Birdhouse

Developer: Sandwich Dynamics

Category: Social Networking

Version: 1.0.1

Release Date: April 13, 2009

Size: 0.3 MB

Price: $3.99
rating 10/10

Birdhouse solves a problem most of us don't know we have: Bonehead Tweet Syndrome. You know you've done it: in the era of instant, always-on communication, your brain is not always on. You send a tweet that sounds good at the time, but could use, I don't know, a thought or two before you hit "send." Then you're forced to look at it for the rest of your digital life.

 Birdhouse is a note-taking app that saves and stores your Twitter drafts until you've had some time to think about them. That's it. You can't follow, retweet, favorite, sort by category or integrate seamlessly with your Facebook account -- you just write, save, revise and send. So it seems like $3.99 is a lot to pay for an app that has only one function.

Until you start to use it.

Birdhouse makes you smarter. Seriously. Jot down a note when you think about it, let it simmer, and come back to it when you have more to add. It has a refreshingly simple and elegant interface. You can view drafts that you haven't sent, or a history of tweets that you have sent. Touch one of the tweets to edit, swipe to delete. When you're ready to publish your tweet, just hit publish -- and Birdhouse asks you one more time if you *really* want to publish it -- then you're done, and your followers are blessed with your wisdom. If you want to unpublish, work offline, or save your tweets to your email account, you can do that, too.

You can sort chronologically, or by a starred rating system, so you can get to your favorite or most recent thoughts quickly. Birdhouse handles multiple Twitter accounts seamlessly; an icon representing your current account sits in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, so you can save your thoughts in separate accounts. The user interface feels crisp, down to the faux-wood birdhouse on the icon itself. In practice, it's fast, easy, and stable. 

Birdhouse is one of a growing number of iPhone applications that's defined by what it leaves *out.* This is an application designed for one-way tweets. It's not a way to follow conversations, or interact with the tweetosphere, and in that way it's a very limited and self-centered application. But let's face it, a lot of us want to project a digital image that is refined, smart and polished, and to hell with what everyone else is saying. For that crowd, and I count myself among you, Birdhouse will help you separate the wheat from the chaff.