Streamieis an open beta web application that streamlines your Twitter feed, displaying only tweet text and avatars in real-time. With it’s simplistic design, quick loading time and small set of features, it’s the opposite of bloatware. Upon signing in Streamie looks like a mobile app: most of the page is dedicated to your timeline, while the iconized navigation bar is centered across the top. From the navigation bar you can access replies, retweets, favorites, direct messages, settings and create a new tweet.

In settings you can choose to color-code your direct messages, mentions and new tweets. If enabled direct messages will have a blue background and mentions will have a green background. Likewise, the faviconon your browser tab will change colors as well depending on the type of new message you’ve received; in addition to being blue or green, the icon can turn yellow for any new tweet that is posted on your timeline. You can even turn on Chrome desktop notifications for any or all of these items as well.

In your timeline you are able to reply to tweets, but as far as I can tell there is no way to send direct messages from Streamie. You’ll have to click on a user’s icon (which will open up their Twitter profile in a new tab) and then send a DM to them from their actual Twitterprofile. You can, however, respond to DMs right from within Streamie. As you can see from the image below, you can also attach images and shorten URLs within your replies.

This is not just a place to display your personal retweets, you can see all retweets from any Twitter user you follow. As you’ll see in timeline image above, the first tweet has a light gray background, this is because it is a retweet. All retweets will have this colored background so that you can differentiate them from regular tweets. A nice addition is also the ability to retweet or quote a tweet (giving you the ability to add a comment before retweeting something).

I did a test tweet just to see how images work. Right now the only option is to upload images from your computer (no uploading via URL or webcam). Once attached, it is automatically uploaded to and hosted at Imgur. Once posted, a tiny icon will show next to the image URL in your tweet. You can scroll over that icon to bring up a small view of the actual image that you attached (see below).

There are some interesting settings in Streamie like the ability to filter long conversations (more than 3 tweets). You can also choose to display your personal Twitter background or keep it as the default white background. If you allow it, you can add your location to your tweets. Streamie can even autocomplete Twitter usernames as you type them. You can see the image below for more setting options.

Honestly, the only cons that I could find were not being able to choose how often the timeline updates, no ability to manually update the timeline (some people prefer that) and the website keeps crashing Safari on my iPod touch (so it doesn’t seem very mobile friendly).

Even though Streamie looks like a very simple application, it does contain some very interesting and useful features. It’s especially perfect for those wanting to quickly check their Twitter timeline without having to worry about the dreaded feature overload syndrome (like many other web based Twitter apps). Streamiehas found a way to make checking Twitter convenient, fun and easy.