Good overview from Rixstep of the four best Twitter clients for Mac users, including my current favorites, Tweetie and Twitterific (both Mac and iPhone).
Canary, TweetDeck, Tweetie, and Twitterrific manage your tweets and followers in different ways. Different strokes for different folks, right? Or, is it, different tools for different fools?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock of late you’ve become aware of Twitter. Everybody’s using it. Google have dozens of feeds there. And Twitter is eminently easy to use. With a 140 byte post limit no one can fault you for bad grammar or spelling or anything. It’s perfect for both corporations wanting to push new product, celebrities who have to know everyone in the world is watching them, and your garden variety illiterates.
No, not everybody is using it. The average Twitter user tweets once, which means that Twitter has two distinct classes. Tweeters and followers. Twitter bills itself as the answer to the question, “What are you doing?” In reality, Twitter has quickly become a personal or corporate RSS feed with a retarded limit of 140 characters.
Ryan Seacrest, Ashton Kucher, and Larry King have millions of followers, but is anyone really paying attention to what they say?
As if to emphasize our vapid love affair with banal aspects of new technology, check the value placed on various aspects of the Mac Twitter clients:
TweetDeck has a far better icon than any of the others. Tweetie’s is horrible; Canary’s looks like open source; Twitterrific is just too ‘Apple’ – like having one too many helpings of meringue pie.
The icon. What a great reason to choose a utility to waste time than a feature without merit?
How many of your conversations with those of the texting and Twittering crowd have been interrupted repeatedly with buzzes, bleeps, and bird sounds, as the person you are supposedly conversing with grabs for the phone to review and respond to an incoming message?
Our lives are becoming tattered and strained under a barrage of endless, needless, and fruitless activities which take time, energy, effort, maintenance, and management and provide so little in return, other than shameless self promotion for the tweeters, and little else for followers.
In deference and to paraphrase René Descartes’ succinct implication of existence, “I tweet, therefore am I?”