1. Video recording and video tweeting.


2. Live filtering your tweet stream for keywords.


3. Persistent state, close the app or get a phone call and it will relaunch on the same page you left it.


4. Offline mode - including offline reading, follow, unfollow and save a link to Instapaper - all your commands will sync back up when you come online again.


5. A drafts manager lets you draft multiple tweets offline and then send all at once when you come online.


6. Sync your twitter contacts with iPhone adress book, marking up contacts with phone number, email and more. The new user profile pages look quite nice.


7. Threaded conversation display.


8. More powerful "nearby" UI, using Mapikt and supporting Twitter's forthcoming geolocation metadata.


9. Integration with third party apps Favstar.fm (know when people favorite your tweets), Tweet Blocker, and Follow cost (see posting frequency for users).


10. "Peak" gesture when replying to a tweet, presumably an easy way to glance back at the message you're replying to. Sounds nice.

That's a whole lot of features, but Brichter writes that he's kept it all looking beautiful. "And here's the beauty of this," he wrote today, "just as Tweetie 1 proved that you didn't have to sacrifice usability for functionality, Tweetie 2 proves it again. Every single one of these features fits naturally into the user interface, none adds unnecessary complexity. It's arguably even simpler than Tweetie 1, all while being vastly more powerful."

Unfortunately, there's no support for Groups. Not in the iPhone or the Mac version of Tweetie. That's a dealbreaker for some of us on the desktop, at least.

If all goes well, the new version will likely be available in the first half of October. Come on Apple, let the new Tweetie on through!

Images from ChicagoNow.