There’s been a bit of talk on Twitter recently about the various twitter clients that exist, with more being created practically every day. One view was that everybody is trying to create the ultimate twitter client.

Maybe.

Certainly there are a lot of new twitter client apps being made, some with lofty aspirations, but more importantly I see a twitter client as the new "Hello World" for desktop applications. And I think it’s a great choice. The days of a Hello World application consisting of a Console.WriteLine are long past. To dig in and learn something new, you have to implement something with at least a little substance to it.

A twitter client has the key components one needs when learning a new technology:

Simple

In terms of base functionality, a twitter client has a very simple task. Heck, Twitter itself is built around the simple premise of asking "What are you doing right now?" and letting you answer. A twitter client, at it’s core, needs to do two things: display your timeline and let you update your "status". Simple as that.

Easy and intuitive API

Twitter’s API is easy. Really easy. When you’re writing a real-world Hello World application, you want to focus on what you’re trying to learn, which is the technology, and not a complex API or other things that simply distract.

Options

Like most applications that have a user interface (and even those that don’t), there’s always room for choices. Depending on what you’re trying to learn (I’m a UI guy) you have different approaches you can take. If you’re learning WinForms or WPF, you can play with different presentation models, learning how to accomplish what you want. If you’re learning deeper back-end programming, you could play with the windows services APIs, or WCF, or whatever. It’s flexible.

Room for expansion

A twitter client can move beyond the basics I mentioned above and incorporate more features, with the limit practically being your imagination. Just look at twittervision.

My friend Mike has been diving head first into .NET (he’s an MFC guru), and decided to create a great twitter client (Bitter) not to create the ultimate one, but to learn the technology. Which is good, because an ultimate twitter client has already been created. It’s called Twitterific.

1. Dew Drop - March 14, 2008 | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew Says:
   March 14th, 2008 at 9:34 am

   [...] Are Twitter Clients the New Hello World App? (Aaron Lerch) [...]

2. Alan Le Says:
   March 17th, 2008 at 3:26 pm

   Lol. Thanks for pointing out that Hanselman tweet. I think he’s right on the money.

3. Dan Rigsby Says:
   March 20th, 2008 at 7:04 pm

   I see my picture on this link! I has good looks!

4. Aaron Says:
   March 20th, 2008 at 7:22 pm

   @Dan Rigsby Yeah, but poor punctuation.

5. Patrick Foley Says:
   June 6th, 2008 at 3:31 pm

   Hey dude – found this via Live Search … always fun to stumble upon a post by someone I know. That Dan Rigsby’s a handsome fellow, too.

6. Hal! Says:
   June 25th, 2008 at 3:20 pm

   Great post. I am trying to learn WPF and wanted to a project that I can attempt to dip my toe in the water so to speak.

   Twitter is perfect for the reasons you outlined.

   But my angle though is, I don’t want to design the ultimate twitter app. I want to create the best looking. For the most part, other twitter apps aren’t doing anything with with the look of the app.

   There is a small win on having a good looking app running while you check your latest tweets. (not to say any other clients are terrible.)

7. nick Says:
   September 1st, 2008 at 12:15 pm

   hey, love the blog – i will try and keep up with it!! please keep more coming I wish I could start a blog but I don’t have much time Thanks, nick

8. Twitter Search Says:
   May 26th, 2009 at 9:04 pm

   thats great that you are talking about the twitter api,a good example of searching with the twitter api is on twiogle.com because you can search on twitter and google at the same time.