Voice tweeting: the next level of social microblogging

Twitter is becoming an integral part of our digital lives, whether used on our mobile devices or desktops. For office workers plugged in all day, Twitter-reading apps such as Tweetdeck and Twitterfox are useful but can be distracting.

Why waste time reading your tweets? With Shouttr you can listen to them. The small desktop client syncs with your Twitter account, and updates your feed as it goes along. Shouttr minimizes to the System Tray so it won’t take up valuable desktop space. As new tweets are received, Shouttr shouts them all out to you. You can repeat tweets if you weren’t listening properly the first time.

One of our favorite features allows you to hear all the tweets published by everyone on Twitter, in real time: this really feels like the future of node-based meta-social-mashups.

Double clicking the icon brings up a menu where you can post your own tweets, and access preferences. Here you’ll find the usual options, like turning pop up alerts on or off, frequency of updates and so on.

More importantly, you can choose the voice of your Shouttr. You can have once voice, or assign different voices to different people. Currently there are eight different voices, including male and female voices, sexy males and female voices, an old person’s voice and even a child’s voice (which is a bit disturbing).

This version of Shouttr is a pre-release alpha so it’s not quite fully-featured yet. In future versions the developer promises to add a range of new celebrity voices and in the distant future is even predicting voice input to Twitter.

Shouttr might be annoying for some people, but it means you no longer have to open your Twitter client or browser tab to keep up to date.