Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

If you’re still using Twit­ter from Twitter.com, I have to say you’re mak­ing it hard on your­self and you’re not get­ting all you can out of it. Desk­top apps are one way to make it eas­ier to track fol­low­ers, respond, orga­nize and mon­i­tor your pro­file or brand.

I usu­ally make an effort to try out Twit­ter clients as I learn about them. I won’t be review­ing every­one in this post but I will review most of the major ones.

Tweet­deck

I really like Tweet­deck’s large and easy on the eyes user inter­face. It’s great for watch­ing and post­ing to mul­ti­ple accounts. For six months, I’d say it was my favorite app for both mobile and desk­top hands down.

Tweet­deck fea­tures sup­port for Twit­ter, Face­book, MySpace, and Linkedin. This makes it easy to keep up-to-date with these social net­works and post to them with­out log­ging in to mul­ti­ple Web pages.

From Tweet­deck, you can post reg­u­lar tweets, pic­tures, or even video, via 12seconds.

It also incor­po­rates bit.ly and other pop­u­lar link short­en­ing ser­vices and can inte­grate with your account. If you’re a freak about met­rics this is super handy.

Many peo­ple use Tweet­deck just for it’s search func­tion which streams in your search into a handy dandy col­umn. For exam­ple, you can enter your brand name and watch it aggre­gate results right in the col­umn. It’s like hav­ing a social media dash­board rather than just a Twit­ter tool.

Seesmic Desktop

Seesmic Desk­top offers sim­i­lar func­tion­al­ity to Tweet­deck. Choos­ing between these two is mainly a deci­sion about what inter­face you are most com­fort­able with. How­ever, Seesmic appears to be mov­ing to improve their desk­top app. They recently bought Ping.fm a tool which allows you to basi­cally post any­where you want to at once. This tech­nol­ogy will most likely find its way into Seesmic Desk­top soon and make it even more powerful.

If you’re a Win­dows user, Seesmic for Win­dows is a native appli­ca­tion which should pro­vide bet­ter per­for­mance for you over the Adobe air appli­ca­tion Mac and Linux users get.

Destroy Twit­ter

Has a very nice UI and includes the option to use themes to cus­tomize it’s look. I really like using this app and it cur­rently incor­po­rates groups. Destroy 2.0 will also fea­ture lists in the future which will make it a really nice option. How­ever right now with­out mul­ti­ple accounts and no Twit­ter lists, I wouldn’t rec­om­mended it for a power user.

Tweetie

A very nice func­tion­ing Mac twit­ter desk­top app with a great user inter­face brought to you by the peo­ple who make one of the most pop­u­lar iPhone apps. Unfor­tu­nately it doesn’t offer lists or groups in the desk­top ver­sion. This makes it more or less use­less for me. But if you have a much smaller lists of friends and fol­low­ers maybe you it will work for you.

Skim­mer

Skim­mer was cre­ated by ad agency Fal­lon. Like the mar­ket­ing com­ing out of the Min­neapo­lis agency, it’s a slick and cleaver. I really dig the look and feel. It ren­ders pho­tos and YouTube video beau­ti­fully. I’m a lit­tle less stoked with it’s Twit­ter fea­ture set. But then again it’s hard to do every­thing perfectly.

Twit­ter­iffic, Twinja and Mac Lounge

A few more Mac apps. None of these appear to have been updated lately and don’t sup­port lists. Twit­terific makes a pop­u­lar iPhone app but their desk­top app feels neglected com­pared with the con­stant updates and rich fea­tures of Tweet­deck.  Mac Lounge and Twinja both are are fine basic apps but offer lit­tle in the way of fea­tures com­pared to the more popular

Thwirl

A min­i­mal­ist but very func­tional desk­top Twit­ter app. If you like to post to lots of dif­fer­ent net­works this may be the appli­ca­tion for you. It’s the oppo­site of Tweet­deck in that it occu­pies very lit­tle of your screen yet does a lot with that space. You can post to Twit­ter, laconi.ca, Friend­feed and Seesmic Video accounts and inte­grate sev­eral url short­ners. Thwirl was bought by Seesmic and updates have slowed, none in the last sev­eral months. So while it’s cur­rently a pretty neat tool, I wouldn’t bet on it being around forever.

Sobees and Dig­iTweet

Sobees and Dig­iTweet are Twit­ter desk­top appli­ca­tion to con­sider if you’re a Win­dows user — I’m not so I haven’t tried them. Sobees does sup­port Face­book, Myspace and Linkedin as well and looks to have the richer fea­ture set. Both are native .Net applications.

A word about Adobe Air

Most of these pro­grams func­tion within Adobe Air, an amaz­ing plat­form that allows pro­gram­mers the abil­ity to cre­ate desk­top appli­ca­tions that func­tion much like mobile apps. Adobe Air is more or less a desk­top ver­sion of Flash — I’m not a tech guy so excuse me if I’m over sim­pli­fy­ing. This pro­vides robust func­tion­al­ity but not always the best per­for­mance to weight ratio. Should a Twit­ter client really be using 264 mb of my real mem­ory? Maybe. And if you’ve got a high per­for­mance machine with tons of ram and disk space, no wor­ries. But if you’re run­ning an older machine maybe a browser based client is more to your liking.

Browser Apps

Browser based twit­ter clients are pretty darn robust these days too. And you should con­sider them as well. I’ll be post­ing soon on some major ones shortly. As well as mobile apps.

Be Socia­ble, Share!

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This entry was posted Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at 1:28 pm and is filed under social media. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.