richardbarley.com

You may have noticed that I use Twitter, the up-and-down conversation/micro-blogging tool. Over there on the right-hand-side is my latest Twitter status from www.twitter.com/richard_barley.  I like using Twitter because it allows me to keep up with lots of folks, some who I would call friends, some who I have never met, without having to invest a lot of time and effort. This suits me as I am essentially rather lazy when it comes to socialising and anything that makes it easier is a winner for me.

Twitter works on the basis of people publishing messages of up to 140 characters. These messages could be anything such as notifications about new blog posts, comments on the weather, updates on a baby’s progress, breaking stories from news outlets, or just plain old “How are you ? I’m fine” type conversations.

There are lots of celebrities using Twitter both real and fake, and I even started up a conversation with Tickle, the cat from the holiday home we recently visited in Carcassonne, which was rather surreal.

Anyway, the big question for me currently is how to access Twitter? There are almost as many different ways to access it as there are crumbs festering in my keyboard. I have tried several in-browser solutions, but none of these gave me the nice warm glow that I was looking for. I use Digsby for all my IM conversations and that handles Twitter well, but I still couldn’t get on with it.

Then I discovered Twhirl and how I loved it’s Adobe Air sexiness. Functionality-wise, it does the lot for me and is a very stable and well-developed application. Then I came across TweetDeck – a new pretender to the crown. This has many of the same features that Twhirl has, but also some that it doesn’t, which are what make it appealing. One of the biggies for me is being able to collect your friends into groups. These groups automatically refresh when new messages (”tweets” in twitter language) arrive. This is really quite cool and allows me to skim down the tweets from those people I don’t really know, but just like to keep an eye on, while pulling out the important tweets from my closer friends and key notifications.

Where TweetDeck falls down is that it is still in early days. The interface can be a bit clunky and there are some important features missing – following/removing friends for instance. These will be addressed, but how soon?

So I have a dilemma. I know there is a redesign of the Twhirl interface coming along soon, and TweetDeck is constantly improving too. I would like to make a decision, but I think these two clients will be battling for my desktop space for a while to come.

In the meantime, why not sign yourself up for Twitter and see what you think? Let me know if you have a better solution.