Battle Of The Twitter Clients

Since this is the first article I’ve written in the last couple of weeks, I thought I’d write about something new. Twitter, the micro-blogging service has numerous clients to update your twitter account. The two clients that I’m going to compare are Iconfactory’s Twitterific and Seesmic’s Twhirl. In order to compare the pros and cons of these clients, I’ve used a combination of both Twitterific and Twhirl over the past few weeks.

Twitterific is a menubar-based application that is relatively easy to use. One of the things I like most about Twitterific is its fantastic UI that sits above any other windows open, regardless of whichever window is selected. Twitterific can update your tweets at a minimum of 3 minutes, which can be quite slow. My biggest problem with Twitterific is the fact that there are constant “Twitter Errors” where the connection between Twitter and Twitterific times out. This can be very annoying and enough to drive one towards using an alternate client.

Twhirl is another twitter client that works well. It seems to update faster than Twitterific and not have nearly as many connection errors. However, the UI of Twhirl is not as attractive as Twitterific, not having a transparent appearance that sits above other windows. Twhirl also has a dock icon. The application is responsive and quite easy to use, available on both Windows XP and Vista.

The Twitter client battle comes down to this – do you want a great looking, menu-bar app that is easy to use, but takes a longer time to connect to Twitter, or do you want a simple application that updates faster and more frequently that is dock-based and doesn’t look as great. The choice is yours.

After comparing the two clients, I chose to stick with Twitterific. Despite the annoying error messages, I still prefer the UI of Twitterific over Twhirl and really like how it’s situated in the menu-bar.

– Alexander Garovi