Bird Brain - App Review

The twitter app that doesn't let you tweet?  For £1.79?!  Mental.

I mentioned Bird Brain earlier this week during my 'Twitter jitters' piece so I thought it might be worth talking about and therefore reviewing the app that pretty much measures how good you are at twitter.  Sort of.

So no, you can't tweet from it.  What it does is keep a very close eye on your followers which is useful for anyone who's ever wondered who it was that unfollowed.  It is of course also digital torture as you log in at various points of the day having a clear picture of who took a dislike.

The home screen shows you most of the stats that you'll be used to, how many tweets, followers, following etc with a couple of nice additions, although this comes with a caveat.  Although it will know how many tweets you've sent the 'mentions' figure is not an all time count, mine goes back around 74 days.  Which is around when I got the app I think.

Similarly the 'retweeted' figure is only counting RTs since I spent my £1.79.  But still, this is interesting stuff yes?  Well for some of us geeks that love a bit of self harm enducing agony as another 'genius' tweet fails to get a RT it is.  To be honest though unless it's a new style RT (not the type you see on the twitter app with the quotes, or an old style one that your retweeter can edit) it ain't gonna show.  How do I know?  Well there's another screen that show's your RTs.  That's right, you can see which of your tweets get retweeted so you can actually tell which of your tweets are the most popular.  People seem to quite like swearing as you can see from this random image I found on the internet.  *Ahem.*

Loads of screens are available to view, you can study the tweeters who follow you that you don't follow back and vice versa.  It is dangerously addictive to try and clean the latter up, 'LOOK, I DON'T FOLLOW ANYONE THAT DOESN'T FOLLOW ME!!!' I can not bellow.  However the real genius is the page that shows your followers in real time, including the unfollows.  Eek!  That's some dangerous stuff, however it has helped me on two occasions to spot that accounts of people I like have simply been closed down.  Useful then and informative.  And heartbreaking.  The, 'why have they unfollowed me, I quite liked them, but didn't follow back because I've turned into a smug lazy twat,' question will haunt you for days.

Really, it will.

It's a good looking app though, dead easy to navigate and lovely and smooth with the touch screen.  It feels professional and it does a great job of digging around in the stats attached to twitter.  The trouble is it almost breaks it down to an unnecessary level (even so I would like to see some additions, such as who I tweet the most etc, that are readily available on other sites).

Great app, worth the money if you're into your twitter stats and really managing your account but be warned it  is almost as addictive as actually tweeting and can, as in my case, actually fuck with your twitter mojo.  Buy it if your made of stronger stuff than me.  Lets face it you probably are.

★ ★ ★ ★