Update: There was a mistake in Sysomos' report. Twitter.com's share actually grew slightly from 45.7% in June to 46.7%. We apologize for the confusion.

Compared to Sysomos' last study of Twitter clients in June, Twitter.com's share fell from 55% to 46%. As Twitter's growth is slowing down, these numbers make a lot of sense. New users tend to use Twitter's web interface at first and then migrate to a third-party client. If Twitter.com's market share among Twitter clients is dropping, then this can be seen as a strong indication that the number of new signups is going down as well.

TweetDeck: The Client of Choice for Active Twitter Users

TweetDeck doesn't just have the largest number of users, it is also the tool of choice for the most active Twitter users. Sysomos analyzed the number of tweets posted by active users based on their primary Twitter application. On average, TweetDeck users send out 1.24 tweets per day, followed by Seesmic users (1.18 tweets/day) and HootSuite (1.11 tweets/day). Users of all the other popular clients like Tweetie, Twhirl and Twitterific update their status less than once a day. Those who prefer Twitter's own web interface only send out 0.67 tweets per day.

How Many Clients Do You Use?

Sysomos also analyzed how many third-party clients Twitter users normally use. Looking at active Twitter users only - those with at least 50 tweets in the last 5 months - the study found that 82% only used a single application. 14% used two applications, 2.35% used three and then the numbers drop off quickly. Only 0.01% of all active users used 6 or more clients. Chances are that a lot of active users use different mobile and desktop clients (Tweetie on the iPhone and Seesmic on the desktop, for example). This would explain why quite a large number of users use two clients.

A small startup company called InfoChimps released for sale yesterday three very large sets of data extracted from 500 million Twitter messages. Included in the offering are the senders and recipients of 1 billion @ messages, Retweets and Favorites. We wrote in-depth about the release late last night. This morning we interviewed Iain Dodsworth, creator of the most popular Twitter client, TweetDeck, about the value he might find in that data and the direction he's aiming to take TweetDeck in the future.

Dodsworth: Straight off the bat - an archive of tweets could form the basis of a profiler and that's very interesting. Sentiment analysis (which I am ALL over) requires that kind of base corpus.

RWW: InfoChimps isn't releasing full text yet, but they would do a custom slice if you wanted it.

Dodsworth: It's the historical element that a large number of services are missing and where they will fall flat - analysis based on the last few hundreds tweets is almost pointless.

RWW: I'm curious what "a profiler" might mean to you and what this data could help make possible in those terms.

Dodsworth: For me a true profiler would be akin to the holy grail - we would analyse who a person converses with, who RTs them the most, essentially all interactions. Then we would track activity metrics (how many tweets sent, replies) and then we would analyse language patterns (usage of certain words) to ascertain how they express themselves and pinpoint sentiment. Off the top of my head this could lead to elements of intention prediction and I'm steering TweetDeck to have this kind of very very basic Artificial Intelligence at its heart.

I'm currently researching intent predicition inside high frequency trading systems and it's fascinating and could directly relate to TweetDeck and social media systems/services in general.

[Dodsworth's background is in developing for financial services, at places like Prudential Financial and PricewaterhouseCoopers.]

RWW: What would intention prediction look like in this context? On twitter?

Dodsworth: At its most basic if TweetDeck could predict what the user was probably about to require next, based on current activity, then it could start to collate that data in the background - cross twitter/facebook/linkedin data for example. I'm looking at it right now from a cross-service data gathering perspective where our servers do the gathering and hopefully get around the issues of API limits for example.

This is based on future functionality we're mapping out now which is a lot more complex than looking at someone's profile or seeing how many RTs one of your tweets has.

I'm thinking the scope is full social graph rather than just twitter/facebook.

RWW: I guess I'm having a hard time imagining "what the user was probably about to require next, based on current activity, then TweetDeck could start to collate that data in the background - cross twitter/facebook/linkedin data for example" might look like. Like, if I'm looking at a person's profile, I'd probably like to see their LinkedIn data?

