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This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

While I’ve been exploring Twitter, I’ve noticed that people are posting their updates from a number of clients. There are dozens of these and the Twitter fan wiki is a good place to start to find all kinds of Twitter tools and mashups. The one’s I’ve been looking at are those that work on Adobe AIR. AIR stands for the Adobe Integrated Runtime, and there are all kinds of cool apps that use it. These run quickly and manage a lot of data, and there are several of these for Twitter. I tried out a few, and here’s my brief review.

Twitch

Twitch - I found this one hard to see because of the white writing on a grey background. I don’t know if I was missing something, but it didn’t tell me when there was a new tweet, which meant I had to click on the window to find out what was new. I ditched that pretty quickly and moved on to the next one.

Tweeter

Tweeter - this was easy to read with alternately colored bars. The menu across the top made it easy to manage most functions, but there was one issue that made me move on quickly. Although it claimed to have a URL shortener, I couldn’t get it to work.

Spaz

Spaz - this client looks good, no doubt about it. The text is easy to read and the color scheme rocks. It made it easy to reply to people, but I couldn’t find a URL shortener. Since for me that’s a must have, I moved on to my final choice. I did like the way you could have a permanent update window in the top right of your screen, though.

Twhirl

Twhirl - this client actually deserves a full review of its own. Suffice it to say that Twhirl rocks. It makes it easy for you to identify status updates, your updates, direct messages and replies and you have a choice of three URL shortening services. You can customize the font size too and you get pop up updates as they happen. This is my top pick for Twitter desktop clients - or it was …

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck - this Twitter client, still in beta, has the most potential of any that I’ve seen. It gives you a full screen Twitter view, with all tweets on the right, replies to you in the middle column and other free columns for grouping tweets from people you want to follow. You can really filter out the noise with Tweetdeck, as well as keeping a check on Twitter uptime status. You can reply, send direct messages and retweet from within the same interface, and this has the potential to replace Twhirl for me especially with two killer features: integrated Summize search and the ability to queue tweets when Twitter is down.

Which desktop Twitter client is your favorite and why? Have you had a better experience with any of the ones I’ve mentioned?

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

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