Twitter Clients 101

January 31st, 2008 at 2:00 PM - Tips by Jeff Gamet

Twitter is a cool tool for keeping everyone up to date on whatis going on in your world or your head. One of the things that really sets this social networking Web site apart is the spontaneity it brings to useris mini-blog entries. Creating and following tweets from the Twitter Web site, however, can really kill the mood -- at least for some people.

If the Twitter Web site just doesnit do it for you, there are other options out there.

Twitterrific Twitterrific from Iconfactory is a stand-alone Twitter client that lets you compose and post your own entries, also known as tweets, reply to other useris tweets, send private messages, mark users as favorites, and more. It keeps everything packed in a tight little package that saves Desktop space, and it supports Growl notifications.

Twitterrific costs US$14.95, but you can use it for free if you donit mind seeing ads tossed in with the tweets you follow.

thwirl twhirl is another stand-alone Twitter client, but this one is cross-platform because it relies on Adobe AIR: Adobeis run-time application environment. It sports many of the same features as Twitterrific along with the ability to shorten long URLs and alternate interface color schemes, but a memory leak in Adobe AIR could cause some performance issues with twhirl.

twirl is free, and it requires that you first install the free Adobe AIR 3 beta.

MoodBlast MoodBlast is pretty cool in that it can post entries to multiple services at the same time including Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr, Skype, iChat, and Adium. If you post to multiple services, this can be a real time saver. MoodBlast is free, but the developers are more than happy to accept donations.

Of course, there are plenty of other Twitter-compatible clients out there. Feel free to share your favorite as a comment.

If you want to learn more about Twitter, check out the TMO article that explains how to get started, and if you want to follow whatis going on at TMO with Twitter be sure to check out TMO on Twitter.

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