Dodsworth: Good example...or see how a certain person you're tweeting with right now stacks up against "similar" people you've spoken to - a box could pop up mid-conversation and give you a tonne of metrics on this person. How full of [crap] are they? Are they a social media guru? Would you be wise to tell this person anything sensitive? Based on previous language patterns, is the person you're tweeting with right now probably lying? A bit out there but possible in theory.

Third-party Twitter clients and tools like TweepML, TweetDeck, Brizzly, Nambu and others all offer their own implementation of this feature, though Twitter also gave early API access to this feature to a number of third-party developers.

Currently, adding friends to a list is still a bit cumbersome and either involves a lot of clicks from a user's profile page or a visit to the 'following' page. The list of users you follow, however, is organized in chronological order, so finding users on this list is quite hard.

One interesting aspect of this feature is that a user's profile will now also show a section that highlights the public lists a user was added to. This could have some interesting social ramifications. After all, Twitter's emphasis on follower counts has already created a bit of a popularity contest and now being part of a certain list that is being curated by the right person could add yet another dimension to this issue.

Of course, these new lists will open up avenues for a new products as well. Third-party tools, for example, can now look at the public lists and maybe create new algorithms to rank a user's authority on Twitter.

Import/Export

Of course, these are still the early days for Twitter lists, but hopefully we will also soon see a feature in third-party clients like TweetDeck that will allow users to export their existing lists or import their new lists from Twitter. Chances are that this is just a matter of time and this will probably be a default option in third-party clients once Twitter rolls this feature out to the majority of its users.

I've been testing the new TweetDeck for about half a day and below are the five things I like the best about it and the three things I like the least.

The Good News

Bring Your MySpace Friendships Back From the Dead, Without Visiting MySpace

Many people don't like visiting MySpace anymore, but let's admit it: unless you're a total snob, you probably still have some friends that are still active there. It's nice to know how they're doing. The new TweetDeck makes that easy. Just grant TweetDeck permission to access your list of friends and their updates will appear in one or more columns. It's downright heartwarming.

The Facebook Integration is Very Good

If you like to use Facebook, TweetDeck isn't going to replace the user experience for you, but it's an excellent supplemental view of your friends' activity streams. You get the whole hog - photos, comments, likes, liking and commenting. You can even send posts to Facebook just by clicking to select or deselect that account in the update composing window. The new TweetDeck makes it easy to post messages and photos to multiple or different accounts. It's remarkably easy - it's fantastic.

Also very nice is the ability to create TweetDeck groups from your Facebook friends. You can even create multiple columns in TweetDeck displaying updates from different groups of your Facebook friends, and group creation is now super smooth in Tweetdeck with name autocompletion when you start typing. Groups are the secret weapon of the social web and they are the key to Tweetdeck's value. Unfortunately you can't import the groups you've already created in Facebook, but more on that later.

Links Shortened Automatically

Type or paste a link into the posting box on TweetDeck and it's now automatically shortened. It's fast and easy, a real time saver.

Drag and Drop Photos Works Well, Even With Skitch

Drag photos in to share them by URL, even out of the Mac screen capture service Skitch. Expect a lot more image sharing via TweetDeck. You can even post those images over to Facebook. You can't send images to MySpace, which is a bummer.

The Directory Has Potential

There's a new TweetDeck Directory that's linked-to from the client where you can find groups of users organized by topic and follow them in a new column with just a click. That's very cool. There are really diverse groups, but they aren't that deep in the accounts included. Using a service like Twellow or Tweepz is still a better way to create your own groups - but this isn't bad for new users and it certainly has potential. (We're holding our breath for the ultimate Twitter group app, another one that's currently awaiting approval from Twitter but that we hope to get to write about soon.)

The Bad News

It's not all kisses from kittens with this new TweetDeck. Here are three things that are a disappointment above and beyond the fact that this is still the most memory-intensive software I have running on my computer right now.

