Comments on: Battle of the multicolumn Twitter clients

Seesmic Desktop takes on TweetDeck, AlertThingy, Nambu, and Twhirl. How does it compare? Heavy Twitter users would do well to consider these other apps.

[loiclemeur1]

Hi Rafe, thanks for this review. If I may, ping.fm has been integrated in Twhirl for months and is planned very short term in Seesmic Desktop.

[rafe]

Updated the chart.

[Stunto]

Very helpful review, thanks. I noticed that TweetDeck is represented on the chart as not having a Single-Column Option. This may have been the case in the past, but the option is available in v0.21.5b

@stunto

[rafe]

Thanks. By single-column I mean, "displays multiple feeds, like @replies, directs, or content from multiple accounts, in one column." You can narrow the Tweetdeck window to show just one column, but it doesn't do *that*.

[frankiewarren]

Hey rafe, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you got users into the groups using seesmic desktop. i might be missing something but it was very difficult for me to add say all my real friends into one group compared with tweetdeck. this makes the feature near useless to me and definitely somewhere below excellent... thanks!

[ghaff]

It's awkward and slow. You basically have to either find them in your twitter-stream or pull them up via a search and then click on the little sun-looking icon when you mouse over their profile pic and add to userlist. At least that's what I was able to find. It's also--as I just found out--too easy to accidentally delete once created. Unfortunately neither TweetDeck nor SD really nail groups yet. (TweetDeck doesn't let you save them and lacks some other management features that would be useful.)

[CrystalsQuest]

I tried installing AlertThingy a bit over a month ago. It wouldn't even install... When I finally got it to say it was installed, it crashed every time I tried to run it. I gave up.

To be perfectly honest, although I have both tweetdeck and twhirl, I'm not real keen on either. The dark interface for tweetdeck is a pain to read and twhirl relies on being on a single computer. I do most of my twittering from igoogle where I can instantly cross link from my rss feeds in other gadgets, regardless of what PC I'm working on (I don't always have install privileges).

Now that the @replies is inclusive of all mentions and retweets, though, I might have to revisit some of these just for the filter capabilities!

[nosugrefneb]

I'm surprised more people don't know about DestroyTwitter. It doesn't do a lot of this stuff, but at the same time, I don't _want_ a Twitter client that does all that stuff. It's similar to TweetDeck but better in my opinion.

[thirashima]

Agreed. I think DestroyTwitter is pretty close to perfect. All I'd want from it is a little bit more control over size, but other than that, I'm very happy with it.

[JGrubbs]

You for got to mention PeopleBrowsr in your story. I found it when looking for an alternative to TweetDeck, since TweekDeck was becoming a resource HOG on mine, and my other friends systems. You should check @PeopleBrowsr out! http://www.peoplebrowsr.com/

[cblackstone]

For my money, which I've already paid, EventBox is the best Mac twitter client.

http://thecosmicmachine.com/

Supports Google Reader, Facebook, Reddit, and Flickr along with reading RSS feeds. It's built like a Mac app and runs circles around TweetDeck.

[zeedotme]

Does EventBox offer groups?

[RenegadeScribe]

EventBox is a nice piece of software, but it is very slow when compared to TweetDeck, and Nambu. I also like the fact that nambu can manage multiple twitter accounts, If TweetDeck would do that, it would be perfect.

[plusque]

there is also @feedalizr to twitter, facebook, friendfeed & flickr

[TmDowling]

I work from too many computers that I don't control to want to become dependent on an installed application (I'm happy with the recent changes to the twitter site, and hope they'll continue to roll out new features, as other developers work out the bugs in them) -- any suggestions for browser-based tools?.

[Lhaeo80]

I don't understand what's so great about multicolumn clients - especially if you really use a lot of columns that don't fit on the screen. I wonder why there are so very few clients that use the good old tabs.

The only one supporting tabs (that I only know) is Bitter (http://bitterware.com/). It's not perfect (did a little review at http://shorttext.com/ex1a9w6 - already slightly outdated), but imo it got a lot potential.
Seesmic is the only one of the mentioned (windows) clients that are somewhat interesting, but I think I missed what's "excellent" about the group feature - but maybe the list of my friends/followers does exist and is just hidden "somewhere". Am I suppose to add friends to groups if they happen to tweet something? Still, it's beta and so too much criticism isn't fair, as too much hype isn't as well. Guess I'll keep monitoring it as well as DestroyTwitter and Statuzer, but stick to Bitter until one does it and implements my most wanted features (especially groups and filtering) not just in a mildly interesting way.

Granted, Air applications look nice, but I don't really need an art museum in my monitor :-)

[Harrison912]

I'm typically using Twitter to socially market my safety and security products so I'm always interested in information that wil help me with that. Thanks, Rafe, for this great article!

[geekgun]

I love these Twitter clients more than twitter. They bring value more than just connecting people. One of my favorite twitter apps is http://www.boilingpage.com that shows the hottest pages on the web based on how popular they are in Twitter. In fact, I found this article through http://www.boilingpage.com, and it shows up in the top 10 hottest pages in their home page.

[lilykudrow]

These twitter clients are great.
Eventbox is great.
Twitter 2.0 Add-on for fring Available for WinMo and Symbian
http://techunits.com/content/1815/twitter_2.0_add-on_for_fring_available_for_winmo_and_symbian

[cloudment]

check out the simplest possible Twitter client. If you use Internet Explorer you may want to try TweetIE, the twitter add-on for IE that helps you post quotes from the websites you visit to your twitter account http://tweetie.cloudberrylab.com/ FireFox plug-in is also available.

[abhishekdesai]

join the rivalry here http://www.rivals4ever.com/Technology-rivalry-of-Tweetdeck-vs-Seesmic-Desktop-743-4.htm

[divyangshah]

I love new seesmic desktop client, it is much better than tweetdeck and hey above rivalry is also cool. i loved the site.

[divyangshah]

I love new seesmic desktop client, it is much better than tweetdeck and hey above rivalry is also cool. i loved the site.