Over the last few years, Twitter has become one of the backbone social media networks. It's quick in sharing information, it's public so any information can be easily searched, and quite honestly it has less drama than Facebook because you don't have to follow the people that follow you. News channels use Twitter regularly to receive feedback from viewers, and it's even (controversially) credited to helping spread the Arab Spring, if not at least helping share its on-goings with the rest of the world.

With such a powerful tool at your hands, you'll need the right mobile app to allow you to make the most use out of Twitter.

About UberSocial

UberSocial is a third-party Twitter client available for both Android and iOS. However, because there are a few distinguishable differences between the two versions, this article will focus mainly on its Android cousin. UberSocial started as an iOS project and has its original codebase on that platform, but it spread to Android by absorbing the now-defunct Twidroyd client, and building off of its code.

Today, it is quite functional and quite similar to the iOS version.

First Launch & Navigation

After first launching UberSocial, you'll be asked to sign into Twitter, by which the app redirects you to Twitter's sign in page that specifically allows UberSocial app permissions. Once you log in, it'll immediately start pulling in recent tweets. You'll immediately see that UberSocial is organized into many different columns, so all of the information you could want is only a few swipes away.

The first and left-most column will be your Timeline of all the people you follow. If you swipe to the left (thereby moving one column to the right), you'll see tweets you're mentioned in. Swiping further sends you to direct messages, "Inner Circle", Facebook, search, trends, nearby tweets, retweets, and finally favorites.

Basics

Viewing tweets is easy and intuitive. Tapping on the "Timeline" at the top will send you to the most recent tweets; pulling the list down even further will refresh the list. Tapping on the tweets themselves results in a bigger view of a tweet, along with action buttons to reply, retweet, favorite, share, and more.

Below those action buttons will be a list of retweets of the tweet you're looking at, or, if the tweet has a link, it'll instead show you a preview of the link. Composing a tweet is also easy by clicking on the pencil icon in the top right corner. You can then type out your tweet, as well as add a picture, video, or location, and even include your posting to Facebook if enabled.

Unique Features

There are a couple of features which make UberSocial very unique from other third-party solutions as well as the official Twitter client. For example, the "Inner Circle" feature allows you to handpick those people who are most important or closest to you, so that whenever you decide to visit the Inner Circle column, you'll only see tweets from those important people that you picked out, and none of the less-important "nonsense" from the people you thought were interesting when you first followed them.

You can even choose to "mute" a user, which essentially removes them from appearing in any of your columns without actually having to block them on Twitter.

Last but not least, you can also add your Facebook account to access your news feed within that column.

UberSocial also has a unique menu system which looks very similar to that of the official Facebook app. You can access it by tapping on the UberSocial logo in the top left corner. From there, you can access any feature of the app, including fast forwarding to a certain column so you don't have to spend time swiping around as well as settings and multiple account setup.

Settings

The app also has a remarkably large array of settings for you to configure. These settings include but aren't limited to: notification settings, themes, sound and display settings, un-read marks, photo and video posting, URL shortening, location and geotagging, tweet shortning, cross posting (to Facebook, GTalk, and email), and other miscellaneous ones such as auto refresh and username autocompletion. In other words, you should be able to tweak the app to your heart's content!

Installation

UberSocial can be installed in a few easy steps. You can find it in the Google Play Store by searching for "ubersocial", and then installing the first result. You may also use your Android device or desktop to follow this link to automatically go to the app. After a quick download, it should be installed in no time!

Conclusion

I'm actually quite impressive with what UberSocial can do, and I find it to be a nice improvement over the previous Twidroyd. It is feature-packed and gives the improved official Twitter client some tough competition. If you are a Twitter user and haven't given UberSocial a try yet, I highly suggest you do so!

Do you use Twitter? What's your favorite mobile app? Favorite desktop app? Let us know in the comments!