Review: The two best Twitter clients

There’s a lot of Twitter clients out there, so we thought we’d test what some blogs we’re following recommended and write about our experience with each one, post a screenshot, and talk about the pros and cons of the applications.

TweetDeck is quite amazing. It’s an awesome Twitter client that runs on multiple platforms as it’s an Adobe Air application, and has some awesome features. Let’s take a look:

• Update Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and Foursquare
• Take advantage of an increased Twitter API rate
• Retweet Twitter style - or your style
• Check-in to Foursquare direct from the client
• Manage conversations with @replies and direct messages
• See what’s hot with Twitter Trends and TwitScoop
• Integrated LinkedIn for your professional contacts
• View YouTube videos within TweetDeck, and record and share video clips though TwitVid
• Manage multiple Twitter accounts easily
• Locate your friends
• Send longer messages through our new Deck.ly service
• Use our scheduling feature to check-in or send a tweet in the future
• Organize and update Facebook with TweetDeck
• Follow topics in real-time with saved searches, editable from within the column
• Add, create and manage Twitter Lists
• Use the Global Filter to remove unnecessary tweets by account, service or hashtag
• Preview short URLs from the comfort of TweetDeck
• Easily see who’s following you
• Use your TweetDeck Account to add all of your social network accounts in one go
• Add networks that use a compatible Twitter API, like WordPress and Tumblr
• Keep your TweetDeck safe with sync and back-up
• Avoid Twitter spam with TweetDeck’s spam button
• Share and view photos with support for Flickr, Twitgoo and mobypicture
• Keep your finger on the pulse with MySpace
• Use keyboard shortcuts to speed up your messaging
• Interactive and informative notifications

I have my Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz accounts set up in TweetDeck, and it really saves time, as I have three Twitter accounts to manage.

Pros:

• Allows you to manage multiple accounts on multiple services.
• Instant notifications, configurable to show either details or a summary.
• It’s multiplatform, so I can run it in Linux or on my Mac for example, and they have an iOS and Android app as well.
• It runs in the background, minimized to the system tray automatically.
• I can post updates to multiple accounts at once.
• It syncs your accounts across different installations with your TweetDeck account.

Cons:

• The notifications can get annoying, because it’s set to notify you of each new tweet in your timeline by default, which can be changed.
• It’s rather large and it can be hard to find a column if you have several open.
• It does not support img.ly for in-program previews, instead it opens it in your web browser.
• You can’t tell if a user is following an account in TweetDeck by looking at their profile.

Overall a nice app, and I highly recommend it. I rate it 8 out of 10, because I really want to know if someone’s following me and I want to know quickly ;)

You can download it here: http://www.tweetdeck.com

Sobees is another interesting client, however it’s not multiplatforum except for its iOS apps, but the client itself depends on the .NET framework and runs on Windows only. Here’s a list of features from the site:

• Search the recent messages posted on Twitter and Friendfeed and be the first one informed if anything that matters to you happens.
• Get the best Facebook integration to access your profile, home, inbox and friends.
• Check your MySpace friends’ activities and update your own mood.
• Connect all your Twitter accounts and enjoy the most powerful Twitter client on Windows.
• Update your status on multiple services in one go.
• Customize your application (language, color scheme, etc).

I also set up my accounts in it, and was able to update multiple accounts, etc. However, it’s a bit buggy, when I tried to add my Facebook account it gave me an error during authentication with Facebook and then added the Facebook account while saying the account couldn’t be added.

Pros:

• I can connect with multiple services including Twitter and Facebook.
• I can manage multiple accounts.
• Its interface is fresh and simple.
• I can organize how I want my columns to appear, like for example a 2x2 group or a 1x1 horizontal group.

Cons:

• While I was able to connect to Facebook and Twitter, I got errors when adding my Facebook account.
• Notifications don’t seem to work.
• The tweets are a bit large and feel like they’re wasting space.
• It’s a Windows-only program.
• It doesn’t support syncing as far as I could tell.
• I can’t easily see if a user is following me on Twitter.

Not the best Twitter client out there, but it does the job. I give it a rating of 5/10, because of the Facebook errors and the lack of notifications.

You can download it here: http://www.sobees.com/social-media-clients/sobees-desktop-application

And that concludes our review of the two best Twitter clients as we found them. I know I’ve left out clients like Seesmic and Metrotwit, but I don’t like Seesmic that much, it’s rather slow, and I’ve written about Metrotwit before.

Thanks for reading! Be sure to comment with your thoughts and experiences with them.