Great Twitter Application For Power Users

By Dustin Brewer
Expert Author
Article Date: 2009-05-07

Finding an app that helps you sort through the people you follow is handy if you follow more than a few hundred people. You can easily lose a message that you may have wanted to see or respond to on Twitter. This is where groups come in, you can sort the people you follow into groups so you can easily monitor and check to see what everyone in a specific group is talking about.

I have several groups setup for myself, a general group where everyone's messages can be seen, another group for "talent" which are people I respect in the industry. A local group for people I know locally so I can monitor their tweets. Then I also have a group for general friends / family that use twitter. It helps me to easily keep up with them as well.

With the group / pane system you will usually be provided a way to quickly and easily monitor any replies or direct messages you receive so you can respond. You can also easily follow, unfollow, tweet, reply or DM directly from these applications.

So, on with the top apps I have found for the group structure which is the most sought-after feature for power users on twitter.

TweetDeck

URL: http://tweetdeck.com

Technology: Adobe Air

Platform: Windows, OSX, Linux

This application for twitter is one of the most popular for not just power users but for anyone using twitter. It works very well, has some pretty great usability and a very small learning curve. At one point it was having a lot of memory issues but those have all been resolved now.

This is the application I use most, it does groups pretty good and will allow you have to have up to 10 panes of twitter-related information. You can have your basic group panes where you can have your various twitter users.

It also has panes where you can have custom search phrases you might want to monitor beyond just what people you follow might be saying. This can help you find new people to follow, tweets you might want to respond to or new business leads if you are using twitter for professional networking.

This application currently only allows you to work with one twitter account, so if you have multiple twitter accounts you may need to look elsewhere until this feature is implemented.

Nambu

URL: http://nambu.com

Technology: Native OSX

Platform: OSX

Nambu has a much better looking interface than TweetDeck, it looks like a native mac application which is big plus. It also seems to run much faster than Adobe Air based twitter applications. The learning curve goes up a bit with this application, adding users to a group is more difficult than with TweetDeck.

I have found that it doesn't populate the list with all, or even most, of the people I follow. Which makes it difficult to use effectively. The system (once found) for adding people to groups is much better than TweetDeck as it has a search function so you can easily and quickly find the people you want to add.

I feel I would switch to using Nambu if it fixed the issue with finding the people I follow and making it easier to add people to a group.

Seesmic Desktop

URL: http://desktop.seesmic.com/

Technology: Adobe Air

Platform: Windows, OSX, Linux

The Seesmic Desktop twitter client has a similar interface to Nambu but is cross-platform compatible running on Adobe Air. You can still have all your groups and search panes in the system. Panes within Seesmic Desktop are setup very similar to Nambu and TweetDeck, although the "main pane" within the system allows you to click to view your replies and DMs within it without taking up extra space which could be used for viewing your groups. Definitely a handy and space saving feature.

Seesmic falls into the same problem that Nambu does with groups though, it is difficult to add people to a group with the system. In my experience with using the software I can only add a person to a group if I catch their name in the timeline. Which, as you can imagine, makes it difficult to effectively build a group. Seesmic, like Nambu, does allow for multiple twitter accounts.

Which twitter application do you use?

All of the apps easily allow for integration with a picture sharing feature such as Twitpic, and they also all have various methods for URL shortening which can definitely help save some time when you are limited to 140 characters.

I think Nambu could be the clear winner if it implemented the "main pane" feature like Seesmic and fixed the difficulty in adding to groups, including finding people you follow. Although, if you aren't a Mac user you may need to stick with one of the two Adobe Air applications. One or the other could be the perfect solution for you. For now, I'm sticking with TweetDeck.

Let me know what you use and why.

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About the Author:
Dustin Brewer is a web designer located in Oklahoma City, OK specializing in aesthetics in design, web standards, accessibility and usability. He also enjoys helping others to discover CSS and web design best practices through his web site, dustin brewer, a web design news site.