November 10, 2008 Twitter's open architecture has allowed developers to build a wealth of third-party tools to help Twitter addicts power users get the most of the service. They include dedicated Twitter clients for the desktop, browser, iPhone, and BlackBerry, along with tools for automating Twitter, posting photos to Twitter, and managing your friends and followers.

TweetDeck is a cross-platform application for keeping up with a lot of people on Twitter at a glance. TweetDeck divides your Twitter messages into multiple columns.

One column shows the default Twitter view of messages from all your friends.

The second column shows only public replies to your messages.

The third column shows only direct messages, addressed to you privately.

You can customize columns, move them around, and add columns for a specific subset of the people you're following: For example, you might set up a specific group solely for co-workers, or your real-life friends, and set up a column on TweetDeck to follow just those people.

TweetDeck also supports realtime searches. For example, you might set up a column to search all of Twitter for all messages containing your company name. And you can also add a column for "TwitScoop," to see a keyword cloud of the most popular discussion topics on Twitter.

TweetDeck is public beta, but it's been public beta for a while and it's stable. It runs on Adobe Air, which supports Windows and the Mac. Air support for Linux is in beta.

Like TweetDeck, Twhirl is Air-based, so it runs on Windows and the Mac, with beta support for Linux. It connects to multiple accounts on Twitter; laconi.ca, which is a Twitter competitor; FriendFeed, which is a social networking aggregation service; and the Seesmic video blogging service. Twhirl lets you cross-post Twitter updates to Pownce and Jaiku, which are two other Twitter competitors; post images to Twitter, and search tweets.

Source: www.informationweek.com