Facebook Groups Can't Be Imported

It's probably not TweetDeck's fault at all but those groups you created in Facebook? You're going to have to build them all over again here if you want to use them. There's nothing like creating separate views for people you knew in highschool on one hand and geeks you know from the internet on the other. The inability to port those groups over makes Facebook reading in TweetDeck a lot more clumsy than it ought to be. Dear Facebook, would you please make sure this is easy to do?

MySpace May Take Up Two Columns

Syncing a MySpace account requires that you put either activity stream or status updates in a column. If you want to see what your friends are both doing and saying, then you have to give up two columns. That's obnoxious, but again probably not TweetDeck's fault. I'm just saying: this is a social network activity stream browser now and there are some issues.

There's Still No Group Export

TweetDeck remains in control over the work you've created in building groups in its client. This is TweetDeck's fault. The company hasn't made any visible progress in data portability. When thousands of friend connections are flying all around, group creation adds huge value. By not facilitating the porting of those groups to and from other clients, TweetDeck (as well as Seesmic) are effectively locking their users in. It's bad.

Those issues aside, this is a major update for the better. The pace of innovation in TweetDeck is really impressive. I look forward to using this software all day, every day, for the next few months until yet another version comes out that's even better. How does it look to you? Hopefully within the next few hours you'll be able to give the new TweetDeck a try and let us know.

Twitter has acquired two other companies so far, that we know of. Search engine and sentiment analysis service Summize became Twitter's own search engine and Values of N sold its assets so engineer Rael Dornfest could be brought into the company. Here are ten other startups we think that Twitter should consider acquiring next. Which kind of company would you most like to see become part of Twitter itself? We've got a poll below.

Some of these we think are likely acquisitions, some less so. In making this list we considered both functionality that would be helpful to have added to Twitter's own site and technology that would be worth buying instead of just building in-house. Whenever a platform company builds technology that a number of other startups offer, there is a risk of scaring other people away from investing in development that the platform could just reproduce. Acquisitions of startups on a platform probably increase the appeal of development though, as it's a chance to get in on the game.

Quite Likely, if It Hasn't Happened Already

Bit.ly is the most full-featured and popular URL shortener on the market right now and was recently selected as Twitter's own shortener of choice, dethroning TinyURL. Bit.ly offers all kinds of smart analytics, from real-time click tracking to semantic analysis of topic keywords from the links that people tweet.

One trusted industry source speaking on the condition of anonymity told us that Bit.ly servers "were moved into Twitter's racks months ago in preparation for this change" [of becoming the default shortener]. Bit.ly is becoming too important to Twitter to keep that functionality outside the company's own shop and the two companies share some investors. We will not be surprised at all if a Bit.ly acquisition by Twitter is announced sometime in the near future.

Could Happen...

Tweetmeme is another fast growing Twitter analytics service that tracks sharing on the service. With another chunk of new features just added today, the service is looking a whole lot like "Feedburner for Twitter" but with even more viral distribution possibilities. The Tweetmeme API is quite interesting and could complement Bit.ly quite well.

Twitpic is a popular way to share images on Twitter. The site faces a strong challenge from ImageShack's YFrog, but independent Twitpic would be a cheaper acquisition and is already well known among Twitter users. (Twitter should probably look at Enjoysthin.gs; it's got the best user experience.) An increase in imagery on Twitter would probably offer the company a lot more advertising real-estate.

Tweepz is a fascinating Twitter search engine that acts like a directory that lets you parse your results using various metrics gleaned from Twitter. Check out this search, for example. Twitter could benefit from making this kind of search available to users, advertisers and researchers - and Tweepz has already built it. See also Twazzup, another company doing interesting things with Twitter data.

Longer Shots

An iPhone app company could be a good buy for Twitter; there's certainly plenty of options. M.Twitter.com is a good mobile service already but someone specializing in super high-quality Twitter apps for the iPhone, Android and Pre could be good to bring in house. It could be AteBits, makers of Tweetie. There may not be enough reason for Twitter to buy one of these companies, though.

