Admittedly I came to the Twitter game kind of late. I’d heard plenty about the service through friends, television news, and tons of magazine writeups (I’m pretty sure some Mac|Life employees do double-duty at Twitter). I kept my distance, having only joined Facebook in March ’08. It seemed to me that they were pretty much one in the same, so why should I complicate my online-self. Needless to say, I broke down and set up a Twitter account this past April and haven’t looked back.

I’m sure I don’t need to extol the advantages of Twitter – from simple informational postings to cross promotion to immense and timely news – it’s really an unbelievable platform. While I’ve fine tuned the consistency between my website, blog and Twitter presences, I’ve also played around with a number of Twitter clients. There are numerous reviews for these applications, so I won’t bore you with a running evaluation of each one. I do however want to reflect on my one true Twitter love – Tweetie.

Tweetie offers a clean and unobtrusive interface. The user window is compact and definitely Mac. The beauty in the product is in its seemingly simple and straight-forward design. Like Seesmic and TweetDeck, Tweetie offers the ability to view “columns.” Seesmic and TweetDeck however take up enormous screen space to truly utilize them. Tweetie on the other hand places the “columns” on the left side via beautiful access buttons. You can add a number of additional columns (saved searches). Also like other Twitter clients, Tweetie can manage multiple Twitter accounts. I haven’t gone down that route just yet, but it’s nice to know that I won’t have to switch software (again).

If you tweet from a Mac, I would definitely suggest checking out Tweetie. The software is free (ad-version) and is also available for the iPhone. I haven’t bought into their iPhone version (I’m really not into the blue/grey iPhone email design they use) and will stick with TweetDeck for iPhone for now. Happy tweeting!

UPDATE

Yesterday (Sept 27) I went all-Tweetie. I decided to try out the Tweetie iPhone app and surprisingly love it. I wasn’t as excited about it due to its design (looks just like the blue/grey iPhone email app). The application however acts so smoothly, just like Tweetie for Mac. I’m sticking with Tweetie for both my laptop and iPhone going forward – and just in time.


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