Review: Birdbrain
by Robb Lewis
April 19, 2010
Overview
If you use Twitter, chances are you want to know who has started, or stopped, following you. Would you like to easily know how many times you've been mentioned in tweets? Birdbrain gives you all of this and more. Followers, retweets, mentioned, blocked and more can be tracked from within Birdbrain. You can get an overview of changes over days, weeks and months to make sure you know exactly what's going on with your 140 character ramblings.Features
- Overview of following, followers, tweets, mentions, retweets and blocked users
- See changes over 24 hours, 7 days, 14 days, 30, 60 and 90 days and 6 months
- Pull down to refresh
- Muliple accounts
- View the timeline of users
- Favstar.fm support
- Block/follow/unfollow users
When you first open Birdbrain you will see your summary page with stats from your account. Birdbrain has four main tabs as well as a more tab. The first is the summary, or overview page. From here you can see how many followers you have, how many you are following as well as other information. If there has been a change to any of the data in the last 24 hours, Birdbrain will indicate this. Swiping to the left or right will bring up different overviews (e.g. in the last 30 days). There a five of these pages ranging from 24 hours to 6 months. It is important to note that when you first install birdbrain, there will be no changes shown as the app only uses data that has been download through the app. So, the longer you use the app, the more data you will be able to view.
The next tab is the followers tab. 
From here you can see a list of your followers with either a plus or minus symbols indicating whether they are new followers, or if they have stopped following you. The list is also split into groups depending on when you last accessed Birdbrain and if new follower information was available. The following and mentions tabs show a similar list as the followers tab and, as with followers, you can see more about a user simply by selecting their name from the list.
As if you thought that was enough twitter data, going into the more tab allows you to dig even deeper into your account. Want to know who you're following but doesn't follow you? Vice versa? Birdbrain has pages for that. Blocked, retweeted, and specific users can all be accessed from here as well.
When you are in any list view, you can select a user to go to a user view page. From here four indicator 'lights' will tell you if they follow you, if you follow them, if their tweets are protected, if you have blocked them as various other information about them. Pressing the settings button in the top right allows you to block, report, follow or unfollow a user as well as view their TwitPic or Favstar.fm profile. Also, any of the lists can be refreshed using the Tweetie-inspired pull-down-to-refresh.
The Breakdown
The Good:
Birdbrain offers everything you need to know about your Twitter account in an incredibly beautiful way. Information is easy to access and the overview pages make it simple to spot changes in your account. Birdbrain really comes into it's own once you have used it for a while, so data can build up. Being able to see how many times you have tweeted in the last 6 months, or how many extra people you are following is great.
The Bad:
Birdbrain is so good it's hard to pinpoint any bad points. However, there are a few things I would like to mention. Firstly, there is no support for lists, which considering it's a relatively new feature, is understandable. Saying this, I would like to see this functionality. Secondly, there is no way to change which tabs are accessible from the navigation bar. I would like, for example, to be able to have quicker access to retweets rather than mentions.
