Twitter Desktop Clients

Before I get into any of this, I first have to say that I am very biased toward TweetDeck. It was the first desktop client that I found, and I fell in love with it. TweetDeck has been very reliable for me in all the time that I have used it.

So now into the reviews and comparisons. Please, if you feel the need to ridicule my disjointed and unstudied prose, use the comment section to it's fullest ability. I can take it.

Like I said before, I have been using TweetDeck for a long time now. The screenshot that you are looking at to the right is one that I took in TweetDeck itself. As you can see, the client, like so many others, will support not just twitter, but Facebook and Myspace as well. What I like about TweetDeck is all of the different tool and window options that  are available. The ones that I use beside the Twitter and Facebook windows right now are the 'tweetdeck recommends' and 'direct comments' windows. You have the option to search on any given subject in twitter, and TweetDeck will put the most relevant tweets into it; or you can search for twitter users themselves. The list of options can go on for TweetDeck. Another new feature that the TD guys have added is the option to get the full news feed from face book, which includes the ability to comment, and view applications and so on. You virtually don't need to go to facebook anymore with TweetDeck. The program is very well put together. I found it completely intuitive to use for the first time, and has been a robust application. I really like this thing. Keep it up TweetDeck Guys!

Next on my list was Twhirl. This client looked very appealing to me at face value, but was a little different from what I thought it would be. Let me explain this. First off, in my own stupidity, I thought that it would be a full window program, but I really neglected to look at the screen shots that the website makes available. The next slight misconception was the way it worked. Twhirl can support almost any micro-blogging website or social network you want..... through a web service called Ping.fm. What the way it all works is that you set up a Ping.fm account, connect all of your social networks to it, and then you access Ping.fm from your desktop with Twhirl. When you update Twhirl for your twitter account, you can opt to update your Ping.fm account at the same time, and thus update your Facebook, linkedin, Myspace, you name it.

Other than all of that, I found on very apealling feature. Twhirl is in my estimation one of the only clients that offers you the option to recieve direct access to friendfeed. This is really why I wanted it. I can run it in the background along with TweetDeck. It's turned out great for me. I fully intend on keeping it around for a while.

The next client is called Sobees.com. What intrigued me here was the touted ability to link me not only to twitter and facebook from the desktop, but also to linkedin. Sorry, no screenshot here. For starters, Sobees failed to run in Ubuntu Linux. On the bright side, however, they are working on making it available to Linux users as soon as they can. I was not overly impressed with Sobees. It has the same old stuff in it like the rest of them, but what really rubbed me the wrong way was that it promises to set you up with linkedin.com access, but I was unable to access it. No matter what I did or where I looked for for support, I coudn't get linkedin to work. But I can say that there is a silver lining for Sobees.com, and that is the visual design that the developers put together was very appealing. I wish that TweetDeck had something similar.

To make mention of some other desktop clients, specifically Linux ones, I wanted to talk just a little bit about Gwibber and Twitux.

Gwibber worked okay for me, but I was not impressed with either the speed and reliability, or the layout and design. I don't run a very powerful system, but for a desktop client, that's no excuse.

I've heard much ado about Twitux. I haven't made myself very familiar with it, but I just wasn't impressed with my first outing in it. Twitux didn't combine my desire to have my Twitter, Facebook, linkedin and FriendFeed all together in the same client. It just did twitter. I might as well go to Twitter instead of use Twitux.

I hope that these short reviews have helped you all, at least the four of you who probably read this. But, seriously, I hope that you have got some good prospective with your Twitter desktop client search from me. My one last piece of advice would be to try a few out for yourselves. But, just so you have been duly warned, my preferences may differ greatly from your's.

Also, let me just make a quick mention about how much I have enjoyed using products(TweetDeck & Twhirl) programmed in Adobe's .air format. It is a very robust platform and has worked just fabulously in Ubuntu. All I had to do was download a plugin, and whammo! it all worked.