twhirl

Seesmic, which recently acquired the AIR Twitter client Twhirl (download), has shipped a new version of the software. There are minor improvements in Twitter functionality, mostly designed to keep it from requesting too many updates from the Twitter API, which produces the dreaded "limit exceeded" message if you use the app too enthusiastically. The Twitter service, which used to allow clients like Twhirl to fetch updates 60 times an hour, dropped its limit to 20/hour during the Steve Jobs keynote; it's only back at 30/hour as of this writing. Twhirl can now adjust its update … Read more

I've been very popular on Twitter lately. Too bad it's not personal. Many subscribers seem to be gaining more attention than they've earned, and probably a good deal more than they want.

This past month has seen a surge in Twitter spam, subscriptions from followers who have created faux accounts to advertise their links or wares. The noticeable uptick has alarmed the blogosphere enough to warrant journalistic notice, off the record in intra-office chatter and on it. The disingenuous among my own modest list of followers don't … Read more

Shortly after Loic Le Meur's Seesmic acquired the excellent Twitter client Twhirl, the new geek hotness FriendFeed got its first AIR application, Alert Thingy (review), which also handles Twitter feeds. Le Meur charged his new employee with putting FriendFeed features into Twhirl to maintain parity.

FriendFeed support in the current version of Twhirl is pretty sparse. If you find it frustrating, however, sit tight for a few more hours because yet another update to Twhirl is on the way, Le Meur told me tonight.

This new version will let you post images to your FriendFeed account just by dragging … Read more

Seesmic (review), which is working towards the public release of its video nanoblogging and chat service, has acquired Twhirl, an AIR-based Twitter client. Twhirl is the most popular third-party client according to ReadWriteWeb, accounting for about 7% of messages sent on the service.

Twhirl was developed by Marco Kaiser in Germany. It's the first AIR app he wrote, and he did it as a side project. Kaiser will stay in Germany as a new employee of Seesmic. It's been a busy week for him, apparently: His wife also had a baby this week.

In my opinion, Twhirl (review) … Read more

I'm a big fan of microblogging services like Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku, but a number of solutions that have popped up to help you make the influx of information more bearable can also be overwhelming.

To help sort through some of that chaos is Twirl, an Adobe Air-based communications application for Twitter that sits on your desktop and monitors the traffic flow of your friends. Sure, there are similar apps that do this, like Snitter, Spaz and Tweetr, but none of those let you post to services besides Twitter.

The latest build of Twirl is nice enough to let you plug in your log-ins from Jaiku and Pownce (two popular competitors) in order to cross-post whatever you're Tweeting about. Yes, there were ways to do this before, but this involves no such RSS hackery, and lets you tweak either of those two external accounts in one place. And for those of you who have more than one Twitter account, you can add in as many as you'd like (I successfully added six).

As an app, Twhirl feels very similar to Snitter, although I found the selection of skins to be a little more robust. There are a dozen to choose from, and none of them are tied to the size and style of text, or the shape of the window. It's also got several handy features that the Web front end for Twitter doesn't have, like a built-in tool to shorten URLs from two different services (Snurl and is.gd), and message notifications that can be tweaked right down to how much speaker volume you want to give them.

The one crucial thing that's missing (and such a tease) is the inability to pull in feeds from the other two services. While it's nice to send out your message to three places at the same time, it's a one-way street. It's also worth noting that Pownce and Jaiku differ distinctively from Twitter in making replies from other users more of a public experience, which might get a little hairy when all three are getting the same message from you.

Twhirl's been kicking around since mid-November of last year, and you'll need the latest version of Adobe' AIR runtime to have it work on your system. Screenshots after the break.

Related: The many flavors of Twitter

… Read more