Plume for iPhone review: Quickly find all the links in your Twitter timeline

Plume for iPhone scours your Twitter timeline for all the links shared by all the people you follow, and then builds a list of just those links so you can quickly, easily enjoy them. We tend to follow the people that interest us, who tend to share the type of links that interest us, but finding those links amid a stream of food porn, tech talk, political discourse, and assorted randomness isn't always easy, and it's never efficient.

Plume strips all that out and builds a list that's links and nothing but the links, allowing you to get the best of both worlds -- a socially curated selection of content without the social noise that typically comes with it.

Since a Twitter timeline isn't organized, you can also create Feathers, which lets you select one or more individual Twitter accounts and extract only their links -- just @iMore's for example, or just a small collection of breaking news sites. You can even create Feathers for accounts you aren't following.

If you find a link you particularly enjoy, you view it in Mobilizer, send it to Safari, copy it, share it via email, send it to Instapaper, or tweet it right back to Twitter. You can even reply, retweet, and favorite right from within Plume.

Twitter links are displayed in a simple yet elegant list that looks like a regular Twitter timeline, including the avatar of the tweeter (though they don't look to be in Retina). However, they contain only the title of the linked-to page. No muss, no fuss, no cruft.

Setup is quick an easy, pulling the Twitter accounts you've already set up on your iPhone in Settings. If you haven't set something up yet, like Features, Plume will suggest you do (though in tiny, hyperlink style format that's begging for better treatment.)

The buttons are overly large at times, or have an embossed style that looks out of place on iOS. Performance, however, is near-instantaneous, and scrolling is silky smooth, even in really long lists. You can flick away with nary a hint of stutter.

Pros

Turns Twitter into a social link recommendation powerhouse
Includes basic Twitter functionality to act on the links you like
Lightning fast

Cons

Button design makes them stick out

Conclusion

I'm a huge fan of purpose-built Twitter apps, from the old school Bird House and Reportage, to the new school Quip. Plume is right up there with them -- almost certainly designed to scratch the itch of a developer, and released as an app to benefit all of us with the exact same itch.

That's what Plume does for those of us for whom Twitter has supplanted RSS as the principle way we get our online news, and that makes it invaluable.