In my continuous quest to eventually take over the world of Twitter, I’ve been looking over a number of different apps this week, in the hopes that I can find one that fits my Tweeting needs perfectly. Of course, once I’m succesful with this course of action, I’m hoping I can find an OS X app capable of world domination as well.
For the most part, most of my Twitter updates have been done either through web-based input, over the OS X dashboard widget, Twidget. While the web-based updater is nice, and the most accesible, things can get a little hectic, particularly when certain friends are engaged in mass retweets or liveblogging. These sort of issues carry over to Twidget, but are made even worse due to the widget’s incredibly small size. I understand it is a widget, afterall, and should have a relatively small footprint, but its simply too simplistic in its operation for my taste.
One of the things I love most about Twitter is that I can see exactly what method people are using to make their tweets. I’ve seen a number of mobile apps, spanning Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices, and even the odd firefox plugin. Yet, one of my favourite Twitter-centric apps thus far has to be TweetDeck.
TweetDeck is interesting for two main reasons – firstly, its highly customizable, and you can bend it to your will, based on how you’d like to recieve and organize your Tweets, direct messages and replies. Secondly, its based on the incredibly lightweight Adobe AIR. In my mind, Adobe AIR is the equivelant of Flash for the Web 2.0 crowd, and has made it possible to create some truly stunning web-integrated apps. Of course, one of the main benefits of developing on AIR is that it is entirely platform independant; almost all major OSs support the web framework right now, which allows those like TweetDeck’s developers incredibly high user penetration, without all the mess of porting.
While still in Beta – which is the amusing norm nowadays, when it comes to the world of Web2.o – the app is incredibly robust. Download it from the TweetDeck website, and see what you think!