App of the week for journalists: Neatly, for tidying your Twitter timeline into topics

App of the week: Neatly

Devices: iPhone / iPad / Nokia

Cost: £1.49 (£1 in the Nokia store)

What is it? A Twitter client that organises your Twitter timeline into topics

How is it of use to journalists? Neatly is a Twitter client that is hugely powerful for journalists. What makes it different to other Twitter apps is that it allows you to filter your timeline, followers and lists by keyword and there is a screen within the app that automatically organises your timeline by topic.

Search your timeline

You will see a filter search box above your Twitter timeline when using Neatly. This is an incredibly useful way to search for tweets containing a keyword (such as the 'Egypt' example in the screenshot below).



Topics

Topics are automatically created within Neatly. The app creates topics based on the subjects the people in your timeline or in one of your lists are tweeting about.

Perhaps you are a journalist with multiple topics or interests. For example you may be tracking 'Syria' for personal interest and following tweets about 'Facebook' for a story. You can mute any of the topics if there are times when you are not interested in news on that niche.

You can even colour code your topics or contacts so that you can organise sources visually.

Smart timeline

There's also a smart timeline that is designed to surface the tweets that will be most relevant to you. The idea is that the ones at the top are from the most relevant sources. The smart timeline gets more intelligent the more you use the app.

Multiple Twitter accounts

If you manage a work Twitter account and a personal one then this app is useful too as you can easily switch between profiles.

Send by email

Another great feature is the way you can transfer tweets on a topic out of the app. For example, the screengrab below shows three tweets on the topic of Syria and the 'send by mail' function sends the tweets in an email, not just the links.



As a journalist this feature means you can find tweets on a particular topic and then email the collection, perhaps to yourself so that you can save and follow up later.

The app looks beautiful too. If you are an iPad and iPhone user, it's worth getting on both devices as the iPad experience makes the most of the larger screen size. You can view multiple windows on the iPad app and there is also a pinning function to save the page.

It is interesting to note that the app is also available on Nokia. The app was made by Cairo-based developers where the Nokia brand is popular.

There's a more detailed description of features in the App Store.

Hat tip: The Next Web

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