Desktop Twitter Programs Revealed
November 20, 2010 06:00 AM Desktop Twitter clients offer some advantages over browser-based options for the more than 175 million registered Twitter users navigating the tens of millions of daily Tweets. Desktop clients free user from the limited range of controls and UT metaphors found in the browser, and there's less chance of being bitten by a web-based exploit. Moreover, third-party browser-based clients, such as HootSuite and Slipstre.am, hint at different ways of interacting with Twitter. It's no wonder that third-party applications have emerged as a significant means of accessing Twitter, with almost 15% of unique users coming through one of the leading clients. Based upon ease of use, the number of services supporting, interfaces to additional services such as URL shortening and filter management, here are five Twitter clients worth a look.
Slipstre.am
Still in beta as of this writing, Slipstre.am is designed to provide additional filtering to Twitter streams apart from lists or hashtags. It's not quite a full-blown client, but rather a kind of meta front end for Twitter that lets you extract that much more signal from the noise. The interface strongly resembles the classic Twitter layout, though it's missing a few recent common features, such as URL shortening. What's important about Slipstre.am is not the interface itself but its filtering system, which can work by criteria other than just text strings.
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