The Best Twitter Apps For Your Smartphone

Twitter is an extremely useful social media tool.  It could be described as a social media site for people who don’t care for social media but want to stay connected to friends and current events.  The 140 character limit makes Twitter like Facebook and Foursquare without any fluff. 

That sounds perfect for busy people who can’t afford to waste time on Facebook.  Of course, Twitter is not immune to fluff: there is no limit to the number of tweets someone can post.  Luckily, there are Twitter applications that can help you be as plugged in as you want to be without getting overwhelmed by overzealous tweeters.  These tools can also help you get the most out of Twitter, whether you are using it as a tool or simply for fun.     

TweetDeck is a proven application that can work on your computer and on your mobile phone.  The good thing about this application is that it is not totally-twitter-centric.  Facebook and Foursquare are also also supported.  TweetDeck describes itself as a “social media dashboard” where you can control your interactions and information flow without having to log into multiple sites. 

TweetCaster is another powerful application that runs on Android-powered phones.  It allows users to have control of all the features that they would have if they were accessing Twitter from their desktop.  Though not quite as muscular as TweetDeck, Caster allows integration with Facebook.  There are also plenty of features such as filters and offline caching.  TweetCaster can support multiple accounts, making it a good option for people with both personal and business accounts on Twitter. 

OpenBeak is a Blackberry-centric application.  It offers one-click Twitter access to everything that you would be able to access from your desktop.  You can easily view timelines and create filters to streamline your tweet-reading.  Perhaps the most useful aspect of this program is that it allows users to easily take photos and post them to photo-sharing sites such as Posterous and TwitPic.  Blackberry also has an “official” Twitter application called, fittingly, Twitter for Blackberry.  This program does all the things that other similar programs do, give or take.  It is a good choice because there are fewer bugs and it can work seamlessly with your Blackberry device’s internet browser.  This may prove useful if you are a heavy tweeter who puts a lot of links in your posts. 

Like many of its peers, UberTwitter recently upgraded to include other social media.  It changed its name to UberSocial in order to reflect this broadening of services.  Uber allows users to access all their social media information in a single stream of information.  This product works on Blackberries and also on iPhones.  The UberMedia company also manufactures similar products for other smart-phone operating systems. 

There are several popular iPhone twitter applications.  One of the cleanest and most useful of these is Twitteriffic.  It is a multiplatform tool that works on Mac-powered computers and also on iPhones and iPads.  Another simple application that includes several useful features like “push notification” (lets you know when you receive a direct message), that are extremely functional (“push” can replace your SMS and perhaps even lower your monthly cell phone bill).  Simply Tweet (now in its third incarnation) is another simple application that is focused more on the social aspects of Twitter.  Like Twitteriffic, it is an iPhone tool that has useful features like push notification and conversation threading.  Like other current participants in the Twitter-iPhone-application arms race, they make it easier to take photos, insert URLs and save links and articles. 

The bottom line: there is no single “best Twitter application” for smart phones.  There are a handful of respectable options out there that can do similar tasks and allow you to organize the flow of social media information into a single place.  Which one you end up choosing is, more or less, a matter of personal preference. 

Author: Nicole Rodgers has been in the tech industry for 3 years; she currently contributes to blogs that deal with online stock investing and where to find the best savings online.