Treader Review

I adore Twitter. It's fantastic for so many things. I can learn new insights from news stories on the service, discover breaking news before the TV networks catch on, learn at the touch of a button just what everyone's so fascinated about right this second, and even learn random facts about some puerile reality TV show. OK, admittedly I'm not too fussed about knowing that.

However, Twitter is absolutely brilliant at offering ridiculous amounts of information in one huge block. Sometimes this is to its detriment. If you've got a lot of followers and you've been away from Twitter for most of the day, you can miss out on a lot of what's happened. Enter Treader, an application that analyses what the trending topics are amongst your followers.

Sure, you can already check out trending topics through a whole number of Twitter clients. This isn't just your trending topics though - it's everyone on Twitter's. Treader enables you to see exactly what your followers are talking about the most. The app takes around a day to collect this information at first, although it did seem to take a bit less for me. Once that's done, though, you can look up exactly what's been going on.

Once you find a topic, a touch of a button and you can see images and articles, as well as tweets, connected to the subject. To make the information even easier to access, you can set up filters and create lists. You can also add favourite people so that their tweets are included in the trending list, even if you don't actually follow them on Twitter. Particularly useful if you just want to gain relevant information from them, not absolutely everything they tweet. Plus you can reply to @ mentions or direct messages (DMs) from within the app.

Treader is really pretty useful. I found myself often using it when I was away from my ever growing feed for a few hours and wanted to catch up on what I'd missed. It makes for a very useful accompaniment to regular Twitter clients and is worth a look.