My review of Twitter clients
I have used multiple Twitter client since I’ve first started using the service. The reason for that is that most of them are in fact pretty bad and it took me a while to find the set of Twitter client I can use at home, at work and on my mobile device, on Windows but mostly on Linux.
I will not even try to make a fair review. The worst clients I have used have resided just a few minutes on the computer where I have installed them. This means the will be essentially based on first impressions. Also keep in mind that I have a strong interest in Linux even if I lately I have had to use Windows at work. I use Linux pretty much everywhere else, all the time.
To put things in perspective, I need to precise that I do not have high expectations from a Twitter client. All I need at the following features, in order of priority:
- it must work on Linux; this sounds simple but most so-called portable client don’t
- it must be visually pleasing, yet not look like an angry fruit salad; this is what shoots down a lot of Adobe Air application
- have a reply feature; without this, people will lose track to what your reply to when you reply to them
- have a retweet feature; because copying and pasting sucks
All additional feature are more layers of icing. Features such as followers management, themability, direct messaging, twitpic support, identi.ca support are useful but not required. I would happily use a Twitter client with only the feature I mentioned above.
So, here is my review of all the Twitter clients I have tried.
BAD!
Sadly, most client I have tried fall in that category. I have used some of them for so little time that I had to go back to the list of Twitter clients on the Twitter Fan wiki to make this list.
Twitux is available in the Debian and Ubuntu software repository, and that is its only quality. It’s also under-maintained compared to most Twitter client available.
Choqok is a Twitter client for KDE4. This is a client that will eventually become good, but I wasn’t impressed by the version I have tried.
Gwibber has too many GNOME dependencies for me. It did not seem to be worth the time compiling it on my outdated Ubuntu Hardy desktop and I don’t have anything GNOME related on my laptop.
twittaré is not a flattering name in french. This client works but has no distinctive features.
DestroyTwitter is a classy Adobe Air application. It works surprisingly fine in Linux but had one big problem at the time I have tried it: the default font it used was so small that I had to squint every time I looked at it. It might be worth the time to retry it since it has all the feature I want in a Twitter client.
Spaz is major Twitter client, and an Adobe Air application. Like many Air application I have tried, Spaz failed to work on Linux. I don’t even remember seeing the main window appear.
StickyTweet is made in plain C/C++ using the Win32 API so saying it is unappealing is an understatement. The guy that programmed that has probably lost a bet. Any high-schooler with a Delphi book could make a better looking application.
Ada is a minimal Twitter client for the Adobe Air platform. It’s very, very minimal. Too minimal. It worked fine on Windows. I have never used in on Linux.
twidge is a command line Twitter client from John “Real World Haskell” Goerzen. It does what it advertises and will be helpful to those more console-inclined than me.
twit.el is an Emacs script for Twitter. Even though I like Emacs a lot, I have never seriously considered using it. I have made it work on my laptop but never even the more features it may support. It is certainly a good option if you spend most of your life in Emacs. I don’t.
Seesmic, from the makers of my main Twitter client. I have never managed to make it work on Ubuntu Hardy. It starts fine but the user interface doesn’t work. It’s a well known client and some people apparently love it. I don’t remember seeing anyone saying that it works on Linux.
TweetDeck is another popular Twitter client, an Adobe Air application, that I could never get to work on Ubuntu Hardy. The program starts but then fail to work, but at least its gives a clear warning saying that it won’t work on the computer. This is also a very popular and heavily featured program that many people are using on a daily basis. It is also reported that it works fine on Linux but it seems my current distribution isn’t supported.
Okay
This is the list of clients that are probably not bad but that I have not seriously used for some reasons.
Twirssi is an irssi script. I have used irssi as my IRC client for a while now so it wasn’t illogical for me to try and see if I could merge Twitter and IRC. I have got it to work on my main computer and used it for a little while. I have not adopted it since installing it manually with CPAN has sent me into a dependency hell that I could not get out of.
Twitter Opera Widget is a sort of plugin which Opera calls a widget. It made a lot of sense to me to use an Opera plugin to use Twitter since I constantly have Opera loaded at home and at work. I have actually used this client extensively when I started using Twitter. It had all the functionality I needed and was correctly maintained by its author. Sadly, this widget suffers from a pretty bad memory leak which made made my desktop, let alone my browser, unusable after a few days. I grew tired of waiting after the leak to be fixed so I ended up switching to Twippera. This is what makes me categorize this client in the Okay category, otherwise I would still be using it.
The Twitter webpage itself is pretty poor in features. The retweet feature that is present in most good name Twitter clients is currently being deployed to some user as a beta feature. This should put twitter.com down in the standings of Twitter client in terms of features. It’s nonetheless a fact that most Twitter user start by using the Twitter website itself and since it’s by far the most used of all client, it probably gets the job done good enough. I have used Twitter.com to sometimes to tweet and I am still using it to check on my follower list and my followers requests.
Good
Twippera is another plugin for the web browser Opera. It has less features than the Twitter Opera Widget but it has no memory leak which cripples my browser. I only left this client to search for a client with more features. I’m still using it on my laptop because I have not yet looked for a replacement.
Twhirl is the client I use on my desktop computer. It is an Adobe Air application, one of the few which work fine out of the box on Ubuntu Hardy. It’s a excellent Twitter client which supports all the basic features I need but a lot more. It’s unfortunate that it is using the Adobe Air platform and that its thus quite resource intensive and only work on GNOME or KDE.
Mauku is the only client I have tried for the Maemo platform on the Nokia N800, and it may be the only decent one. The Maemo 4.x version is missing several feature I desire from a Twitter client but the display is good enough to work with and I’m using it whenever I’m away from my computers but close to my N800.
Brizzly is what Twitter.com should be. It is an excellent web client to access Twitter which include several features that are available in desktop clients. Brizzly exposes its features in a single web page, which is better than what Twitter.com offers. The feature I love the most in Brizzly is the display of Twitter trends with explanations that are free to edit by Brizzly users. This has since been implemented in Twitter.com but in a way that is less efficient that what is shown by Brizzly.
