ReadWriteWeb

When Twitter's platform lead Ryan Sarver sent out a missive to developers last week telling them to stop building Twitter clients, he argued that users should rely on the "official" Twitter apps. Sarver maintained that, indeed, most users were already doing so: "According to our data, 90% of active Twitter users use official Twitter apps on a monthly basis."

That assertion caught the attention of Sysomos, as Twitter's data seemed inconsistent with some of the analysis that the social media analytics company has done on the Twitter ecosystem.

So Sysomos took a sample of 25 million tweets from Friday, March 11. That data shows that 42% of tweets were made by unofficial apps - more than four times the figures that Twitter claims.

Originally set to launch in "early December," Twidroid surprised us by launching the next version of the popular Android Twitter client here on the last day of November instead. Twidroid 3.0, which is now available in the Android Marketplace, is a major update for this mobile application, introducing new features like geolocation, in-app image previews, threaded conversations, and, most notably an extensible plugin platform.

Reportage is a brand-new Twitter client for the iPhone which, according to the company, turns Twitter into a radio tuner. In this case, they're using the phrase "radio tuner" as an analogy to describe how the client operates - it doesn't actually play music. Rather, it lets you "tune in" to the people you follow on Twitter as if they were each their own radio station.