multiple accounts, you are forced to log in every time you start up TwitBin. You’re automatically brought into the “Public” space, where you get all sorts of information you don’t need.

All-in-All, TwitBin was not the solution we were looking for.

Do you have any suggestions?

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