Twitter’s own iPhone app, formerly Tweetie, has been updated to 3.3, but that minor-looking upgrade brings some pretty major changes:
Some of these are pretty neat, like auto-complete for @usernames and the ability to search your phone contacts for friends on Twitter. However, like on the website, Twitter is pushing trends on the iPhone app. Now a translucent trending topic or ‘Quick Bar‘ will float on top of your timeline. You can swipe it to rotate through trending topics, and you can choose to view location-based trends if you want.
What you can’t do is turn the Quick Bar off, and it’s quite intrusive. Unlike the search bar, it doesn’t sit at the top, but appears over your timeline, apparently whenever it wants. I think trends are useful sometimes, but they aren’t Twitter’s top feature, and the inclusion of promoted trends just makes things worse! The people I follow are who I want to hear from; too often trends can be annoying (or even slightly offensive).
Hopefully the Quick Bar will become optional in version 3.4, but for the time being I’m going back to Echofon.
