Twitter is a popular social networking utility which has gained enormous popularity as a micro-blogging tool, With millions using the service across the globe. Indeed, Twitter is pretty much constantly in the news. It enables friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Registered users can post messages (known as Tweets) via a Web interface. However, many users prefer to use desktop applications that offer more functionality and are totally removed from the web browser. Using a desktop application also means that subscribers do not have to keep refreshing the web browser’s page. Having a desktop client polling for updates is very handy. To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 8 Twitter clients which make micro-blogging easier.

Tweetdeck

TweetDeck is a personal browser for staying in touch with what is happening now, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook and more. TweetDeck shows you everything you want to see at once, so you can stay organised and up to date. TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR desktop Twitter application. Like other Twitter applications it interfaces with the Twitter API to allow users to send and receive tweets and view profiles. It is the most popular Twitter application.

Twhirl

whirl is a desktop client for the popular microblogging platform Twitter that builds on the Adobe AIR runtime. AIR allows desktop software development using popular web techniques like XHTML/CSS or Flash/Flex. Most of the features available on the Twitter website are accessible through twhirl. This software also adds a considerable number of usability enhancements.

Qwit

Qwit is a cross-platform Qt4-based client for Twitter. This project started with the purpose of studying Qt4 programming. It could be useful, for example, for KDE users, who need a natively looking simple client for their systems. This software handles the core Twitter functionality well, but currently does not offer much else. However, Qwit offers a lot of promise with new versions being released on a regular basis.

Spaz

Spaz is an award-winning open-source Twitter client for the Adobe Integrated Runtime, written entirely in HTML, Javascript and CSS. Spaz performs most of the functions a normal desktop Twitter client provides such as sending/receiving tweets, stream public tweets, etc) but the software also offers extra customization support. It shows your Twitter feed, has tabs to see your Direct Messages and @replies, both a search function for Twitter-at-large and a filter for the posts in your feed.

Choqok

Choqok is an Open Source fast, efficient and simple to use micro-blogging client for the K Desktop Environment. It is designed for social networking sites like Twitter and Identica, and has support for residing in the system tray, and using system notifications to notify the user of updates, and being very configurable. The software’s name comes from an ancient Persian word which means sparrow.

Gwibber

Gwibber is an open source microblogging client for GNOME developed with Python and GTK. It supports Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, Pownce, Identi.ca and other popular social web services. It uses WebKit for rendering, and creating a new theme is (largely) a matter of changing some CSS. Gwibber has been accepted for inclusion in the universe repository for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) onwards.

Twitux

  • Twitux is a Twitter client for GNOME. Twitux displays your personal messages, your network of friends and public messages. In addition, Twitux also allows you to send new messages and reply to friends. This software is simple, clean, and attractive.

    Pino

    Pino is one the lightest twitter client for Linux. Pino is a Linux twitter client written in Vala and designed to be simple and fast. It only shows your timeline and mentions but it’s still in the beta stage.