In search of the perfect Twitter client for my PC – looking for feedback

If you don’t know already I am a really big fan of Twitter, for many reasons I love twitter for keeping in touch with friends, discussing trading strategies, and finding new friends. It’s a great tool that has become a cornerstone of my communications and daily life. In fact I am likely on Twitter in someway more often than any other tool or service.

Right now I am in search of the *perfect* Twitter client.

Presently I use twitter all the devices that I have, my iPhone, BlackBerry, Mac’s , PC, and via SMS. On my iPhone and on my two Mac’s I really like Twitterriffic. Its simple quick and pulls a lot of back tweets (the biggest problem is when switching between machines I don’t know where I left off). However, I have yet to find an equivalent on the PC side. I’ve tried Twhril, Spaz, TweetDeck, and OutTwit. Twhril is the closest example, but I’m not sure that is what I am looking for. In fact I like Outtwit the best, although it has some limitations.

The biggest determination as to what is the *best* twitter client I believe centers around how you want to use Twitter. I know Guy Kawasaki uses TweetDeck and only has replies and searches presented. For me Twitterriffic is great on my iPhone because it displays the latest tweets to me in a clear and simple interface. On my Mac’s its great for the same reasons, but I use my Mac’s as my personal machines while I am at home not working. As a result I am either actively using Twitter or it’s running during a period of low activity and unread stored tweets are rarely ever pushed off the timeline. However, what happens while I’m traveling spending hours at a time on flights, or during a normal work day sitting at my work PC where I rarely have the time to be constantly checking the timeline and often hours may go by between reading the timeline. In such a situation even Twitterriffic wouldn’t work very well. At least Outtwit is integrated into Outlook so it stores my timeline so I can read it offline or comeback to it after I’ve reconnected but it doesn’t fetch enough tweet’s and its not accessible on other devices.

So what would the perfect Twitter client be in my mind?

Something like NewsGator I believe would be an idea Twitter client. When I first started using RSS feeds I was quickly drawn to NewsGator for the Ability to have the feeds always updating in the cloud and then accessible from different machines using different interfaces while maintaining the read/ unread/ flagged status. Such a solution would be idea. And I would be the first PAYING customer of such a solution (yes I would actually pay a moderate subscription service for this). However, to recreate such a service would take considerable resources (Hey NewsGator, maybe you should add Twitter into your system!).

The second best solution in my mind would be for an email based client. A system that would send an email for each post in my friends and my timeline, replies, direct message (if I wanted duplication). Of course the first reaction is; wow what a boat load of email, and that’s true it would be a large volume of email. With some filtering it would all go into a folder(s) and one could set rules so that tweets deemed important (based on sender or keywords) had some other action taken (Now that I use gmail rather than Exchange for my email, this would be very easy and accessible. Not to mention quick and easy to use from the website and keyboard shortcuts).

What benefits would this solution provide?

1) Online and offline access to my entire timeline regardless of when I last accessed Twitter.com or any of the local clients

2) Mobile access: have the folder/ tag sync with your blackberry/ iPhone

3) Always knowing where you left off in your timeline and never miss a tweet.

4) An easy way of saving Tweets/ URL’s you want to revisit at a later time.

Obviously the biggest competitor and most obvious substitute to this would be twitter.com itself. I believe a lot of people would say; if you want to go back in time go to twitter.com. Which I fully agree with however, I almost never go to twitter.com mainly because I never know where I left off last time or I spend way to long looking for that spot. To some people they may not care. Personally I do care and believe there are other people out there like myself.

The other large concern would be the interaction with Twitter. This is by far the biggest problem I see. How would one post, reply, DM another user if it all came through email. Well there are some easy workarounds but none would be nearly as good as a local client.

1) You could use Twittermail to email in tweets (the easiest and most ubiquitous way, but it would require copying and pasting usernames if you didn’t know them and that’s not the easiest thing on the iPhone).

2) One could build in some type of reply email gateway like Twittermail.

3) Use a local client only for posting when one is available.

So I am going to see if I can have a proof of concept built for me to play around with. In many respects this would act just as Outtwit does now (I get the posts into a folder in my inbox, but it would be universally accessible and ubiquitous)

I would like any feedback you may have on such a service and/or your thoughts are on the best twitter clients for your use!

UPDATE: See this post about the twitter client I had built to suit my needs.

Posted in Twitter on November 12th, 2008 Taged with Twitter

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