Editorial: Find Me a Twitter Client

Guru is the editor of the Gadget Wisdom blog and the voice of GadgetWisdom on Twitter.

I have gotten addicted to Twitter. It wasn’t my idea. I got onto Twitter to promote the blog, initially, and didn’t think I would have much use for it. But like many Twitter has mostly replaced the RSS feed for me. I want to keep up on what is going on, and I want that information delivered to me.

So all of the sites I used to follow in my RSS reader that offer a Twitter feed, I unsubscribed to the RSS feed. I’m hardly alone in that. There is too much to go through out there. And the nice thing is that in addition to straight blog->twitter feeds, there is some human filtering. If Tweeter A shares my preferences, the things they link to and retweet are likely to be ones I want to know about. That also creates a social element, as there can be commentary/dialogue about these things.

I am also on Identi.ca/StatusNet, also at GadgetWisdom. It is the same philosophy, but has a significantly different set of people, and fewer of the news sources I’m looking for, so I use it less frequently. It does offer a higher percentage of tech people though, so it has its place.

The Gadget Wisdom blog auto-tweets new blog entries, and I do try to comment on what other people are saying to get involved in the conversation. But ultimately, my problem is finding the right Twitter client.

I am a Linux user. The most popular Twitter clients that will work on Linux are Adobe Air based. Adobe Air is nice in that Air programs will work on any OS you can successfully install the software onto. But Adobe software can be difficult, although to Adobe’s credit, they do maintain the software and try to improve it.

I’ve been using Twhirl, which has not been maintained since Seesmic acquired it. Seesmic has its own Desktop software, which they’ve spun off into a variety of other social networking products, including one for Android. Twhirl is not ideal, but it has several features I want. I am trying to find the Twitter client that does everything I want. So, here are my parameters for a Twitter client. Note: This is a discussion of desktop, not mobile clients.

When I return home after a few hours away, I want to catch up on my tweets. This is where the problems come in. For one, with any client, if I don’t leave the client running, then I can only retrieve an hour or two of tweets. What if I’m gone for the day…6-12 hours? Some programs even have a maximum number of tweets they’ll keep even if you do leave it running, causing you to lose some. And even using the web interface, it is hard to go back more than a certain number of hours in your timeline.

So, this is what I want in a Twitter client

• Lightweight – It’s Twitter. I don’t need it to take up that much memory. I wouldn’t mind if it saved my Tweets locally in realtime. I could afford the hard drive space.
• Keep Track of Read Tweets – When I go out, or even when I’m in, I want it to keep track of where I left off reading and make sure everything from then on until I return is retained.
• Prioritize Mentions – When I return, I want to know if anyone said anything to or about me to reply with before I read through hours of tweets to catch up.
• Multiple Account Support – I have to monitor more than one account.
• Backup – Why can’t the program save my tweets locally as a backup? My IM client can. Is there a single Twitter client that can do this?

So, let’s take a look at some Twitter clients we’ve tried…We mentioned Twirl, and it isn’t maintained, so we’ll skip it for now…

TweetDeck

Tweetdeck is perhaps the most commonly used Twitter client after the Twitter web interface itself.

• It uses a column based interface… It has a lot of good features.
• No Status.net/Identi.ca support
• Multiple Account Support, but you cannot combine/group information from multiple accounts together.
• Online sync option, but only for column information, not for position or account information.
• A dot appears next to Tweets to mark whether or not it is read or unread.

Seesmic

Seesmic Desktop is the most serious challenger to Tweetdeck.

• Multiple Account Support
• Either single or multiple column format. Offers a filter/columns to group information from multiple accounts or separately look at each feed.
• No Status.net/Identi.ca support.
• No Online Sync, despite the fact Seesmic offers a web-based product.
• No good way to keep track of your place, except by clearing your read Tweets.

Seesmic Web is an online version of the Desktop client, with similar features.

Gwibber

I needed to cover a native Linux client. I want to love Gwibber. But it has a few showstoppers.

• Multiple Account Support, including Status.net/Identi.ca.
• Offers a singe column input, but offers the opportunity to filter the column to a specific stream, ie account, mentions, etc.
• No way to keep track of read Tweets.
• No support for Groups or Twitter Lists

A lot of the above is on their roadmap for future improvements, but it isn’t quite there yet. Of course, I’m running the latest testing version for Fedora, which is not the most current. Ubuntu Linux users would have a more current version.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a web based client, and very popular. But it has that same showstopping problem we can’t find a solution for. Keeping track of where we left off.

I’ve looked at other clients, but cannot find anything that works for me. So tell me, what do you use? What works?