Five Best Twitter Clients

Twitter has risen to prominence as the most popular micro-blogging service around. If you’re underwhelmed with the Twitter web site and looking for more features you’ll definitely want to check out the five Twitter clients showcased here.

TweetDeck (Windows/Mac/Linux/iPhone, Free)

TweetDeck boasts the ability to monitor multiple social-networking services, in this case Twitter, Facebook and Myspace. You can fight Twitter spam with a built-in spam monitor, follow topics with saved searchs, and preview shortened URLs from within TweetDeck. You can use TweetDeck to manage multiple Twitter accounts from one interface and thanks to web-based TweetDeck accounts you can backup and sync your TweetDeck profile across multiple machines.

Brizzly (Web-Based, Free)

If you’ve been reading over the various Twitter clients in today’s Hive Five and thinking “I don’t want some fancy application, I just want the actual Twitter web site to be more functional!”, then you’ll definitely want to check out Brizzly. The first thing that strikes you after logging into your Brizzly account is how similar it is to the actual Twitter interface—except vastly improved. Shortened URLs are automatically expanded, links to pictures and videos are automatically thumb-nailed and easy to preview. The left and right navigation columns are fixed, so as you scroll through the tweets you never lose sight of useful links. Brizzly is a super-charged version of the Twitter web interface. One thing, if you’re ready to try Brizzly out. You’ll need an invitation to the service. Fortunately invitations aren’t hard to come by, Twitter is buzzing with them. Search Twitter with this link and check out invitations until you find one with an active use left.

Seesmic (Web-Based/Windows/Mac/iPhone, Free)

Seesmic not only has a diverse platform base—you can use it on the web, on your PC or Mac, and on your iPhone—but you can also use it not only for keeping up on Twitter but Facebook too. The Seesmic desktop application, built on Adobe Air, is quite configurable. You can specify which URL shortening and image hosting services you want to use, what kind of notifications you receive, how large of an event timeline Seesmic will build, and how you want all that information displayed. Video and pictures can be inserted into shared directly from Seesmic.

Tweetie (Mac/iPhone, Free)

Tweetie definitely has the most interactive GUI of any of the Twitter clients in today’s Hive. On top of features like threaded conversations and direct messages, you can grab pieces of your Twitter stream and pull them right off. See a topic you’re interested in keeping an eye on? You can pull it right off into a separate window. Want more than one reply window to compose multiple messages? Not a problem. Tweetie is free—but ad-supported—you can pay $US19.95 to get an ad-free version.

DestroyTwitter (Windows/Mac/Linux, Free)

DestroyTwitter is a very compact Twitter client that has a very IM-window kind of appearance. Everything is presented, by default, in one column which can be cycled through various views via the buttons along the top and bottom of the window—Home, Replies, Saved searches, for example. You can expand DestroyTwitter to present multiple columns at once and give it an appearance more similar to some of the other Twitter clients available, but many people prefer the simple and compact one column default. If you’re looking for a lightweight Twitter client and you don’t mind sacrificing some of the bells and whistles you get on the other clients like expansion of shortened URLs and thumb-nailed images, DestroyTwitter is worth a look.

Can’t believe your favourite didn’t make it? Never had a problem with the basic Twitter site? Let’s hear about it in the comments below.