Plume for Twitter (for Android)

By Max Eddy

Just because Twitter is working to curtail non-canonical clients doesn't mean that developers have stopped trying to deliver its 140-character utterances in better and better ways. Plume for Twitter brings a highly customizable Twitter client to Android devices (free, $4.99 to remove ads) with a powerful muting feature to help you manage the chaos of Twitter.

Starting up Plume for the first time, users are greeted by a colorful screen and Plume's cute, friendly duck/penguin masot. Once inside the app, Tweets are displayed in a series of scrolling columns, showing @ replies, the latest updates, direct messages, and so on. Users can scroll up and down to move chronologically through the feeds, and left and right between feeds. Swiping left to right from off the screen will open a hidden tray of other features, such as search and trending topics.

The Sound of Silence
By far, Plume's strongest and most useful feature is "muting" certain users, words, and services from appearing in your feed. One of the drawbacks of Twitter, and it is surely like this by design, is that ?the only way to remove a user from your feed is to un-follow them?a public and noticeable act. Twitter's Lists feature helps, but it lacks fine-grain controls. If you mute a user in Plume, you'll still appear as their follower and you can unmute them at any time. For a sticky social situation, or a power user who has accounts he or she is obliged to follow, "muting" is a powerful tool.

Plume also has the ability to mute Tweets that contain certain words or phrases, as defined by the user. For everyday folks, this is a great way to avoid the weekly cavalcade of #FF tweets, Apple product announcements, or particularly tiresome memes from invading your Twittersphere. For people with PTSD or emotional triggers, being able to hide certain terms from view could make participating in Twitter a far less stressful experience.

Users can manage all their mutes from the settings menu, including muted updates from other apps that publish on Twitter.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/N_Kfc4j1Cvs/0,2817,2414773,00.asp

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