Twitter: Tweeting from your Mac

What would you do if your free web-email service was down half of the time on any given week and only let you see the last 15 email messages when it was working? Would you keep using it? For a while, perhaps. But, you would probably give serious thought to switching to a different service. Twitter, the free micro-blogging (140 characters or fewer per post) has, in fact, been providing this kind of unreliable service for several weeks now. But, it is so sticky that I'm guessing very few regular users (relatively speaking) have abandoned it.

Twitter, however, appears to be the stickiest web service ever created. People (including me) simply wait for service to be restored and then start using it again. Twitter's appeal lies in its simplicity of answering the question What are you doing? in 140 characters or less. I've been using the service about a year now and found that it has replaced most IM (instant messaging) and a lot of incidental email for me. It is a great way to keep up asynchronously with friends and colleagues even in my busiest moments when I might not respond to an IM or reply to email.

My guess is that most people use the Twitter.com webpage to see what friends are doing and updating their own status. However, if you start to depend (some might say become addicated to) on Twitter, you might want to take a look at some of the products I've been taking a look at over the past few weeks. Here's a trio of free Adobe AIR based applications to start things off...

Snitter (not the product name I would have recommended) is an alpha-release product. It was a little hard to read and did not exit cleanly from its menu (I had to use a kill -KILL pid to get rid of its process). However, it appeared to be lightweight and will probably become more interesting as its development progresses.

Tweetr 3.1 is a nice looking client that also lets you upload photos and files. I had a little problem with it now and then when text started to overlap on some messages. But, this did not happen all the time and I haven't seen it in the past week or so.

twhirl 0.8.1 is my personal favorite Twitter client. It uses Twitpic (more on this later) to upload photos and can also cross-post to Pownce and Google's Jaiku micro-blogging services. It can also short URLs you might post using snurl, twurl, or is.gd. Its interface is nice to look at (important for something that is on your screen a lot) and has an easy to understand interface.

Twitterrific 3.1 costs US$14.95. However, don't let that deter you from downloading and trying it. You use it for free if you don't mind the little bit of advertising that it displays. Paying for and registering the product turns off the ads. It has a nice looking interface. But, I think I prefer Twhirl overall. This, however, is just a personal preference.

TwitPic is a free web service that lets you upload photos which are presented as a weblink on your Twitter account. I mostly use this from my cameraphone by emailing a photo to a special Twitpic email address in the form of twitterusername.secretstuff@twitpic.com. The email subject line is turned into a Twitter tweet (text message) and the photo is weblinked to its storage area on the Twitpic site.

These are the Twitter-related products I've been trying out recently. You can find a great list of Twitter client and web applications on the Twitter Fan Wiki at...

Twitter Apps

And, you can find my tech-focused Twitter tweeting at...

http://twitter.com/toddogasawara

I promise I won't mention what I had for lunch in this account unless it is directly related to some tech topic I follow :-)