I’ve been using Twitter for a while now and its various 3rd party apps along with it.
I started out with twitterific on mac and then iPod touch. Eventuly though I found myself drawn to the more complex, more stylish apps available such as TweetDeck. It is still my favourite because of how feature rich it is and how it let’s you group up people you follow.
The group syncing can be a bit temperemental sometimes but for the most part it’s a great free app.
Now that Twitter has launched lists though, which is essentially their official version of groups, it will be interesting to see how tweetdeck merges the two together.
Surely this will eliminate syncing problems as eveything will be stored online. Not only this but it will allow you to carry across the same lists to any app seamlessly which is vey cool.
As good as tweetdeck is now and as much promise as it has, sometimes you just want a very lightweight app for when you don’t need to check all your groups and you have a more simple goal in mind like DMing someone or checking your replies.
There are a lot of simplistic apps out there but most people favour tweetie, echofon or twitterific along with a few others. There’s too many to mention really.
Like I mentioned earlier, I started with twitterific for mac and iPod touch. Now I prefer to use either tweetdeck or just twitter.com when I’m on the pc or mac and tweetdeck and tweetie 2 now on my iPod. That way you get a fully-featured and lightweight app in both places.
I also have the free version of tweetie for mac so I may use more of that soon especially if it syncs with the mobile version.
As far as tweetie 2 for the app store goes, I like it. The price put me off for a while but I feel like it does justify it. The only real issue I have is that I hope they don’t continue to release each update as a new version and charge for each. I can understand that they need to make it a business, but it’s generally poor form when tweetdeck and others are free.
Another issue is that the search is basic compared to twitterific because you can’t distinguish between only messages from a user and all messages to and from them. So if you want to see the tweets from someone you don’t follow who gets a lot of mentions you have to search for that user every time. Saved searches will get mixed up with lots of stuff you dont want to see. It’s not a big isssue by any means but a little disappointing nonetheless.
Overall the two best apps appear to be tweetdeck and tweetie. Both of which are available in desktop and mobile versions.
Combined, they provide the best combination of stylish minimalism and feature richness.
If you’re a serious Twitter user it’s hard to go wrong with either. That said, if you don’t require as much in the way of customisation or features then you might want to consider using just the web interface for desktop use and a free app like twitterific (which has ads) for mobile. The mobile Twitter website is just too basic to recommend.
Thanks for reading and I hope this helps you decide on the right Twitter path for you.
