Trickle Review: Trickle Displays Tweets One at a Time

Trickle is one of the simplest Twitter-viewing clients I've seen. For 99 cents, this third-party application displays tweets one at a time on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. Buy this Twitter app once, and you can use it on all three devices.

That's it. Nothing complicated. Just download the app to your device from the Apple App Store and enter your Twitter ID and password. Then tweet, tweet, tweet, it trickles out little bursts of text onto your screen, in stark white-on-black simplicity.

Tweets display in Helvetica font and roll in from right to left. Each stays on screen about four or five seconds, long enough for you to not only read, but also to think about it. By default, Trickle pings Twitter for updates every three minutes, but you can adjust the timing in the settings. Touch the "i" button at bottom left, then "Settings," then “Refresh Time,” and select how often you want it to grab new tweets.

Why would anyone narrow their Twitter world to single-tweet viewing? Well, it's great for multitaskers doing something else on their computer desktop. Prop your iPhone or iPad up on a stand, and let the tweeting begin. Trickle’s simple text display makes reading tweets easy; it slows down the hyper-Twitter experience. It's also a passive experience, no hands needed to click or touch anything to keep your stream going.

Trickle handles multiple Twitter accounts, so you can aggregate, say, your personal and professional Twitter accounts into a single stream. That’s helpful if you are a multi-account kind of networker. To add an account, touch the "i" button, then "Settings," then "Accounts" and then add any additional Twitter user names you want.

The main pros of this client are simplicity and reading quality. Its simplicity lies in the ability to do hands-free viewing. The big text makes it easy to absorb a tweet with a quick glance. And the easy-to-read text allows you to do something else while simultaneously consuming occasional tweets.

If you want to interact with Trickle, you can do a few things. To speed up the text stream, for example, touch your screen and swipe right to left. A new tweet will appear each time you swipe.

The main con is how Trickle reduces Twitter to a limited experience. Twitter is a high-powered messaging system that allows you to receive massive amounts of information quickly and participate in dialogue. Clients such as TweetDeck let you see many tweets quickly. They also allow you to interact with Twitter by sending tweets.

So the biggest downside of Trickle is that it's one way, at least in its earliest version. You consume tweets and don't send them.

Trickle does make it easy to retweet, with an “r” button you simply touch. Then it automatically sends out that message from your Twitter account with the RT code at the beginning.

You can also “favorite” a tweet by tapping the “f” button. But that’s about it for interactivity. You can't type text to send an original tweet.

More annoying is how Trickle tends to freeze for no apparent reason. I found the app repeatedly froze on my iPad when I tried to change settings. I had to reboot the tablet each time. The developer needs to eradicate whatever bugs are causing Trickle to come to a screeching halt.

All in all, though, I consider Trickle well worth the 99 cents, especially if you want to consume tweets in a simple way. It’s one of the better Twitter apps I’ve tried.

You can download Trickle from the Apple Computer’s App Store.