blu is a desktop application Twitter client for Windows Vista.

Features:

• download requires Windows Vista and .Net 3.5
• view unlimited tweets
• inline @replies (threads)
• excellent graphical displays
• TinyURL integration
• ability to select favorite friends and notification of their tweets

The Good:

blu is a desktop application Twitter client dedicated to Windows Vista users. thirteen23 labs in Austin, Texas developed it (so it must be good!). There are plenty of good features. We liked the ability to view unlimited tweets and the threading of @replies. The graphical display is also quite good, with some interesting features when “hovering”. Customization is also available for settings like opacity and refresh intervals.

The Not-so-Good:

We so wanted to believe that blu would be the perfect Twitter client for Windows Vista, but it’s not perfect. Good, but not perfect. There isn’t a scroll bar, so getting up and down through the unlimited tweets can take a while. There is no search feature, which would have been good. Also, there is no way to see a display of friends/followers. Lastly, there is only support for one Twitter account at a time.

Tweetwave.com rates it: ♦♦♦

Witty is a twitter client for Windows Vista and XP. Features include:

• View recent Twitter statuses from the people you follow (auto-refreshing)
• View recent replies to you
• View a specific user’s timeline
• Update your twitter status
• View and respond to Direct Messages
• Links will open in the user’s default browser ♦♦♦

OutTwit is an application that lets you use twitter from  Microsoft Outlook. ♦♦♦♦

• Update your Twitter status directly from Outlook.
• Receive your friend updates as Outlook messages.
• Archive, manage and search your tweets the same way you manage your email.
• Track keywords. OutTwit will automatically download ALL tweets matching the keywords you specify, even if you are not following the tweet sender. This feature is perfect for keeping up to date with the Twitter buzz on your name, brand, interests, etc.
• See new tweets at a glance.
• Assign custom folder and categories to new messages.
• Use Outlook’s “Reply” and “ReplyAll” commands to send twitter direct messages and @replies.
• Automatically sort new tweets into per-sender folders.
• Shorten URLs with tinyurl.
• See graphs of your Twitter usage statistics.
• Tweets sent to you (@replies and direct) are marked with high importance, so you can see them at a glance.

System requirements:

• Windows XP or Vista with the latest Service Pack.
• Outlook 2003 SP3, 2007 SP1.
• OutTwit does NOT work with Outlook Express.

TwitKit integrates twitter into Firefox on Windows, Mac and Linux. Users can view their twitter stats and manage their twitter network easily. ♦♦♦

Feedalizr is an Adobe Air app that serves as a dashboard and an update center for Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr and Facebook. If you’re managing multiple social accounts, Feedalizr provides a desktop-based hub for listening, sharing, filtering, researching trends specific to conversations within each network, and posting content to specific communities. Works with Linux too. Pretty clever. ♦♦♦♦

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that allows users to send and view tweets.

Features:

• all Twitter operations supported
• ability to search, filter and group tweets
• auto-update of threads within Twitter
• Twitpic support
• URL shortening via several different services at user’s option
• shorten tweets via Shrinktweet**
• translate tweets into any number of languages**
• in addition to TwitScoop and 12seconds video, now integration with StockTwits**
• ability to display and select recent hashtags from drop-down menu**

The Good:

TweetDeck does an excellent job of not only sending and receiving tweets, but of allowing users to manage how tweets are grouped and displayed. Additional viewing columns are created within TweetDeck each time a new filter or group is applied. This is a powerful feature and is especially useful for “power tweeters”. The extra features added by TweetDeck are very impressive.**

The Not-so-Good:

For all the great stuff that TweetDeck lets users do, there are a couple of things that are irritating shortfalls. Sometimes TweetDeck gets its Twitter API request limit numbers messed up and “hangs”. A bigger irritant, though, is the lack of multi-account support. That would truly give it “rock star” status. Finally, TweetDeck is still in beta, so everyone should be patient.