A desktop Twitter app company could help Twitter increase user engagement. Many of the most serious Twitter users (though not all) swear by desktop access. Twitter could acquire the most popular and arguably most innovative desktop app, Tweetdeck, or it could bring Seesmic in house. Tweetdeck would be cheap and shares investors with Twitter. Desktop apps may be too limited in appeal to be a compelling acquisition target.

Geo-location could be a good feature to add to Twitter. Search by user location could be made much more meaningful and the list of things that could be done with it is very long. Brightkite is popular and well developed, Shizzow is pretty and wouldn't be expensive. On the other hand, browsers themselves will likely all become more location aware in the near future and Twitter may be satisfied with its current location data.

A semantics company could bring structure to the Tweets, making them more useful and easier to advertise against. Right now links Tweeted are semantically analyzed by Reuters' Calais and sent to Bit.ly, but we wouldn't be surprised if Twitter was interested in scooping up a small semantics shop and helping it scale so that analysis was being done in house. Twitter may feel like semantics don't need to get that close to consumer users, though. (Disclosure, Calais is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.)

Topify is a widely loved service that intercepts your new Twitter follower notification emails and sends you much more useful ones. It's great but probably too easy for Twitter to just reproduce itself.

FriendFeed plus Twitter would be a match made in heaven. It would be an engineering powerhouse. It would be a step towards mainstream user adoption of FriendFeed, a service that can't make up its mind which end of the sophistication spectrum it's targeting. It's also quite unlikely to happen. If there's one related startup we can imagine turning down a Twitter acquisition offer, it's probably FriendFeed. (Though the investment-laden and highly ambitious OneRiot is a close second.) Nonetheless, it would be awesome if FriendFeed's cross-network aggregation, threaded conversations, groups, media support, search and more joined forces with Twitter.

Ultimately, it may be most likely that Twitter's next acquisition will be something vapid. A service that aggregates shopping Tweets, or celebrity Tweets, or something else that will fall short of taking advantage of the Twitter platform's huge potential to change the world. Twitter staff makes relatively simple use of its own service, so hoping that it will acquire companies that make it all the more powerfully sophisticated may be an early adopter's pipe dream. [Update: After some discussion this afternoon, I am thinking it's time to reconsider this position I've held for some time. Twitter staff is not full of dummies, I'm sure, and it has probably been inappropriate of me to write as if that's the case.]

Maybe not, though. We wouldn't be shocked to see Twitter pick up at least a few of the companies above. What do you think? Are there other services you'd like to see become part of the Twitter team even more than the above? It's a wild and woolly micro-content ecosystem out there - anything could happen.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Doug Coleman, Jolie O'Dell, Dana Oshiro , Lidija Davis and Steven Walling.

iPhone App

We weren't able to test the iPhone app in detail yet, but based on what we have heard about it and the screenshots we have seen, as well as the information we have received from TweetDeck itself, this app looks like it might be a winner. Overall, the iPhone app will recreate the look and feel of the desktop app, with the ability to flick back and forth between different columns, create and manage groups, etc.

The most important aspect of the app, though, is that changes in one app (desktop or iPhone) will automatically be synced with the other app (this includes groups, columns, etc.).

Update: we got to play with the iPhone client a bit more now, here are some of our observations:

• you need to register an account with TweetDeck to enable syncing
• the animations for switching between columns are very smooth - switching between columns also feels very natural
• the app doesn't work in landscape mode
• adding users to a group is a bit complicated, as you have to go through the 'columns' menu - you can't just look at a user's profile and add him/her to a group

Overall, after having tested the app for a bit longer, this is clearly going to be the iPhone app to beat now. It's easy to use, fully featured, and fast, even with hundreds of new updates coming in with every refresh. At least for this author, TweetDeck will probably become the default Twitter client on the iPhone.

