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The 3 best twitter apps for power users to tweet with
Posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 under twitter by Dustin Brewer.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
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
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
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.
Whats Next?
11 Responses to “The 3 best twitter apps for power users to tweet with”
About Dustin Brewer
Dustin Brewer is a freelance web designer based out of Oklahoma City, OK passionate about web standards, and beautiful web design. Dustin Brewer has been in the web design industry for over 8 years through freelance and professional experience. If you are interested in hiring Dustin Brewer please visit the web design services page to find out more information. You can also checkout my web design portfolio.
Actually with nambu it’s probably the easiest. They add a lot of hidden functionality just by right clicking on stuff. Just right click on someone’s tweet and select what group you want to add them at the bottom.
Tom,
That is the same way that Seesmic does it, it would require me to wait for everyone I want to add to a group to do a new tweet so I can add them. Which would take a minute. I like how Nambu has the search feature to find people to add but it doesn’t pull my complete list of people I follow.
True, a way to get a complete list of people you follow is to either double click one of your own tweets, or select your tweet and then hit apple key, I. It will bring up a separate panel called user info and there is a tab to view all your followers or people following you. You can do that to anybody.
I used to use Twhirl exclusively until I discovered Tweetie. It is by far the best I’ve used on both PC and Mac and is very simple to use in comparison to Tweetdeck and Nambu. In fact I had major issues with Nambu crashing on refresh.
A really well explained point, thanks for sharing.
Great post, once again thanks.
Using destroy twitter, performs fast, simple, and I like the minimalist style, but has tones of features despite the simple interface.. give it a try.
I use Digsby. Not only does it allow me to use multiple Twitter accounts, but it lets me keep up with my Yahoo and Google Talk conversations, all in one place.
Has anyone found how to work around the Twitter API and it having a limit to the number of calls it makes in and hour?
The limit applies to the Twitter account rather then the application and only allows 100 API calls per hour.
I use TweetDeck, the cross-posting to Facebook on a whim helps me think straight, lol. I’ve never used the second two, and have actually been warned against the last but I won’t know until I try I suppose!
Overall, Twitter can be utilized as a marketing strategy if done correctly. Using twitter as a marketing tool is a topic of much argumentation in the marketing world. I have read numerous articles in favor of this technique and equally as many against it.