Rumors have been flying in the past 24 hours about Twitter abandoning their Mac desktop client, Twitter for Mac.
Read more

Loren Brichter, the creator of first Tweetie and then Twitter for iPhone, has just left the company.
Read more

The best thing that can be said about the new official Twitter App for Mac (also known as the artist formerly known as Tweetie) is that it’s simple. The next best thing you can say about is that it’s free.
Read more

Good times.

Download the  update directly on your iPhone or via iTunes.

(Hat tip: Mashable.)

Good news – the Seesmic for iPhone app is finally available (iTunes download – it’s free).

I like it.

Pros:

1. It’s free.
2. It’s clean, runs very quickly, and the interface is intuitive and easy-to-use.
3. Includes native and traditional retweet support (including via), which is a huge plus.
4. Support for your own bit.ly credentials.
5. It’s very Tweetie-like. This is a good thing, but the timing of this release is unfortunate given Twitter’s official successor to Tweetie, Twitter for iPhone, also came out this week. It might be a little too like Tweetie to gain a lot of market share, especially as both apps are free.
6. The Seesmic app supports Twitter, Facebook and Ping.fm. I’ve never been hugely bothered about having an ‘all in one’ aggregator for my mobile or desktop social media client – if I’m using Twitter, I’d rather the client focused its attention and resources 100 per cent on that – but the Facebook implementation here is efficient and handy if all you want is a quick look at your news feed. I don’t use Ping.fm so can’t comment there.
7. Supports multiple accounts, and also cross-posting (something which I don’t like to see but others disagree).
8. Evernote support.

I only have a couple of immediate issues. One, when you close the app and re-open it, it doesn’t remember exactly where you were. It knows that you were in Facebook or Twitter, and puts you back there, but on the latter it always starts on the home feed, and not where you left it (i.e., replies or in a list). This is something Tweetie does very well, and it’s a small but niggling oversight.

My second concern is from a marketing perspective. When you submit a tweet using the Seesmic iPhone app, it’s labelled simply ‘Seesmic’. For me, I would expect (and prefer) to see ‘Seesmic for iPhone’, and for Seesmic, I would think they would want to do this to benefit from the marketing exposure. Maybe I’m unusual, but when I see new clients in tweet information, I always check them out. As it is now, the vast majority of users will see ‘Seesmic’ and think nothing has changed. There’s an opportunity for growth there that I think might have been overlooked.

(You can suggest improvements and tweaks through a special feedback page that Seesmic has started.)

Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur (@loic) has recorded his usual enthusiastic video:

Overall, this is recommended. It’s not quite as slick as Tweetie/Twitter for iPhone, but there are a couple of extras here that should have some appeal, notably the support for old-style retweets and the Facebook implementation.

Twitter for iPhone – aka, Tweetie 3 – was released today. You can download it here (iTunes link). It’s free.

This review will be brief, essentially because Twitter for iPhone isn’t enormously different to Tweetie 2. Sure, they’ve moved a few things around and done a couple of minor adjustments to search, but for the seasoned Tweetie user the overall difference is very marginal indeed.

These include:

• An ability to use the app without actually having a Twitter account. (Which seems both utterly pointless and actually self-destructive from Twitter’s point of view.)
• On the off chance you think that Twitter looks fun, you can now sign up within the app
• Search results have been “improved”, which means you’ll now be able to see ads

So, not much different for veterans. Be warned – if you install Twitter for iPhone, it overwrites Tweetie. It’s one or t’other.

For new users to Tweetie, however, this is an essential download. For the full list of reasons why, check out my review of Tweetie 2. Don’t let my indifference put you off – it was already spectacularly good. I just expected this upgrade to offer a little bit more.

Following the launch of the official Twitter app for Blackberry, this is absolutely huge.

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve entered into an agreement with Atebits (aka Loren Brichter) to acquire Tweetie, a leading iPhone Twitter client. Tweetie will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and made free (currently $2.99) in the iTunes AppStore in the coming weeks. Loren will become a key member of our mobile team that is already having huge impact with device makers and service providers around the world. Loren’s work won the 2009 Apple Design Award and we will eventually launch Twitter for iPad with his help.

From Loren:

I’m happy to say that as of today Twitter is the proud owner of Tweetie – and I’m joining their mobile team and starting work on turning Tweetie.app into Twitter.app, for iPhone and iPad.

In my opinion, Tweetie is far and away the best Twitter app (my review is here). This is fantastic news for Twitter, and more evidence that they’re looking to take control of the external use of their platform, certainly in the enormous mobile area, but we’ll have to wait and see if any of this is good news for users.

Or, for that matter, developers. The jury’s very much out on what this means for mobile alternatives to Tweetie Twitter For iPhone, such as Echofon and TweetDeck. And is this an early warning that Twitter is likely to go after the desktop-based clients, too, radically improving the lacking Twitter.com to compete there?

Perhaps of more concern, Twitter hasn’t been exactly a leader in innovation for their own product. Virtually everything that matters on the platform has been initiated or improved by users (@s, retweets) and developers (practically everything else). Tweetie is so user-friendly and so slick – I hate to think that any of that will suddenly be stifled by committee-thinking.

The weeks and months to come should be very interesting. In the meantime, learn more about this news at the Twitter blog, or directly from Loren himself here.

A couple of months ago, I suggested that HootSuite was the closest thing we have to the perfect Twitter client.

Since then, and really over the past fortnight or so, I’ve switched completely to HootSuite for all of my desktop-based Twitter interaction. I no longer use any downloadable Twitter client.