Desktop App

On the desktop side, we are very happy to see the end of the 10 column limit. As we tend to use TweetDeck as a research tool, we love the fact that we can now see more groups and searches right in TweetDeck without having to resort to other tools.

Another neat new feature is the addition of a 'reply to all' feature. Thanks to this, you can easily reply to all users mentioned in a tweet, instead of just the user who sent the message.

There are also a number of other new features in the desktop app, including the ability to reference another user (marked as 'RE' in tweets), support for video playback from Qik and 12seconds, as well as the ability to see a list of local (instead of Twitter-wide) trends.

This is Big

Overall, this is an important new version of TweetDeck, and the addition of the iPhone app with syncing is probably the killer feature here. Other Twitter clients also feature desktop and mobile apps (Nambu, Tweetie, and Twitterific, for example), but while a lot of TweetDeck's competitors have promised a similar feature, none have delivered this functionality yet.

We have often wondered how an application like TweetDeck or Seesmic could make money from their efforts. Tweetdeck, after all, is the most popular desktop Twitter client, yet it doesn't feature any advertising or pro versions, so providing customized versions of the app to bands and brands seems like a very smart way to actually make money for TweetDeck.

Blink-182 on Twitter

Blink-182 (assuming this is an official account), joined Twitter in February, but have only posted three tweets so far. Two of them are actually announcements for the TweetDeck client and were posted within the last hour. However, the band's singer, Mark Hoppus, and drummer, Travis Barker, are clearly active Twitter and Tweetdeck users, so this combination seems like a very good fit for TweetDeck. Especially, because both of the band members actually seem to engage their fans on Twitter.

Similar Deals Coming Soon?

We are still waiting for confirmation that money actually changed hands in this deal, so we have contacted TweetDeck and will update this post once we hear back from them.

According to a DM we got from the TweetDeck team on Twitter, however, "this is just the beginning, wait until you see what else we've got coming up next." We are also awaiting the release of the next version of TweetDeck in the near future. Chances are that this will not be a one-off deal between Blink-182 and TweetDeck, but that the company is actively looking for similar deals with other brands.

This new version comes just in time, as Seesmic, the company behind Twhirl, unveiled its TweetDeck inspired Seesmic Desktop yesterday.

Both TweetDeck and the new Seesmic Desktop were built on top of Adobe AIR, and both feature multi-column views, with the ability to create groups and persistent searches. Both programs, however, also have quite a few features that the other hasn't replicated yet.

The new version of TweetDeck, for example, can now display previews of of TwitPic images, while the new Seesmic client smartly keeps one column on the left side stationary, so that you can always keep an eye on your replies or direct messages, for example. Optionally, TweetDeck can now auto-complete usernames and add hashtags to replies. It now also features support for adding the Digg URL-shortener.

Seesmic also features support for multiple Twitter accounts and it can take a picture from your webcam and post it to TwitPic. Besides its support for Facebook, TweetDeck, on the other hand, has implemented support for more third-party apps like StockTwits, TwitScoop, and video service 12seconds, while the Seesmic Desktop is currently just focused on the basic Twitter experience.

Just a short while ago, making a recommendation for a good desktop Twitter client was easy. For heavy Twitter users who needed multiple columns to group friends and persistent searches, TweetDeck was the way to go. If you just wanted to dip your toes into the Twitter stream, Twhirl was the best choice. Now, however, making these recommendations is a lot harder.

If you want a multi-column Twitter client, both apps have their advantages and disadvantages, but the core Twitter experience on both clients is actually quite comparable. To differentiate themselves from each other, both clients will have to continue to innovate, though, and for us, as consumers, that can never be a bad thing. If you are on a Mac, we also recommend that you give Nambu a try, as it isn't encumbered by some of the limitations of the Adobe AIR platform (our review).

Is there still a market for a simple Twitter client?

