Twitterific and TweetDeck

Once you get going on Twitter, you pretty quickly run into the usability limits of the web interface and some of the more basic clients like TwitterBerry. The good news for power tweeters is that heavy duty tools are available.

We’ve been trying out Iconfactory’s Twitterific as a Mac client for the past couple of days. Twitterific works fine and sticks to the spirit of other clean and simple floating Mac apps like Anxiety.

Then we found TweetDeck.

If you decide to try this power client, buckle your seat belt. The first sign of things to come is on TweetDeck’s home page which cheerfully points out… “Especially useful running full screen on a separate monitor”

The great thing about TweetDeck is that it breaks your incoming tweets into categories such as “All”, “Replies” and “Direct Messages” and then displays them side-by-side in separate columns.

Another really cool thing you can do is to categorize the people you follow into groups. A very useful feature since one of the things you find out quickly is that the quality of tweets is all over the place. Using categories is also a great way to organize Twitter for work – e.g. clients, vendors, staff, the boss, etc.

The first new feature we would like to see is adjustable column width. Although the TweetDeck window is adjustable, the column widths appear to be fixed, at least in Max OSx.

There’s a lot more to write about – we’ll continue to test and post more later. By the way TweetDeck works with Mac OSx, Vista, XP and Linux.