I have a problem. I sometimes buy iPhone apps without reason. I buy them when I either have no need for them, or when false hype intrigues me. Sometimes, it works out. Birdhouse for example. I didn’t need it, but it seemed mysterious during beta testing (which I badly wanted to be in on), and even though I didn’t necessarily need it, I bought it. Turned out that I loved it. And I did the same thing today with Birdfeed. I don’t need another Twitter app. I already go back and forth between Tweetie and Twitterrific as it is. But I have an addiction and I doled out five bucks.

And now I’m wondering why. I mean, don’t get me wrong. Birdfeed is a perfectly usable Twitter app. But it’s not bringing much to the table to set it apart from the other clients that are on the store for months now.

Good Stuff

It’s a slick interface. On my 3GS it runs super smooth. Menus slide in and out with grace. It’s a wonderful piece of coding and the design is well thought out. You get a threaded DM view, a cool pill-looking thing to show you character count, and all the panels are beautifully crafted. You get pretty much all of the same functionality you get with Twitterrific. But while you get threaded DMs with Birdfeed, it forgoes the much more useful threaded conversations we’ve seen on other clients. It’s a real shame that the threaded stuff isn’t present everywhere in the app.

Other cool things Birdfeed does include local caching of tweets; something that I appreciate. It timestamps wherever you reloaded tweets, so you can go back and see where you last stopped reading. Last thing, it handles notifications intelligently, only listing them for mentions and DMs.

On to the bad

My biggest complaint with Birdfeed is what it leaves out. Namely viewing followers and inline photo viewing. I know you’re gonna say, “But Twitterrific doesn’t have those either!” And that bugs me to no end about Twitterrific too. I’m also sure that it’s gonna be addressed in future updates. Birdfeed also doesn’t let you update your Twitter location.

There are no huge glaring flaws with Birdfeed, it’s a bunch of little things I just wish it had. Let me put it this way, do you think that after the first car with headlights came out anybody bought one that didn’t? I don’t know how you could launch without features that other Twitter apps have had for months.

Next, I’m not entirely comfortable not having a navigation bar at the bottom. It’s all done in tables by going back and forth. Nice thing though is that you can have unseen mentions display in the back button in timeline view. This isn’t a dealbreaker, just used to a menu bar at the bottom. Another weird interface thing is that whenever you’re posting a message or uploading a photo, you get a HUD overlay showing you it’s working during which you can’t do anything else in the app [Ed: This seems like Tweetsville all over again!]. Not usually a long time you’re waiting, but it’s annoying. Oh, and please let me change the message color. I’m not digging this purple.

You Should Probably Wait On This One

Birdfeed isn’t bad. It’s actually pretty good. But it’s not enough to swing me over from the other twitter apps I’ve been using. It’s got multiple account support, saved searches, Instapaper integration (which didn’t work for me), but which twitter client worth the name doesn’t?

You can also get two much better Twitter apps—Twitterrific and Tweetie—at a lower price than Birdfeed’s $5 pricetag. I will say that I do believe after some updates, Birdfeed could be a great app as this 1.0 is definitely going in the right direction. So I’m not saying don’t buy it ever (I reserve that for Twittelator); just can’t recommend you buy it now.