Tweetie & Twhirl: Twawesome!

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have gotten into Twitter recently. Well, if you have much experience with Twitter, you know that there are countless twitter clients available for little to no cost. They mostly are designed for specific purpose--to experience twitter from your Mac/PC/Linux computer, smartphone, tweet your GPS coordinates, tweet photos or what article/webpage/song you are listening to at that moment. There are also twitter tools like Tweetchat that renders public tweets into a chatroom format, TweetStats that tells you (or shares) how you use Twitter, or Twitter Search that enables you to learn about twitter and leverage the twitterverse based on your needs.

I am writing about my two favorite Twitter clients, Tweetie for iPhone and Twhirl (multiplatform).

Tweetie (pictured at right) is an iPhone application ($2.99 in the app store) that enables reading and posting of tweets. It has a handful of cool features that distinguish it from some of the other iPhone applications that I tried. First, it supports the standard twitter funcions--public timeline, current trends, search, profile editing, favorites, etc. It also supports multiple Twitter accounts simultaneously, which was important to me. It also supports posting your GPS location, which is not important to me, but definitely cool. Plus, it has a very intuitive interface, and has yet to crash on me. Every other smartphone app that I have tried for the blackberry or iPhone did not support this full range of features. The Blackberry applications in particular tended to be buggy--they either crashed frequently or had frequent failures when trying to execute certain functions.

Twhirl (free) is an Adobe Air-based desktop client, which means that it will work on Mac or Windows. In addition to Twitter, it supports connections to other microblogging services, including Friendfeed and Seesmic. It supports cross-posting to other sites like Facebook and Linkedin as well. It also features multiple accounts and posting to twitpic, searching public feeds, and much more. The user interface is relatively simple and very clean and performance is much better than another Adobe Air-based and quite popular Twitter client, Tweetdeck. My second monitor is now completely covered with Twhirl twitter feeds. Love it!