Twitter and IM Clients

We have been using IM for years, and migrated over to Pidgin some years ago when we were still on Windows as Trillian Pro was not being updated regularly.

So, yesterday, when we discovered a review of the Trillian Astra Beta, we thought we would explore the issue of clients for not just IM, but Twitter. The positives of the new Trillian, themes, notifications and replies, customizations, and email. Check it out.

Fedora has decided to make Empathy the new IM client in Fedora 11 over Pidgin, as it is more closely integrated with the desktop. Pidgin will still be available as an option though. We did a few tests of Empathy, but the version we had didn’t import from Pidgin, and we have years of log files we don’t want to lose, so we’ll hold off on migration decisions for now.  Empathy’s superiority is in design, not necessarily in use.

We used Pidgin for a while not only for IM, but for Twitter, when it first started, except the Twitter plugin was a bit buggy and kept crashing the whole program.

So, we sought to separate our Twitter from our IM. We tried several Twitter clients in Fedora. The only one that supported multiple accounts was Gwibber, and it had limits on how many messages could be displayed. So we went to Adobe Air and tried the immensely popular Tweetdeck. However, it does not have multiple account support, so we migrated to Twhirl.

Twhirl has everything we need. But Twhirl will likely soon be replaced by Seesmic Desktop, which is still in preview releases. We’ll be staying with Twhirl at least until its successor is out of preview. One blogger predicted that Seesmic will blow Tweetdeck out of the water. Everything on Seesmic is supposedly faster. Both Tweetdeck and Seesmic offer grouping functions, something Twitter itself should integrate, allowing those people you are following to be categorized by you. Seesmic is more a competitor for Tweetdeck than a straight successor to Twhirl.

Either way, there are a lot of IM and Twitter options out there. One has to find what works for them. So far, Pidgin and Twhirl work for us. Tell us what works for you.

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