As a keen follower of Twitter, I started off with the native platform on web. But the curios spirit in me wouldn’t allow me to settle and just for the heck of it thought of experimenting with some of the API’s that are out there.
Currently, the two very popular APIs to access twitter are Twitterfox and TweetDeck. Twitterfox is a plugin to the popular browser Mozilla Firefox, whereas Tweekdeck is a standalone application which requires Adobe Flash and Adobe AIR.
Here are the Cool and Not-so-Cool features of each of these tools:
Platform: Windows XP
TwitterFox (v 1.8.3)
Cool:
- – Blazingly fast updates
- – Simple structure
- – Updates, Mentions and Direct Messages are available
- – Customize the tweet update interval, font size,
- – Multiple Twitter accounts
Not-so-Cool:
- – Plugin designed only with Firefox
- – Only the last 20 tweets are visible
- – Need to toggle between multiple twitter accounts for updates
- – No Search options
URL: www.twitterfox.net
TweetDeck (v 0.26.4)
Cool:
- – Support for multiple Twitter accounts side-by-side!
- – Amazing customization options and features like:
– Grouping of followers
– Multiple Twitter Accounts from a single window
– TwitScoop, Image upload using TwitPic, YFrog
– URL shortening service from Bit.ly, Digg, tinyurl, etc
– Integration with 12seconds.tv (share short videos)
– Integration with Twitcounter
– Integration with Facebook
– Easy access to TweetDeck support
– Upto 200 tweets in a coloumn
Not-so-Cool:
- – Standalone application that has be to downloaded and installed (not a plugin)
- – Requires Adobe Flash and AIR
- – Slow to update when compared to TwitterFox
URL: www.tweetdeck.com
If its simple and faster twitter updates that you are looking for, then Twitterfox might suit you (provided you are using Mozilla Firefox as your browser), but if you would like to have additional features like integration with Facebook, multiple account support, grouping and etc then Tweetdeck might just suit you.
However, I will leave it to you folks for which one to go for upon your needs. Do let me know your thoughts. You can follow me at @terminalfix
