The presentation is interesting and it makes you feel like to give Twheel a try.
Twheel is a new interface to manage more efficiently the tweets produced by Fluid Interaction. When you follow many accounts on Twitter you can lose some important messages: but Twheel reorganizes the tweets in a circle (which vaguely resembles the old iPod interface) that allows you to better handle the complexity of the information on the phone. Thus, you download the app and start it… at least that’s what you do if you don’t pay attention to the legal details.
To use a free app you must give some information. In this case, the app declares it all in a very transparent manner. It explains immediately that the application records the time that each user employs to read the contents of a tweet and of what is linked from that tweet. This clearly means that the data is fed into a server that observes everything that everyone does. Twheel adds that the data will be provided to customers, and of course it promises not to give away any personal data, except in cases where the law requires. The law which mainly refers Fluid is Finnish. But it would be of not little importance to know which law Fluid refers to in Iran, China, Syria, Russia, the United States, and so on.
Moreover, when asked to access your Twitter account, Twheel declares that they will use the account to even read direct messages on Twitter, and to write in the name of that account, and to add new followers. I was wonderng why they do so. And so I turn the question to those who pass by this blog:
1. Is your experience with Twheel’s interface nice?
2. What did Twheel write on your Twitter account?
3. Which new followers did it add to your account?
update: @twheelapp answered: “There’s an option in twheel that allows following and unfollowing users. But nothing happens without user interaction”
I downloaded and found it interesting, but don’t think it will replace Tweetbot for me.
#violagail
Hello Luca,
and thank you for this post about twheel.
Just to correct few points on your blog post. Fluid Interaction is based in Finland and is under finnish jurisdiction.
To be able for twheel to work, you need to give permission to twheel to access your Twitter account. Your permission is required by Twitter. Fluid Interaction does not gain any access to your Twitter account and so on can’t write any tweets on your behalf or add any followers.
And yes, in the future, twheel will analyse your tweet reading behavior to be able to highlight the sources you spend more time and perform more action with.
Hopefully I was able to clear your suspicion about twheel. If you have any additional questions concerning twheel, please feel free to contact me.
We would definitely like to hear more about the feedback you receive about twheel.
Best regards,
Kalle Määttä
CEO
Fluid Interaction
Io l’ho provato, ma sono rimasto abbastanza deluso: molte funzioni mancano (ad esempio non è possibile vedere il profilo di qualcuno con la lista dei Followers e Following), non si possono salvare ricerche (almeno, io non ho capito come), non sincronizza le liste, non presenta i trend; la distribuzione delle informazioni è un po’ confusionaria: su ipad è dispersivo, su ipod/iphone appena accettabile. Unica cosa positiva è la rappresentazione grafica dei retweets, che permette di vedere subito quali sono i messaggi più popolari tra quelli della propria TL. In generale direi che l’idea è buona, ma sviluppata male e non a sufficienza. Non sostituisce un normale client di Twitter, al massimo lo integra. Io lo cancellerò. @dsot