After following a link from Kevin Dente to a twitter client called Mixero and installing it I thought I would just list my 2 favourite Twitter clients, why I like them and what I dont like. First of all to those who do not see or understand the value of Twitter, its NOT Facebook and it does not attempt to be Facebook. Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that has taken the world by storm and clearly if you do not “get it” you may never. I have had friends asking me “What is Twitter?”, “Is it like Facebook”, and I’m like you don’t get it so leave it. I use Twitter for one primary reason, fresh content. I get updates from top Microsoft guys in a quicker way than say through an RSS feed, and Twitter seems nicer than RSS feeds to me. So that is why I keep going back to Twitter, because knowledge is good, and if you know about things its always good.

In essence Twitter uses a 140 character mini-blog post from a user, me or you, about anything you think is important, and sometimes what some people say is important. Scott Gu is easier to follow through Twitter, as is people like Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack. The social media’lites also use Twitter extensively. So when you post a Tweet (thats the term used) you have a choice of ways to do it, each with their drawbacks:

• Twitter: Go straight to the source, to the fountain, to the mothership. You will need a browser for this though (Internet Explorer/Chrome/Firefox) and although it does the job, once you close that browser window the connection to Twitter dies and any new content coming through wont be seen. Your Twitter page itself also refreshes content, but you need to click on a UI (user interface) element to get it to show the new tweets. So this is not my favourite way of connecting to Twitter. I do like the once-in-a-while changes to the main twitter login page though.
• Tweetdeck: I have been using Tweetdeck for quite some time now and I like it primarily because it allows me to update Facebook statuses and Twitter at the same time. I also like it because it notifies me when new Tweets are made. I dislike it because the UI that appears when a new Tweet comes in can get in the way sometimes, even though it has a close buttons
• Seesmic Look: I like it because it has been written using WPF and it looks slick and pretty. It does not display notifications of new Tweets though, which I wish it had