**TweetDeck has recently released a new version (v0.21.5b) with some additional features. Those are noted herein by a **. Tweetwave.com rating is now 4.0/5**

Further updated review:

TweetDeck is now on version 0.25b. The principal changes since we last reviewed TweetDeck are the addition of Facebook integration and plenty of new bugs. The Facebook integration is a good feature which adds one more social media tool to the TweetDeck toolbox. The extra bugs and hang times have been discouraging, but the TweetDeck guys are working on it, we’re sure. Our Tweetwave.com rating remains at 4.0/5.

Tweetwave.com rates it: ★★★★

Twitterlicious is a Windows application that makes using Twitter more “fun”. It handles all the hard work, leaving you to read and write tweets with the minimum fuss. Best of all, Twitterlicious is free!

Features

• Small and concise UI, shows maximum amount of information in a minimum amount of space.
• Hides itself in the system tray when not needed, and pops up a notification balloon when there’s a new tweet.
• Displays the real read status of each tweet, so you know which tweets are new and can see any that you’ve missed.
• Automatically refreshes itself at user-defined intervals.
• Properly threaded so it won’t lock up if Twitter.com is unresponsive.
• Support for authenticated web proxies.

♦♦♦♦

twhirl is a desktop app that allows users to send and receive tweets, @replies and DMs.

Features:

• remembering login credentials on user’s computer
• all-in-one timeline with tweets, replies and direct messages
• configurable auto-updates for the timeline
• displaying user’s latest 20 status updates and direct messages sent
• sending status updates
• sending replies to other users (with quick buttons on others’ statuses)
• sending direct messages to other users
• showing user’s friends and followers
• deleting own status updates and direct messages
• input area can be hidden (configurable auto-hiding)
• multi-account support
• keyboard shortcuts
• sys tray / dock icon support
• audible and visual notifications
• viewing and (un)setting favorites
• (un)following users
• auto-updating the program
• changeable color schemes
• searching for public tweets (powered by terraminds)
• filtering the timeline
• ** saved searches on Twitter
• ** searching for tweets mentioning @username
• ** Ping.fm support for twitter and laconi.ca/identi.ca
• ** video recording
• ** English spell checking
• ** bit.ly short URL support

The Good:

twhirl is a great multi-account Twitter desktop client based on AIR and Flex. It sports a compact UI, keyboard shortcuts, many features like auto-connect, auto-refreshing tweets, sending updates, replies, direct messages and more. Users are able to filter tweets, lookup other users to follow/unfollow and shorten URLs. Twitpic is supported.

The Not-so-Good:

This application is easy to use, but note it is not open-source. That won’t be a big issue for most users. Although you can filter tweets for a particular keyword, it isn’t possible to filter groups of users for display. Other than that, there seem to be few complaints, except perhaps that more color schemes/themes would be good. The multiple account support is a huge bonus feature.

**On 9 Feb 09, twhirl released an update with some new features (shown above with **). Our rating is now up to 4.5 / 5.**

Tweetwave.com rates it: ♦♦♦♦

BigTweet – BigTweet installs as a bookmarklet and allows you to post to Twitter from any web page.

Features:

• login with Twitter credentials
• choose 140 or 240 characters for length of tweet
• shorten URLs using Bit.ly API
• insert special Unicode characters

The Good:

Big Tweet is a great way to create a tweet about web pages that you visit. It is an easy-to-use widget with many features: choose a classic 140 character update, or a 240 character tweet; Insert special Unicode characters and shorten URLs with the Bit.ly API right from the bookmarklet window and automatically capture the current page title, URL and any highlighted text. No registration is required – only Twitter login credentials are needed.

The Not-so-Good:

Big Tweet is a brilliant little widget. In the past, the only odd thing we encountered was that, on occasion, the widget would get “buried” under some graphics on a few websites. That could have been a Firefox thing; we’re not sure. It didn’t happen very often, and appears to have been fixed, so we can’t really complain too much.

Tweetwave.com rates it: ★★★★