Twitter with Tweetie on your Mac

Sometimes I’m ahead of the curve, sometimes I’m behind the curve. Kate, meet Twitter. For the past week or so I’ve been checking out Twitter utilities for my Mac. At first, it was interesting, but not very productive. Twitter is basically micro-blogging. Instead of reading an article, you get 140 characters of fluff, spam, tidbits, tips, tricks, observations, opinions, questions, and more. So, what’s the best Twitter utility for me?

Test Drives

All my friends said I would love Twitterific for Mac and iPhone and they were correct. The iconfactory gets what Twitter is about and makes it easy and elegant and it comes loaded with features.

A couple of friends said I should try out Jetwit, kind of a mini-Twitter and Skype utility for the Mac’s Menu Bar. Parking another icon in the Menu Bar seems to be what Twitter utilities are all about.

The problem with the utilities that mix and match—Twitter and Skype or whatever—is that they don’t do any one thing well.

Syrinx is decent. I love free. I love to customize. I love efficiency. That is Synrinx.

$15 gets you EventBox, another of the utilities that doesn’t truly know what it is. It’s good for Twitter, good for Facebook, good for Google Reader, good for Flickr, Reddit, RSS, and more.

The idea seems plausible. All your social network connections in one place (doesn’t my browser already do that?). When it comes to a feature comparison it’s really no comparison.

The Winner

What I wanted was plenty of Twitter features, quick access, conversation tracking, a separate window to compose tweets, a built-in search capability, bookmarks, and threading all over the place.

Oh, and a companion iPhone Twitter utility.

For those Mac user bargain hunters, look no further than Tweetie for the Mac, and Tweetie for the iPhone.

Honestly, Tweetie is one of those non-Apple utilities that looks like Apple designed and built it.

My only negative nit pick is that it’s yet another utility which shows up in the Menu Bar, and space is precious up there these days.

Tweetie for the iPhone also handles multiple Twitter accounts, has a full timeline of replies, favorites, messages, and can even browse both friends and followers. In fact, Tweetie for iPhone is better than some Twitter utilities for the Mac.

The newest version adds image compression, landscape keyboard layout, and it remembers the last scroll position. And multiple themes.

Tweetie for the Mac has even more features. You can drill down to get details on other Twitter users, search for what’s hot on Twitter without a browser, and simple double-clicking gets you an entire conversation history.

But Why?

To twit or not to twit, that is the question, no?

I’ve waited a couple of years and spent plenty of time pooh-poohing Twitter as a senseless waste of time—after all, what can you say in 140 characters?

It turns out, not much. But the critical mass is important. I have enough friends and family and co-workers using Twitter that I thought I’d give it a try.

So, I’m here, I’m live, I’m living a Twitter life. For now. Drop me a note on Twitter. Let’s see if anything good can come from this. Who’s first in line?