Never Heard of it.

Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. Twitter is the darling of social media these days and with its popularity has seen a huge influx of applications and tools. I thought that I would take this moment to throw out my apps of choice.

Tweetie Screen Shot

Mac- I have a mac book and a clear cut choice for a twitter app on it, Tweetie. Why Tweetie? It is very simple, great layout, all the feature you could want and it stays out of the way. I like that it is on the top bar in OS X and that I can click that icon and open the program without closing what I am doing or dealing with the dock. The dock icon can show a badge for when tweets and dms have  come in. With Tweetie you can leave it running and pretty much forget that it is even open, that is until you get an update. I have tried out Tweeteck and I know it is popular because of its Facebook integration, lists and layout, but I am not a fan of Air apps and it just feels in the way as opposed to working in the background. The best feature in Tweetie is its implementation with growl. Tweetie pretty much handles all of the features that you could want from a twitter app, and I expect them to continue to add in the new features that twitter adds. It is an ad supported app, but the ads are far from obtrusive and at times it will ask you to upgrade to a professional version.

Windows- My desktop is running windows 7 and even more clear cut as my choice for Windows is Digsby. Digsby is much more than a twitter app and there is a good chance that whenever they release a Mac app I could leave Tweetie on my Mac. Now, that will depend on the implementation but Digsby has an advantage in that it could replace Tweetie and Adium for me. Digsby is a multipurpose app that works as a chat platform (like pidgin or trillium) for multiple chat apps including: Facebook, gchat, Aim, Yahoo, and MSN. Digsby as a twitter app is good but not great. I like the layout of Tweetie as a twitter client but Digsby is definitely functional. Digsby gives you twitter updates and will allow you to view your entire twitter stream. Digsby also works yp update your Facebook friends statuses. Digsby comes with several built in skins and can handle so much, there is not much of a reason to use anything else. It is my twitter client of choice as well as my chat client on Windows.

Also, Digsby will check you email accounts and give you notifications when you have received new mail. This could replace gmail notifier on my mac. Digsby is great if you want one app to handle many different things and everyone should check it out at east once. If nothing else at least check out some of their provided screen shots.

Check out Brizzly

Web- I really do not know how may web apps there are out there for Twitter but Brizzly is the way to go if you want to access twitter through the browser. Forget about twitter.com, Brizzly is the way to go. Why bother with Brizzly when you can just go to twitter? Brizzly has a few enhancements that will save you some click time.  First off, the layout is so close to Twitter that there is no learning curve. On the side you will see that Brizzly has the hot topics just like Twitter does, but what makes it interesting is that next to each topic it says Why? Click on the why and you get a community based answer on why this is trending. Hate clicking on shortened urls because you do not know what you are getting in to, well Brizzly automatically shows you the original url. If someone attaches a picture or video to a twitter post Brizzly automatically opens it in your stream, so you do not have to go to another website to see it.

Brizzly will automatically shorten urls like twitter, and there is a button on the page to click and upload a picture that is saved as a part of your Brizzly account. Brizzly allows you to see up to 5 different Twitter accounts, and it will allow you to connect to Facebook. It will be interesting to see if it will allow you access to content that has been blocked (ie. Facebook is blocked on the University computers.) I would really like to see some of Brizzly’s features built into a standalone app. Brizzly is an invite only beta. I have 10 invites as of now. Feel free to request it in the comments.

Mobile- I will not go into great detail here but I use a Windows Mobile Device. My app of choice on this platform is Twikni. The reason I like Twikni is because compared to the other Windows Mobile apps that I have used, it is the only one that works without a bunch of bugs. The scrolling worked well. It did not kill my battery. It had all of the features that you could want and it is constantly being updated. There may have been some other apps on this platform that had some interesting features but they did not compare to Twikni in stability and function.