Twitter Clients for Mac OS X

by Dee-Ann LeBlanc

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard of Twitter, even if you haven’t used it. While the folks at Twitter are proud of the simplicity of their approach, having every Tweet from every person you’re following just flow into one long stream can get overwhelming.

Fortunately there’s a Twitter API that allows third party developers to write tools that interact with it. In the OS X world, there are many different Twitter clients. This article discusses four of them: EventBox, TweetDeck, twhirl, and Twitterrific.

EventBox is a commercial multi-site social networking client, allowing you to interact with Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Flickr, RSS feeds in general, and Reddit.

Through this interface, you can view only unread messages, only recent ones, only the replies you’ve sent and received, only your direct messages, or only your starred (favorite) messages. You can also open individual messages in the browser, send a direct message, reply publicly, mark a message as a favorite, flag a message, or launch one of many possible additional actions, such as retweeting a message, peek at a user’s profile, search for that user, and follow or unfollow that user.

You can also use the client’s search feature to search through your messages. If you receive messages from multiple services into EventBox, then you can search them without even having to worry about which service the message came from.

TweetDeck is a (currently) free Twitter application in public beta–meaning that it’s in testing. By default, it presents all of the Tweets you follow in the left column, the replies to you in the middle column, and your direct messages in the right column. You can also reduce this client to a single column with just the public tweets displayed, as shown below.

You can post directly from this application, which also offers a URL-shortening interface, the ability to use one of many URL shortening services to shorten a URL, add a Twitpic to go with your Tweet, and more. One very handy feature is the ability to create groups and then view Tweets by group. There are many more options available in this application, and it’s well worth exploring.

Two more Twitter clients that are worth looking into are the free twhirl twhirl and Twitterific, which is free but ad-supported. If you pay for Twitterific the ads are removed.

Dee-Ann LeBlanc (www.freelancesurvivor.com) has been a computer geek since childhood and a computer writer for the last 15 years. Her home is run by Macs, Linux boxes, and a trio of dogs.