With new players like the Mac-only Nambu, as well as other Adobe AIR clients like AlertThingy, the market for Twitter clients is continuously in flux, and it would be preposterous to try to make any predictions about the future of this business. It is important to note, however, that while there is clearly a market for well-designed, multi-column, multi-social network enabled clients, some of these extra features are probably just overkill for a large number of Twitter users. The majority of Twitter users, after all, are still using the web interface to access the service, and a relatively straightforward client like Twhirl is ideally positioned to capture a good slice of this user base - assuming that Seesmic doesn't abandon Twhirl in favor of the Seesmic Desktop.

The latest version of TweetDeck has become somewhat infamous for how much memory it often eats up after a few hours of continuous usage. Nambu, on the other hand, keeps a relatively low footprint. Just like TweetDeck, Nambu features the ability to create groups (which is really the only way to keep up if you follow a large number of users) and separate columns for specific searches.

Nambu also features a number of other features that set it apart from its competitors. You can, for example, translate any tweet into English with a simple keyboard shortcut, and you can easily add users to a group from a very straightforward right-click menu. Nambu can also auto-complete the names of users you follow when you write a new message. For real power-users, Nambu also supports more than one Twitter account, and for URL-shortening, it currently defaults to tr.im, which was developed by the Nambu team.

Unlike TweetDeck, however, Nambu doesn't feature integration with a lot of third-party applications like StockTwits, and it doesn't support Facebook yet. Looking forward, however, the team plans to enable support for FriendFeed, identi.ca, and Ping.fm in the near future.

Three Views

While Nambu most closely resembles TweetDeck, the application also features two other views as well. The first resembles a traditional, one-column Twitter client like Twhirl, while the second looks a lot like the interface for EventBox, which we reviewed last week, and which sports a sidebar with all your groups and persistent searches.

Twitter Threads

One of the most interesting features of Nambu is that it automatically organizes your conversations into threads. It will also do this for conversations that you don't participate in, but you have to be subscribed to both sides of the conversation.

Still in Beta

Of course, Nambu is still in its early beta phase, so you can expect things to break now and then. The development team, however, is issuing updates regularly and development is clearly moving ahead swiftly. There are obviously still some bugs in the application, and the latest update, for example, seems to take up more memory than the previous release.

Nambu also offers an iPhone application, and while it's a decent enough mobile Twitter client, we would recommend other options like Twitfone or Tweetie over Nambu on the iPhone platform.

On the Mac desktop, few applications can currently rival Nambu's feature set, so if you already like TweetDeck, and if you are on a Mac, then Nambu is definitely worth a try.

This latest update, due out later today available now, sees the launch of "groups," putting the service in direct competition with the most popular desktop client for Twitter: TweetDeck. Where AlertThingy surpasses its competition, though, is in its integration of multiple social networks, the most significant of which are Facebook, Flickr, and Digg.

Although TweetDeck's recent update integrates a column with a stream of your Facebook friends' updates, with AlertThingy you can create multiple groups of friends from multiple networks. Once you get your head around it, the grouping of friends works surprisingly well. But unfortunately, it does currently have one major drawback (mainly for Twitter users, who tend to follow many people), which we'll address below.

This release of AlertThingy does unleash one particularly outstanding feature: deep search. AlertThingy's search capabilities allow you to use whatever search terms you like across all your groups, feeds, and networks, remarkably fast.

Limitations

Given TweetDeck's phenomenal rise to success and recent feature developments, any desktop alert-oriented application will have to face comparison, particularly if it incorporates groups.

Aside from a few minor bugs and time lags in switching views, we were frustrated by two things in particular with AlertThingy:

1. It is not efficient in creating groups for Twitter users who follow more than 1000 people. Although you can receive updates from everyone as normal, you aren't able to receive the full list of Twitter contacts as you would with TweetDeck.
2. In terms of usability, figuring out how to view Twitter replies and direct messages took far too long. Learning which view to select to create groups was also frustrating. And adding one's various networks and RSS feeds felt needlessly complex.

