Without trying to explain why I like Twitter, let’s just say it’s good. I previously posted about various apps that took Twitter out of the browser. In a comment to that post, Mark Bowen pointed me towards EventBox a Mac OSX app. Here’s a short review of EventBox.
Within about 3 days I had purchased the still beta version. That alone should suggest that I was impressed.
EventBox pulls together all the social networking applications I use into one simple interface. At a basic level, EventBox is like an Inbox for your web life (for me that’s Twitter, Facebook and Flickr). EventBox sits open like an email client, with the Unread folder selected; it regularly updates and aggregates new content from all the sources I have set up.
(For a better screenshot with more detail, see the EventBox site.)
Like TweetDeck, I can see if there have been replies to me on Twitter whilst I’ve been away from my machine. Also like TweetDeck, I have a search setup for a term I’m interested in – if anyone posts about it on Twitter, I will know. What’s different to TweetDeck is that it does this without having multiple panes of “tweets” open.
One difficultly with Twitter is that it’s an ongoing conversation, when you step away from your machine the messages pile up. I don’t worry about catching up, but just “Mark All As Read”. However, there are some people that I am particularly interested in what they post, so I set them up using the “Profile Peek” – so anything posted by them appears in it’s own section.
In addition to the social networks I mentioned above, EventBox also supports Digg, Reddit and RSS (meaning it’s usefulness is limitless). EventBox does even more than I’ve written about, and for a beta product it does it very well.
If you’re on a Mac and use Twitter or Facebook or Flickr, or even if you’re just looking for a nice RSS reader, give EventBox a whirl for free.
To me, an interesting observation about these Twitter apps is that they are just that, applications running on your machine. I wonder when there will be a Bloglines/Google Readed type web-based application that becomes your social-networking inbox.