Here’s why:

1. Wherever I go, when I log into HootSuite it’s configured exactly how it was when I last left it.
2. My columns, lists, searches and setup are all right there. All the time.
3. This is the beauty of all web-based apps, of course (see later for more on this) – whether I’m at home, at work, looking at HootSuite on my iPhone, or even at an internet café or friend’s house, it’s enormously comforting, as well as productive, to know that when I log onto HootSuite, I’m getting exactly what I want.
4. I manage several client accounts on Twitter, and HootSuite is far and away the best and easiest way to do this. It makes CoTweet look like a dinosaur in comparison. Especially as the iPhone HootSuite app means you can monitor and respond to brand mentions essentially 24/7.
5. Scheduling tweets is a breeze (as is editing those that are pending).
6. The one-click conversations feature is super-useful, especially when you get a very random, out-of-nowhere reply to something that you’d long forgotten about.
7. The audio notification is really subtle (and doesn’t scare the life out of you like on TweetDeck).
8. There’s some syncing available with some downloadable Twitter clients, but it means installing the software everywhere you go. This often isn’t an option at work or at a new location, and that means a juggling act between the client and the next best thing.
9. I’m a big fan of owls.

HootSuite still isn’t perfect, and the inability to choose the URL shortener I want – bit.ly being the only shortener anybody should be using (assuming, you know, you want people to read and retweet your stuff) – is still a problem. I use bit.ly sidebar for every link I share, which is fine and something I’m now very much used to doing, but if you have to leave an app to get the feature you want, that’s a problem. Most people won’t bother, and that’s a shame, as HootSuite nails virtually everything else.

There are other web-based options, of course. Lots of folks love Brizzly, but it just hasn’t quite clicked for me, possibly because I’m a big fan of columns. I spend most of my time in lists, mentions and searches, and in Brizzly that means constant clicking from one-to-another.

It also niggles that I have to be on the home screen to actually write a new tweet. Plus, every time I visit Brizzly, it tells me I have loads of unread direct messages, which I do not. Sure, I can tell it to ‘shhh’, but that’s one extra step I never have to do on HootSuite. A minor irritant, but an irritation nonetheless.

Still, Brizzly does have something, and enough people I respect rate it to prevent me from dismissing it entirely without further investigation. (This includes Brizzly for iPhone, which I’m downloading as I write. Still, it’ll have to get up very early in the morning to supersede Tweetie as my mobile app of choice.)

Others rave about the Seesmic web app, but I find the features there a little lacking, notably the inability to manage multiple accounts. It all seems a little cold, too.

Both of these score a hefty win over HootSuite by incorporating the new-style Twitter retweets (although the way Seesmic web manages retweets of me is essentially useless), and as I find myself using the internal RTs more and more it’s a feature that’s notably missing from HootSuite. Again, I have to visit Twitter.com to monitor all of this, or to actually do a Twitter-style RT at all, which is another sign that something is broken.

But HootSuite gives me enough that this is something I’m prepared to put up with. For now. You see, us Twitter users are fickle beasts, and prone to hop over to the next best app when it offers a solution to something that has started to eat away at our very souls. Or has simply become a nuisance.

I’m encouraged by news that a pro version of HootSuite is on the cards (confirmed here). Assuming it’s not priced at ludicrous Rupert Murdoch-style levels, solves all of these issues and gives us some cool new stuff to play around with, I’ll happily pay for the privilege of accessing and interacting with Twitter in the best way that I possibly can.

All that being said, this reminds me of my previous comments about how a plugin-based Twitter app, which would allow us to pick our favourite elements from HootSuite, Brizzly, Seesmic, TweetDeck, Tweetie and every other app out there, is still, in this Twitterer’s opinion, the best way forward.

I’m interested in all the ways that you interact with Twitter, including Twitter.com and everything else.

There’s not a lot of really good data on Twitter client usage and it would be nice if we could get a lot of votes here – my goal is to see at least a 1000 responses on this page.

Please share this poll with your friends and colleagues – click here to retweet this post and help me out. Thanks!

[poll id="14"]

If you can’t see the poll, please go here to vote.

(If you selected ‘other’, please expand on this in the comments. Thank you.)

UPDATE: Tweetie has been bought by Twitter and replaced with Twitter For iPhone, which as of the current update is essentially the same. The main difference is that it is now completely free. Read my review here. Tweetie is no longer available on the app store. However, the review below remains valid simply because Twitter For iPhone is for all intents and purposes the exact same application.

I know, I know. I’ve come very late to the highly-regarded Tweetie, and that’s because I’ve also come very late to the iPhone, having owned a 3GS for just a little over one month.

Hence, I have no experience of the original Tweetie, which was released for the iPhone way back in November 2008, and therefore have not had the opportunity to become as passionate about the client as many others.

Please forgive me. I will try to make up for this oversight with enthusiasm and detail.

Honestly? I give Buzz about a week
before it drops off the front page.

So, this is essentially a first look for me, which should provide some comfort that this is an open and honest review.

A Little History

Prior to getting Tweetie, I was using TweetDeck on my iPhone. The TweetDeck app is free, and because I was familiar with TweetDeck on my PC it seemed logical to install this first. Indeed, I was quite happy with this decision, as for the first three weeks of iPhone-related Twitter usage TweetDeck seemed to hit all of my buttons. It was fast, it was easy to use, and it basically just worked.

(I’ll be reviewing TweetDeck for the iPhone at a later date.)

But all the overwhelming positive mentions of Tweetie kept eating away at me. Could something this loved be anything less than excellent? All of a sudden I was very keen to find out.

Read more