That said, after some time getting to grips with the application, we have many nice things to say about the social networking client. The UI in and of itself is clean and easy on the eye; the process of merging friends from various networks into a single group is superb; and, once understood, the various viewing options are a solid, worthwhile feature.

When all is said and done, however, devoted TweetDeck users, who account for approximately 13% of all Twitter users, would likely miss the overall slickness of the leading Twitter client. Among the features noticeably missing from AlertyThingy are the ability to modify theming options, to move columns left and right, to receive separate notifications for separate groups, and to view user profiles within the application.

Conclusion

AlertThingy is unquestionably a strong player in the Twitter and social network client market. With its impressive feature set and clear direction, AlertThingy certainly has potential. If it focuses on usability, flushes out bugs, adds a couple of missing features, and works on configuration for groups, it could overtake other applications, including TweetDeck, in the not-too-distant future.

Based on this data, Marlow argues that once your network grows beyond the Dunbar number of 150 (the theoretical cognitive limit of how many people one can maintain a stable social relationship with), you are, at best, increasing the number of 'casual contacts' that you track passively.

What About Twitter?

Marlow, of course, focuses only on Facebook, but these numbers are also quite interesting in the context of other social services like Twitter. Just this week, we saw a an interesting discussion about how many followers one can really interact with on Twitter - especially considering that some users there follow tens of thousands of people.

While some of these numbers for Facebook probably also hold true for Twitter, it also needs to be acknowledged that Twitter is a far more casual network than Facebook, where users just dip in and out of the message stream during the day. Also, the concept of 'friendship' in general also seems to be more loosely defined on Twitter.

But if you really wanted to have a two-way communication with most or your Twitter followers, then following 10,000 people is simply crazy. However, those Twitter addicts who follow this many users probably also only really track a very small subset of their followers through groups on Tweetdeck and searches.

If you've never used Tweetdeck, it's the most powerful application available for sending and receiving Twitter messages. It's about to become even more awesome.

Language translation is now available in the drop down "more actions" menu inside every user profile next to a tweet. It's a pretty rough translation, as these things always are - but how cool is that anyway? Twitter is a very international phenomenon - now we can grunt at each other across languages a little more effectively.

Stocktwits is a fast-growing startup that hosts conversation and news tracking around the stock market. Now Tweetdeck will let you tie in your Stocktwits account and create Friends, Portfolio, Recommended, Commentary and "all" columns. We expect that to be quite popular.

Hashtag Support comes in the form of a new drop down to the right of your message composition window, displaying one-click links to add any of your 10 most recently used hashtags. When you reply to a message that included a hashtag - that same hashtag will be automatically appended to your reply. That's going to keep conversations much more coherent.

User Search lets you set up a column to search for any username - see what people are saying to and about people of interest.

One Column View is a quick little button you can hit to zip your full screen Tweetdeck down into just one column, the easier to watch it next to a browser with. Click it again and it will expand to full size.

There are a number of other new additions, from easier group management to email forwarding of tweets to some API access improvements. There may be some changes users don't like, as well.

All we can say for now, having just used it for a little while, is that the most powerful Twitter interface available is not slowing down - it just keeps getting better.

If you'd like to befriend the ReadWriteWeb staff on Twitter here are our accounts - we'd love to meet you too!

Recently, FriendDeck developer Paul Kinlan released an Adobe AIR application of his FriendFeed tracking tool. Although still rough around the edges, this app has potential to become a viable alternative interface to FriendFeed for the service's heaviest users.

One of the best features of the new AIR application is how it syncs with the online version of FriendDeck. That means whatever changes you make within FriendDeck on the web show up in the desktop application and vice versa.(Side note: how we wish TweetDeck did this!)

But let's be clear. The Adobe AIR version of FriendDeck still needs a lot of work. The slider bars are hard to see, the columns can't be moved around, "un-like" didn't work in the first version we tested, pictures don't show along with posts, and performing searches requires the use of specific query syntax, like "friends:username." That last bit practically requires you to use a cheat sheet when building your columns. (For search query syntax, see the list provided here.)

