5 Twitter Clients Compared
As some of you might have noticed, I have been fairly into Twitter lately, and to this end, I have tried out several Twitter clients. I would like to share my experience with them here.
This is the normal twitter interface, that I am sure you have seen by now. The functionality on there is rather limited as far as I saw, since it does not even provide a ReTweet button, or any way to filter the tweets in the tweetstream. It is a fairly clean interface, and does mean that you do not have to worry about running into the API limits that Twitter imposes on all third party applications. Also, it is a web interface, and therefore available from any browser.
This is a Firefox addon, allowing you to see the updates from all your friends on both twitter and facebook. It provides the ability to reply and retweet posts. The problem I found is that it displays only one message at a time changing them periodically (by default the period is 7 seconds, fortunatelly it can be changed, as I found it immensly distracting).
I have to be honest, I spent the least amount of time with this client… Just did not like something about the interface. This one, like the two following clients is an AIR app, so you will need to Install Adobe Air Runtime in order to use it.
It supports other microblogging platforms besides twitter, a fact I did not find very usefull since I do not use any of them at the moment. It does allow filtering and groups.
As far as I can tell, Tweetdeck is the most popular twitter client, and is the one I am using at the moment. It has an attractive interface, with easy to read tweets, and allows for easy following, retweeting and replying. It does provide support for filtering and groups, which I found very useful.
Another useful feature is the ability to set how often it checks for tweets, allowing you to conserve API calls, and make sure that Twitter does not completelly kill your productivity.
One feautre I thought was a great way to see what is happening in tweetspace is the Twitscoop pane, whihc presents a tag cloud of currently active topics on twitter, as well as trending topics.
It has a couple of features that I have not used yet, such as support for 12seconds and StockTweets.
This somewhat oddly named client is the newest serious contestant. It looks very similar to TweetDeck, although it lacks support for groups. I also found the default fonts a bit small. One nice feature is the ability to click on a tab, and open a column showing all the tweets with that tag
I was seriously tempted to go with Destroy Twitter at first, but the lack of group support put me off. The developers are constantly updating it though, so I may yet switch back to it.
Well, there are my opinions on the five clients I have had a chance to experiment with. There are others, some of them probably better, but I have not spend enough time with them to give an opinion.
