I love this app!! But needs a "Never" option for "Still Active Alert"
I absolutely adore this app. I follow too many people (more than 2,000) for it to keep up with my timeline -- it just keeps reading and reading and reading, never stopping, and inevitably falls behind -- but thats not how I use it anyway. Instead, I use it mostly to listen to my @mentions during car trips and such. Listening to @mentions, as such, isnt a specifically supported feature, but it can be done easily by creating a search for my own Twitter handle. I also occasionally set up a search for other terms. This works GREAT, and Id say it handles the more difficult aspects of tweet-reading surprisingly well, probably getting things like multi-word hashtags, weird punctuation/emoticons, etc. right 80% of the time (and when it gets them wrong, its often in a hilarious way).
I really, really wish, though, that there was a "Never" option for the "Still Active Alert." When Im listening to my own @mentions, or an obscure search term, a loooong time can go by between tweets, and Id like to be able to listen to my music or podcasts without a nagging interruption every 5 minutes announcing that The Social Radio is "waiting for new tweets." Its sort of like the voice you get every few minutes on hold, interrupting the elevator music, and briefly getting your hopes up that someone is finally going to pick up, only to say something unhelpful like "Thank you for holding. An operator will be with you shortly." I *know* Im on hold, and I *know* The Social Radio is waiting for new tweets -- it doesnt need to keep telling me that! That 10-second interruption, basically every other song, is really irritating. I only want to be interrupted when there are new tweets for me to listen to. :)
If, for some reason, its technically difficult to add a "Never" option, please at least add a lengthier time period -- every 15 or 30 or 60 minutes -- as an option, in addition to the current options of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 minutes. Indeed, I cant imagine why anyone would use those short time periods; I think a more sensible menu of options would be 1, 5, 10, 15, 30 or 60 minutes, or something like that. A reminder every 30 or 60 minutes, or even 15, would be much more tolerable than 5.
Also, someone mentioned having an option to wait until *between* songs to read the tweets that came in during that song. Thats a brilliant idea, if it can be pulled off. (It should be an option, of course, not the default behavior.) Another idea, sort of the opposite: have an option to *pause* the song/podcast while tweets are being read, then resume it when the tweet-reading is over.
It would also be great if the search feature could be made to properly support boolean searches, which it doesnt right now. So for instance, since I have two active Twitter accounts, @brendanloy and @MileHighMids, and since my friends and I often use the hashtag #TMM9, I could search for all tweets mentioning "brendanloy OR MileHighMids OR #TMM9." That sort of search doesnt work right now; itd be awesome if it did.
Itd also be cool if there was a feature to submit text-to-speech translation "bugs," so the developers could more effectively "learn" from the problems that users experience in real life. Id use that feature sometimes, if it existed, particularly when I encouter the same error repeatedly. For instance, the app mispronounces BYU, the university, as "byoo." It misreads "#lastman" -- a hashtag that is used in a few different contexts, always meaning "last man" -- as "lastmun" instead of "last man." It doesnt know that "Mmm" (as in, the sound you make when something is delicious) should be pronounced instead of spelled out. Those are a few very minor examples, not to complain about those specific issues, but just to make the point that a built-in system for ongoing user feedback could help you catch and fix these things.
But anyway, Im nitpicking now. The ONLY thing preventing me from giving this app 5 stars is the "Still Active Alert" problem. Until thats fixed, it gets 4 stars (Id give it 4 1/2 stars if I could). Fix the "Still Active Alert" issue, and I will not only give it 5 stars, but I will sing the praises of this app from the mountaintops to every fellow Twitter addict who will listen. :) Thanks for a great concept and a well-executed app!
irishtrojan about
The Social Radio: Twitter Read to You