Yet despite these problems - all of which are being addressed according to the developer - I still can't get enough of FriendDeck. Why? It's simple: FriendDeck gives me an eagle-eye view of the topics I care about on FriendFeed. Using the app, I can see a lot more information with a glance than when I use the FriendFeed web site itself.

Use FriendDeck to Follow Your Lists, Rooms, and Searches 

There are a couple of ways you can use FriendDeck. For me, a compulsion to organize things into groups has led to the creation of over 30 lists for tracking specific topical areas outside of my "home" feed. I don't check each list daily, but it's nice to have them there. I doubt that anyone else has embarked on such madness, but even if you have only a few lists, like "Favorites" or "Personal", you can add them to the FriendDeck application by typing in "list:list_name" (where, obviously, "list_name" is the name of your list).

Similarly, if you're less inclined to use lists and more inclined to track items by keyword, you can instead just type in the word or words you want to track in the search box. For rooms, you would just type "room:room_name."

Use FriendDeck as a More Advanced Feed Reader

Another great way to use FriendDeck has to do with one of the biggest secrets surrounding FriendFeed itself: you don't have to participate to use the service. Although community members will tell you this goes against what FriendFeed is all about, it's true. If you're the kind of person who could care less about "liking" items or leaving comments on the latest internet meme, you can alternately use FriendFeed as an aggregator on topics you want to track, no participation required. Instead, FriendFeed can simply become the framework you use to build the feed reader of the future: an aggregator which lets you follow much more than RSS feeds alone.

For example, take any subject about which you're passionate. You could build a private FriendFeed room that you fill with blogs, news sites, Twitter searches, Google searches, well-known Twitter users who post on this subject, and more. Within one interface, you can track it all. This is a million times better than just following blogs in an RSS reader or just tracking Twitter posts using Twitter's search engine because you're not limited to RSS alone.

You can share these rooms with others either by making them public or by inviting select users - like your colleagues - to join. Alternately, you can keep them completely private and only for your personal use.

You can then add these personalized rooms into FriendDeck by typing in "room:room_name" and soon you'll have one single application that tracks everything you care about on the internet - from blogs posts to tweets and so much more. And it's all in one window.

Too Complicated?

In explaining how FriendDeck works, it occurs to us that it may sound a bit complicated for the average user. That may be true, but then again, FriendFeed itself is an application that requires a lot of explanation, too. It's also quite possible that FriendFeed and FriendDeck will never cross over into "regular user" territory. That's OK, though. For anyone who has learned how to use FriendFeed - really use FriendFeed - applications like FriendDeck will hold appeal, despite their complications.

It's still far too early to call FriendDeck a complete success or failure, but it's not too early to use it. If you're geeky enough to learn its quirks, you may find the FriendFeed desktop application you've been waiting for. If not, then feel free to return to your browser.

New on 12seconds.tv

Soon after their successful public launch, 12seconds.tv implemented a host of new goodies to make the service more appealing for its users. The most popular new feature is the daily challenge. The service asks users to respond to a particular challenge of the day. A new challenge appears everyday. While it's fun to participate in the challenges, users can also win rewards for their participation.

API Launch

Today the service is launching the first version of their API. To give users and developers a taste of what can be done, 12seconds.tv has partnered with a great Twitter client known as TweetDeck, another video-blogging service known as Phreadz, and micro-review site Blippr. Now you can keep up with your friend's 12seconds videos right from TweetDeck and leave your own micro video comment on Blippr reviews.

It's a Micro-world Today Folks!

The latest additions to 12seconds.tv's offerings should be well received by users and fans of the service. Quite frankly, I'm more than excited to be able to use 12seconds.tv from TweetDeck. Let us know what you think about the latest API offerings from 12seconds.tv in our comments section.