All You Need to Know About Twitterfox

There are many different Twitter Applications with which you can tweet your heart out and keep up with your followers and people you are following. This week I am going to go through a few of them and determine which is the absolute best program for your twitter account management needs. Today we are going to take a look at TwitterFox.

Twitterfox is an optional add-on to those of you who are using the ever so popular web browser Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla has become somewhat of the all-in-one browser that attempts at allowing you to control as much of your online life directly from their browser.

Click on this link if you would like to install Twitterfox to your browser. Installation instructions will follow after the install. After you have installed Twitterfox click on the “tools” drop down menu and then go to “add-ons”. Click on the extensions tab and then this Box should pop up for you.

Click enable and then restart Firefox. Upon Restart the Twitterfox icon will show up in the bottom right hand corner.

Right click and then choose preferences to set up Twitterfox to your Twitter account. This is the preferences box.

Add in your account information and then you are ready to start. Click on the Twitterfox icon to pull up your Twitterfox Application.

Now you will notice 5 Key areas. The text bar is used to type in your update. Twitterfox does count down the amount of characters you have left in your update before you get past the 140 character limit set by Twitter. To send a tweet simply type and press enter to send it.

By clicking on the Recent Tab it will bring up the latest updates from both the people you are following and your personal updates. If you haven’t visited that tab in awhile it will put a number on the tab to let you know how many of your friends updates have been submitted since the last time you checked it out. If you want to check out one of your friends profiles simply click on their image icon and it will take you directly to their Twitter page.

By Clicking on the Replies tab it will show you how many people have sent you an @reply since the last time you checked you @replies. It will also show you the number of @replies you’ve had since the last time you clicked on that tab.

By Clicking on the Messages tab it will show you how many direct messages have been sent to your Twitter account. Just like the other two tabs it also counts the number of direct messages you have received.

Perhaps the coolest feature that Twitterfox has to offer is the option to click on the link button which is located directly to the left of the Recent Tab. If you are reading a blog article that you would like to tweet about simply click on that links tab and it will paste the link to that article directly into your update bar.

Limitations of Twitterfox

• No ability to search through Twitterfox. One of my personal favorite things to do is to use search.twitter.com and search for what people are saying about the topics I care about i.e. google, twitter, or (my favorite sports team) the Cleveland Cavaliers. There are other Twitter applications out there that allow you to use Twitter Search and it is very helpful such as Tweetdeck
• It is difficult to find new friends to follow. The only real way to add friends to your Twitterfox account is to visit a friends page on Twitter and find people that you would like to add directly from there. To really be able to use a Twitter application I think that is a necessity and Twitterfox does not have it.
• There is no way to shorten a URL when you are trying to tweet about one. Again I think that is a MUST for a twitter application, and unfortunately Twitterfox does not have that either.

All in all I would have to say that Twitterfox as a twitter application ranks right around the middle. There is a lot of room for improvement but it is a good first effort by Mozilla to come up with an application for its users to use Twitter directly from their browser.

Until next time…Happy Tweeting!