Tame Filters Your Twitter Timeline To Show The Most Important Content
Lately, Twitter has been paying more and more attention to making the UI of both its website as well as its mobile apps as intuitive for the end users as possible. The micro-blogging platform has revamped its design several times since its inception, but let’s face it, if you’re one of those who follow too many people, even Twitter can’t help you. Your whole Timeline can turn into a disorderly jingle-jangle, making it hard to keep a tab on the important stuff – people in your timeline, the important hashtags, all those mentions and whatnot. Third-party twitter client Tame aims to give you a helping hand with all of this. With the tagline of “The social web is too chaotic. Time to Tame.it!”, it aims to do so by ridding your timeline of all the unwanted stuff, presenting only the content that’s most relevant to you.
While learning about a great new service definitely sounds appealing, getting to know how it actually works is also fairly important. Tame claims that its smart algorithm points you towards what really matters, while reducing the redundancy often found on busy timelines. In addition, it provides you with details of people, links and trends when you search about anything. While Tame doesn’t get into details regarding how it does that, the service can prove extremely useful for heavy Twitter users.
Getting started with service is also very easy, and that in itself can makes it a great alternative. After the mandatory registration process that asks you to enter your email and choose a password, you can easily link your Twitter account with the service in one single click.
Tame also sends you a verification email for activating your account, so make sure you do that before using the service. Once ready, log in and hit the ‘Connect Twitter account’ button to get started.
Upon connecting, you are presented with the main interface – the Tame dashboard, which carries ‘My Timeline’ and ‘Search Twitter’ tabs at the top. The dashboard opens up to My Timeline when launched, which is itself divided into three main columns: Links, Topics and People. Tame is only capable of working with data from the last 24 hours – that’s right, you cannot access tweets older than that from the app – though you can easily check what went by within those last 24 hours with a slider. Just move to slider to your desired position and let go to immediately filter your results. Considering how many of us use twitter as an active, real-time communication medium, this limitation might not actually be a bad idea to help users stay focused on what’s happening or has happened within the past 24 hours. (Update: You can actually go back up to 7 days)
By default, Tame only displays the top ten results in each category. However, you can always expand these results as you need. Every item in list has a small drop-down button, which expands upon clicking to show you the full content. For instance, in the Topics column, you can click any hashtag to view pertaining tweets that relate to it. Similarly, clicking any link shows you the full tweet.
Another handy way of finding content you’re looking for is by using the Search Twitter tab. This feature instantly displays relevant results when you type in the search field. For those who need to perform a more refined search, there’s also an Advanced search option.
The free plan of Tame does have a few restrictions that are mentioned on its pricing page, including one Twitter account, and no lists analysis, global tweeter search or tweet wizard. You can, however, easily unlock these premium features by opting for the basic 5 € / month membership.
While a service like Tame isn’t going to appeal to every twitter user, it can surely come in handy if you mostly access Twitter to sift through the important stuff going on, and have a huge Following list that makes it a hassle to sift through all that content for the most important stuff. Tame’s basic features are available for free, the app boast an impressive design, and works as advertised.
