Twootball Falls Short Of Goal Line
When I saw the description for the Twootball iPhone App, a smile came to my face.
Twootball has one simple function – display a live stream twitter conversation about NFL teams, organized around the games for that week. The idea of sitting in front of an upcoming playoff game and easily meeting new people via conversations about the action on screen seemed like a no-brainer to me. So, even though I don’t usually interface with technology on Sundays, I downloaded the free app and waited to give it a whirl.
Selecting which game I wanted to have a conversation around was simple.
On first glance, it delivered just what I was hoping for. Unfortunately, the moment I went to reply to one of the tweets in the stream, I was disappointed. Nothing happened. I touched my finger to the screen several times. I expected a window to open giving me the ability to reply to the sender, or retweet their comment. Instead, nothing happened. I even restarted the app to make sure it hadn’t frozen in some way. No luck.
Without the ability to reply or retweet, Twootball becomes somewhat pointless. Especially since I can enter hashtags into Summizer, or even create a special football page on Tweetgrid, that would allow me to do exactly that with minimal effort. I was surprised to find that even on the Twootball.com website, replies and retweets are not possible. This seems like basic functionality to me.
I love the concept of Twootball, and the interface is nice, but I don’t want to simply watch a stream of comments. I want an easy way to engage in a conversation. In that regard, Twootball fumbles the ball.
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Comments
I’m the founder of Twootball.
I appreciated your opinion, it’s true, right now if you want to reply to somebody you need to write a message and manually insert their nickname. I wish I could had more features but considering how close is the end of the season i’m not sure you’ll see all these new features before next one.
I hope to find time and funds to keep improving Twootball, maybe with a slightly modified version for the Superbowl.
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I did not even know about Twootball and the screen shots look excellent. I would have been disappointed to with no immediate interaction through the app – seems pointless to have the app and my bet is most people are like you and wonder, “why?” Maybe you will hear something from the creator(s).