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If you are frustrated with Twitter mobile, then you’ll love Slandr.

What’s missing in Twitter mobile?

Choosing a page

They recently blogged about having 10 tweets per page…but I want more usability, I left this comment:

“At the end of a page instead of just older and newer, is it possible to get “previous 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 next” type of thing.

Reason being is if I’m on page 4, and decide to tweet, it takes me to the front page again. Then I have to click through 4 pages to get to where I left off. Instead all I would have to do is click page 4.”

Replies

Apparently coming soon, as per the end of this post.

Direct Messages

No go.

Favourites

No go.

SLANDR

Choosing a page

Slandr wins hands down with every feature, except probably the most important function…

You can only read one page of feeds (20 per page), there is no “next” or “previous” button

From their site:

“No ‘OLDER’ button:
Browsing back ‘with friends’ history is currently disabled per Twitter API. It will return when the API is updated.”

This makes it a shop stopper for reading your stream.
But I do visit it anyhow to check out my direct messages and replies…read on.

Avatars and Icons

You get avatars (not just a name like m.twitter) and icons for other functions

Replies

There is an icon next to each tweet to quick reply
There is a reply tab to see all your replies

Straight off this makes it a winner.

Direct Messages

There is an icon next to each tweet to direct message
There is a direct message tab to see all your messages (view both inbox and outbox)

Straight off this makes it a winner.

NOTE: the icon is still there for people who don’t follow each other, and if you try and send a direct message it won’t work.

Favourites

There is an icon next to each tweet to favourite.

How often am I on the train and I want to flag a tweet for later action…well now I can.

Only thing is that there isn’t a tab to see all your favourites

Search

Via Summize…how neat is that

Users

In your tweet stream you can click on a user next to a tweet to go to their stream, but there is also a Users tab to find your friends.
- type in friends name (this is not search, you need to know their name…darn!)
- a tag cloud of the most recently active 100 friends…neat!

Location

Change this via “settings”

Change this through the regular status update field
eg. L:Perth
This will not post as a tweet, it will just update your location profile

Geo

You can also change your location here.

More exciting than that is you can see the locations of your last 20 friends who have tweeted (but it does’t display their names)
- it also plots this on a map (click each location to get an exact location)

Not bad hey
- if one of my friends are travelling to my city they could change their location profile easily from the update status field
- next time they tweet I could see who’s around
- other option is to check Twitterlocal

Apparently there is more to come.

Brightkite

The other day I posted on Brightkite, which is a location awareness presence service (geoloco) ie. people check-in to places, so at anytime you know where your friends are located.
Once you are checked-in you can also upload photos and text, this is called placestreaming.

On thing they do is allow your check-ins to change your Twitter profile location setting
- with another option to also publish this as a new tweet (which Slandr doesn’t do).

I wonder what’s going to happen in the geoloco space.
Slandr is using Twitter for very primitive friend location awareness, I wonder if this can soon match the awesome features of Brightkite.

Twitter also has Twemes for hashtags, which is like on-the-fly Placestreaming, only a tag can be about anything, not just a place.
And then, as mentioned there is Twitterlocal for placestreaming based on location profile setting.

Do people use both Twitter and Brightkite, or would it be easier to have just one service for all this?

UPDATE: there is now a mobile web version of Brightkite.