TweetDeck - Twitter Desktop Client
I've been actively encouraging people to sign up for Twitter because I think it's a great way to keep up with sound bytes from lots of people. It's a decent way to quickly find help with a problem if you are engaged with enough other people. And if selectively used, Twitter is a great way to filter some of the information that flows through your life. For an excellent (and more detailed) explanation of Twitter, watch Twitter in Plain English. After experimenting with only reading other people's Tweets on my phone, only reading in a browser, and using a couple different desktop apps, TweetDeck comes out as the clear winner for organizing information in a way I can quickly digest, showing me the tweets from everyone, the tweets directed at me, and direct messages only I can see in separate panes. TweetDeck is built on the Adobe AIR platform, which feels like a slightly reinvented version of Flash, making it a cross-platform solution out of the gate. My biggest complaint with TweetDeck is that on my Vista laptop the software refuses to update to a newer version, although I've been unable to duplicate this on any other machine. [Windows XP/Vista | Mac OS X | Linux $0.00]