Twitter Apps for your Tweetbelt

The Twitter Phenomenon – some call it the death of journalism, some call it the rebirth of useful communication. No matter your feelings on Twitter, it’s likely that you have an account, or will get one soon enough.

Now when tweeting (verb: the act of updating your twitter) you have many options. The robust Twitter API allows you to post from just about anywhere with any internet or mobile device. There are hundreds of Twitter clients for you to choose from! Today we’ll go through the many different clients you can holster in your Twitter Toolbelt!

The AIR Clients:

AdobeAIR, for those of you that don’t know, is a runtime environment developed by Adobe for building powerful Internet applications that can be deployed as desktop applications. (They’re mainly composed of Flash, HTML, Javascript, and AJAX). Many Twitter apps have been developed in the AIR environment, making them all cross-platform, but with drawbacks. If you’re a Mac person, and you like your standard OS X Application Interface, then be warned. The AIR apps are great, but may not be right for you. Personally, I’ve tried many of them, but found that they reacted like web apps, when I wanted them to react like desktop applications. This is not to say they’re bad apps! Many are fantastic, but personally I don’t want them on my desktop.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is arguably the most popular AIR client, with an attractive dark, multi-column interface and integration with tons of popular URL shortening services as well as TwitPic and YFrog. TweetDeck also taps into the Facebook API to allow you to update Twitter and Facebook Status Updates. The app allows users to link more than one Twitter Account, something not seen in all clients.

Seesmic Desktop

Seesmic Desktop almost seems like a cousin to TweetDeck, but is a little bit less cluttered. Seesmic also takes the multi-column approach, but looses the icon-only-based navigation. The app has a great sidebar to organize your Tweets (and yes, Facebook integration in this one too), and just has a great user experience in general. I was impressed once again to see all of the external Twitter services such as URL shortening, photo uploading, and a handy “shrink text” feature to help you squeeze the most into of your Tweets.

Tweetr

Tweetr is about as straight up as you can get with a Twitter client. Its no-nonsense, “tell it like it is” layout works quite well for beginning tweeters. It shows tweets from people you’re following, your own tweets, @mentions, and direct messages all in the same list. Now if you follow hundreds of people and get thousands of @mentions a day… might not be the best app for you, but for a beginner Tweetr is great. It offers a number of excellent features such as URL shortening, uploading images right from your Webcam, and a basic layout.

The iPhone Clients:

Of course, “there’s an app for that.” There is a plethora of Twitter clients of the iPhone, and quite frankly it’s hard to find a bad one! The iPhone seems to have been built for Tweeting, it’s just so natural on the device. A few apps lack features in one or two areas, lag, or a just a bit ugly, but all-in-all the majorty of them are great. The following are considered some of the best:

Tweetie

Tweetie is an excellent app with a number of  features. Landscape keyboard, light-weight, and a well organized user interface make Tweetie stand out from the crowd. With support for multiple accounts, bit.ly and TwitPic integration, and a native iPhone feel, Tweetie is easily worth the $2.99 price tag, and is my favorite paid iPhone client.

Developer Screenshot

Twitterfon

Twiterfon is another great client, but it comes for the best price: $0. Twitterfon is the only free client on our list, and for good reason. Even though it’s sibling Twitterfon Pro offers a ton of great features, for the thrift shopper at the App Store, this is the best buy. It’s just a solid client, with features like conversation view, and a similar interface to Tweetie. Though freebie downloader beware: Twitterfon is ad-supported. It’s really not to invasive, but it’s kind of a pain. I’m personally too cheap to drop $4.99 on Twitterfon Pro, when I can get a great client like Tweetie for $2.99 with almost all of the same features. If you’re looking to spend nothing, and get almost all of the great features you’d expect in a paid app: look at Twitterfon.

Developer Screenshot

Twittelator Pro

Twittelator Pro is the heavy-weight in this category. This is for the Power Tweeter! You’ll be amazed at how many features are packed into this mobile app, you might even feel claustrophobic. It’s an incredible app, but it quite frankly it has more features than anyone will honestly ever need. It goes into a depth that is subterranean, but if you’re the kind of person that wants to put dingbats and Greek symbols into your tweets: this is your app. As seems to be quite common with these iPhone apps, they all seem to have agreed on the same basic interface to work from, so using one is like using another, only the features and colors vary.

Developer Screenshot

The OS X Native Clients:

These are by far my favorite type of Twitter apps! There’s nothing like a good ol’ native application in OS X. There are a number of advantages to a native client including Growl notifications, noticeable speed differences, interface responsiveness, quicker launch times… you get my point. Many of these are in their infancy, in early beta’s lacking a few of the features of the AIR clients, but they feel much studier.

Nambu

Nambu is my personal client of choice. It does exactly what you hope a Twitter client would do. It has a great sidebar for sorting tweets, it has multiple view modes, it has conversation view, it has that Mac OS X standard search in the upper-right corner, it has integration with tr.im and pic.im, and it just works. It can collapse itself into a Tweetr-esque interface, then sidebar view, or a TweetDeck-esque layout for those interested in seeing 3-4 columns of content. Best of all: it’s native. It feels comfortable, intuitive, and sturdy. It’s still in beta, but coming soon: Facebook support! AIR clients: meet your closest competitor.

Lounge

Lounge is a promising client, and a great one for people who like color coding. Lounge has a handsome OS X interface with cutesy color coded icons and tweets to help you distinguish all of the various details. My favorite feature of Lounge is how it handles TwitPic photos. If it sees a TwitPic link in a tweet, it loads a thumbnail of that photo next to the tweet. It’s really nice to have the mystery taken out of “what is this a photo of?” when clicking through to a TwitPic. Lounge also features a great multi-account system with each switching in-between. Another unique feature of Lounge is how it displays your followers/following feeds as mini-profiles.

Twitterpod

Twitterpod is an enigma. I should preface this by saying I strongly discourage readers from downloading this app. In all honesty when I first launched this app, I wondered if the developer was tripping. Users are greeted with what would be a standard Twitter client design except for the psychedelic multi-colored header scrolling your subscribed tweets in a pretty trippy way (there are three views in this app, one being full on trippy tweet scrolling). The top navigation of the client uses icons that are much too small, and require screen zoom to analyze their purpose. I can’t help but wondering if this is a joke of some kind: it’s that bad. There’s nothing particularly useful about the client. I only throw it into this mix as a warning, and because there are only 3 native OS X Twitter clients available. The other two are so innovative and unique from their AIR competitors, that I feel they make up for this pointless little… odd app.

Other Methods of Tweeting:

SMS

For those of you who have yet to convert to the iPhone, or prefer a different device there’s always tweeting by text message. Sign up on Twitter.com with your mobile number and start tweeting your heart away to shortcode: 40404. Also, you can subscribe to get mobile SMS updates when you subscribe to other Tweeters.

Blackberry

TwitterBerry is a popular app for RIM Blackberry devices. I haven’t used it personally, but I’ve heard it’s a decent client from a number of people.

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