6 reasons you should be using Plume for Android

First off, just in case you’re not sure what Plume is, it’s an Android app for Twitter (and, very soon, for Facebook as well) that adds lots of functionality to Twitter on your Android device.

“Why isn’t the official Twitter client good enough?” Well, for most people, it probably is. But you’re a power user, right? I mean, that’s why you’re reading this blog. Because you’re not happy with just doing things “good enough.” You’re on the cusp of technology, spearheading new paths of… bah, who am I kidding? You probably stumbled upon my blog for entirely different reasons. Like my movie reviews. Or homebrew posts.

Plume’s better, and I’m about to talk about why.

My only real caveat with Plume is its lack of push notifications. Once they integrate this key feature, they’ll become the Tweetbot of Android apps. Instead, what I do is let the official Twitter client alert me of interactions and use Plume for everything else.

But let’s talk about Plume’s strongest points, shall we?

• Multi-column support – sure, there are other apps out there with this feature but Plume’s fluidity on both phones and tablets make it the top of the heap for me.
• Image previews – you get a pretty little thumbnail in your tweet stream when someone posts an image. You can then click the thumbnail and the image opens in Plume, so you don’t have to wait for your browser to launch and load the image. Very handy.
• Open links in default apps – this is one of my favorite features. Not sure what this means? Let’s say someone posts a pic with Instagram. In the official Twitter client, you click the link, the image loads in your browser. In Plume, you can choose to open said link in the Instagram app. This makes it easier to see associated like data, post a comment in the app, follow that users, etc. Same thing with lots of other apps, too, like Google+ and YouTube.
• It’s attractive – personally, I like Plume’s design. It’s quite colorful and comes with a coupe different theme options.
• Bitly support – this one’s actually for power users. I have my own custom URL shortener, shnw.co, powered by bitly. I can enter my credentials for bitly and if I post a link to something using Plume, it will shorten using my custom URL.
• Strong autocomplete support – When tweeting using the official Twitter client, it lets you click a button and choose who you want to mention from a list. Poor design. Plume lets you click a button, start typing the name of who you’d like to mention and Plume will autocomplete. The official Twitter client boasts this feature too but it’s spotty for me at best. More often than not I have to type the full handle of who I’m mentioning. Plume also autocompletes trending hashtags which is a huge plus for me and has a built-in tweet shrinker in case you get too wordy (kind of like this post.)

How can Plume improve? Here’s a small list:

• Better tweet button placement – The new tweet window that pops up has half of the buttons above the tweet field, and half below. It’s hard to remember which buttons are which (they only have icons—no labels) so it takes a couple seconds for me to remember which is which. I’d prefer all of the buttons to be on one row, above or below the new tweet field.
• Push notifications – consider the dead horse beaten.
• Custom notifications by column – I have a list of close friends that has its own column in Plume. I’d like to be able to get notifications for that column the same way I do for mentions.

All in All, Plume is as good as it gets when it comes to Twitter apps for Android. With the impending Facebook support about to launch, Plume will start to push into the Hootsuite and TweetDeck space as well. I’m seriously looking forward to that battle as TweetDeck is long overdue for an update and just might get too far behind to catch up if Plume does Facebook support right.

Want to start using Plume? They have a free version and a paid version. I only had to use the free version for a couple of hours to know I wanted the paid version, and I think you will, too.

Got questions? Hit me up in the comments below!