Now that Twitter has reached an age of maturity, it’s being used for more than just micro-blogging. More recently, Twitter is being used for more unconventional tasks such as task management. todoTweet takes the micro-blogging platform a step further to accomplish this so you can accomplish your day-to-day tasks.

Getting Started

Heading over to todoTweet, we can see that it is a pretty simple web app but could definitely be useful depending on your workflow.

Sign In

There’s no sign up or registration. todoTweet uses Twitter’s secure Oauth sign in method to securely access your Twitter account. Once you authorize the application, you’ll be redirected to todoTweet’s web app.

Interface Overview

Once you’re signed in, you can see your list of to-do’s, create new ones or manage existing ones. I really like the overall design of the web app and it’s simplicity makes it super easy to use. While I like flexible task management apps, they tend to quickly become over complicated; meanwhile, the simplistic and minimal task management apps do a fantastic job of focusing on your tasks.

Using todoTweet

Using todoTweet is incredibly simple (as it should be). You simply tweet your task, adding #todo and any other hash tags to the tweet you might want. I’ve tweeted, “testing todoTweet #todo #now #ignore,” which is automatically added to my todoTweet task list.

The “#todo” hash tag has been removed as it isn’t necessary within the app itself; it’s purpose is to flag the tweet for the todoTweet web app to be picked up as a task. The other hash tags are added in the sidebar, which can be used to quickly filter through large lists of tasks.

Private Tasks

My first concern about adding tasks via regular tweets is that, not only are they public but it would be an easy way to irritate your followers. People follow you for your interesting tweets; tasks, aren’t quite interesting tweets and don’t appeal to your followers.

If you have tasks you want to add that would bore your followers or that you don’t want visible in your public stream, you can easily add a private task. Click the new todo button in the top left of the todoTweet web app, enter your task and slide the visibility slider from Public to Private, click Create and you’re done.

Private tasks are marked with a lock icon and “private” next to it.

Other Functions

The other functions of todoTweet are pretty straight forward. You can mark tasks as completed by clicking the gray arrow icon to the left of tasks, changing it to a green icon signifying completion; mark tasks as due now using the star at the end of tweets, changing the icon to a bright yellow star; or, when viewing completed tasks only, you can permanently delete tasks.

todoTweet Pros

I think todoTweet has a really great idea going. It has a well designed, simple and clean interface, well functioning web app interactions with JavaScript implementation to reduce page reloads and seems to work, overall, quite well.

Adding tasks is easy, and can be done anywhere you have Twitter access — including Tweeting via text’s. An iPhone app is also on the way, which will make it much easier to add private tasks for those of you on that platform.

todoTweet Cons

I really have to say, I don’t like the way tasks are added publicly. Many of us handle boatloads of tasks each day and Tweeting those tasks is going to loose me some followers; so adding tasks via tweets is just out of the question for me. Sure, word your tasks creatively so your followers aren’t as irritated but I don’t like the idea of worrying about wording my tasks correctly.

There needs to be a way to add tasks by sending a tweet via @ or DM to todoTweet, which the first method would still be somewhat public but won’t irritate your followers. Perhaps tasks can be added via @ for semi-public visibility and via DM for private. This way you’ll also be able to add private tasks from any Twitter capable system, including basic texting.

Final Thoughts

todoTweet has a great idea going and with some feature additions, I think it could be a really great, yet simple, task management web app. An accompanying iPhone app would top things off for me. A general mobile interface for other mobile devices would help those users also take advantage of the app.

What do you guys think of task management so directly integrated with Twitter?

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