bTT Twitter/FriendFeed Combo App Gets an Update

If you haven’t already heard of bTT, get up-to-speed by reading this great review over on Corvida’s site. This Twitter/FriendFeed combo app has probably gotten overlooked by many due to it being Windows-only. However, if you are on Windows, it’s certainly worth a look.

After initially launching a less-than-worthy app by the silly name of bTittleTattle, the company actually listened to the feedback users provided and completely remade the app based on what people wanted. That new app was then re-branded as bTT and relaunched. Now, bTT is nothing like its predecessor, except for the fact that both let you access FriendFeed via the desktop.

Unlike Twhirl, which provides FriendFeed in a separate window, bTT takes a note from AlertThingy’s book and combines the streams. Each service can turned on or off as desired in the app’s settings and there is a convenient link to click to access your FriendFeed remote key. The app does several things well – its sort-by-service feature, for example, makes it easy to filter FriendFeed’s content and its flickr slideshow is a unique feature that other FF clients don’t have.

What’s New

The latest update to bTT includes a few more features that make the app worthwhile – most notably, they’re offering several options for filtering your stream. In the new app, you can click to show or hide posts that have a minimum number of likes, a minimum number of comments, or you can use both filters combined. The options for what that minimum levels should be are configurable in bTT’s settings (the default is 3).

You can also choose to sort the stream by publish date which puts things back in chronological order instead of having your liked/commented on items bumped up to the top as FriendFeed does. Also new is the ability to respond to a tweet via both an @reply and direct message. That last option is pretty cool – even FriendFeed.com doesn’t offer replies via DM.

The new bTT has a new skin available ("paper"). Personally, I prefer this one over the original black theme, which I found hard on the eyes. I would still like a few more choices, though. 

Finally, the new app offers a pop-up video player and includes a built-in URL shortening feature.

There are still a few minor adjustments I would make, like making the up and down buttons visible on the scroll bar instead of just displaying the slider, which I found hard to control when the app was resized to be small enough for my laptop screen…especially when trying to view 30+ comments on a Scoble entry! (I didn’t even realize that they were there at first.) Then when I used them, the scrolling seemed to jump too far ahead, but what it was really doing was updating the screen to display the next item. However, I like the more fine-grained control of actually seeing items scroll by on the screen when I use arrow buttons, and bTT didn’t provide this.

Obviously, this is a minor complaint, but one that speaks to the details that stand between a good app and a great one, which bTT has the potential to be…at least for Windows users, which is something that may ultimately be its shortfall. Oh how I wish this was built on AIR instead!

But still, if you are a Windows user who hasn’t yet settled on a desktop client for FriendFeed, bTT is worth checking out. For Twitter, though, I still can’t part with Twhirl.