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.

With the addition of Identi.ca, Twhirl now supports for four of the most important social streaming apps: Twitter, FriendFeed, Seesmic, and Identi.ca. These apps are different than traditional social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo, etc., because they are, for the most part, about immediate interactions. Seeing tweets, "dents," shared social streams on FriendFeed, and even updates of your friends' recorded videos (perhaps the slowest stream of the bunch) is a much different user experience than when we interact with the large application-filled social networking platforms. Instead, the new social network is always on.

That "always on" feature is exactly why social media enthusiasts are dealing with "information overload" issues. Because we're somewhat addicted to these types of interactions, we're hesitant to log off for fear of "missing something." However, for the regular user, always on social networking doesn't have to be a source of stress - it just means that when you go online, socializing with others just becomes part of the overall experience of being on the internet. For today's digital natives this extra information stream isn't worrisome, as uber-multitaksers themselves, they're more adept at dealing with "noise," so this real-time social web is just another channel from them to tune in to.

Twhirl To Get New UI

As for Twhirl, by combining access to these four always-on networks, they're establishing themselves as the go-to application for all your real-time social networking needs. And although you might feel a bit overwhelmed at the moment - especially considering each app opens a separate window - it won't be that way forever.

Johann Romefort, CTO at Seesmic, and Marco Kaiser, Twhirl's creator, have both confirmed some big changes to the Twhirl UI. Specifically, they've said that their goal is to have all accounts in one window. This update will include a "(kind of) tabbed interface," says Marco.

That makes the most sense since FriendFeed is indeed "richer" as Johann says, which means that it should get its own tab. However, he tells me that Twitter and Identi.ca's streams will be combined into one stream. How much longer will you have to wait to see what these changes look like? The ETA on this update is before the end of the summer (which includes September, says Marco).

Conclusion

Once these streams because accessible from only one window, the value of Twhirl will skyrocket. Some people have trouble using Twhirl now because of the numerous windows required, so they simply use it for their Twitter needs. But with everything easily accessible from tabs, Twhirl will easily be the real-time Twitter client of choice, especially when you also take into account its other excellent features like built-in search (Twitter Search, formerly Summize), URL-shortening services, and direct posting of photos, to name a few. Killer app? Yes definitely....Unless you just don't care about the social web...in which case, maybe I can just direct you here.]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twhirl_adds_identica_becomes_killer_app_yes_really.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twhirl_adds_identica_becomes_killer_app_yes_really.php Products Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:25:00 -0800 Sarah Perez Here are the highlights from the week's stories on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side, we analyzed the increasing mainstreaming of social news site digg; and we reviewed some awesome new web apps (Grooveshark, SixApart's BlogIt, Twhirl, Alert Thingy, and others). On web trends, there was a meme this week that declared the Mobile Web dead - we begged to differ. We also looked into two 'real world' issues for Web tech this week - the impact of social media on "real people"; and real world data portability.

Web Apps

The Decline and Fall of Tech on Digg

If you're a fan of digg, you've probably been noticing that tech stories are becoming less and less a feature of the social news site. The reason? Digg is attempting to attract a large mainstream user base. Just how low has tech sunk in digg? We have new data that shows that the number of frontpage tech stories is halving every year on digg.

Is it time to accept that Digg is no longer an equivalent to Slashdot, and that it is as much a mainstream news site as say BusinessWeek or People magazine?

SixApart's BlogIt Could Be the Start of Something Big

SixApart launched BlogIt by TypePad this week, a Facebook app that lets you post to SixApart blogs and other blogging software like WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr, to your Facebook Newsfeed and to Twitter all from one place. It's the kind of app that makes Facebook all the closer to being a one stop social media experience.

The service could be more fully developed but it's certainly in the lead compared to other services aiming to do the same thing. A close look at the details leads us to believe that this could be a much bigger move than it might seem to be. This post lists a few reasons why we believe it's so interesting.

Grooveshark Launches Awesome Streaming Music Service

Gainesville, Florida-based Grooveshark, a music sharing startup that we first profiled in August, this week launched their latest product: Grooveshark Lite. Lite is a slick, flash-based streaming music service that takes Grooveshark's huge catalog of uploaded music and makes it available to stream, no registration required. Grooveshark Lite is fast, easy to use, and free.

When we reviewed Grooveshark last August, we called it "one part Last.fm, one part Limewire, and one part iTunes store." With the addition of Grooveshark Lite, the service is now also one part Pandora.

Battle of the AIR Apps: Twhirl vs. Alert Thingy

The battle between the two most popular AIR apps has begun. Earlier this week FriendFeed AIR app Alert Thingy, having only just launched on April 13th, was already getting an update - this one to include Twitter support via a built-in "Tweet" button. Not to be outdone, Twhirl wasted no time in providing an update of their own, seemingly crafting their updated version overnight. Now Twhirl includes FriendFeed support and Alert Thingy does Twitter, but are either of them really giving users what they want?

SEE MORE WEB APPS COVERAGE IN OUR WEB APPS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Is the Mobile Web Dead? Some Mobile Entrepreneurs Say Yes

Former Yahoo! Mobile evangelist turned startup entrepreneur Russell Beattie announced this week that he's calling it quits for his company Mowser, because the market for mobile browsing is taking a fast turn for the worse. "The mobile traffic just isn't there," Beattie says, "It's not there now, and it won't be."

Beattie's announcement comes just two months after mobile blogger and consultant Michael Mace wrote a much discussed post titled Mobile Applications, RIP. "The business of making native apps for mobile devices is dying, crushed by a fragmented market and restrictive business practices," Mace wrote.

Be sure to check the comments of this post, there were some excellent counterpoints made on both sides of the argument.

Real People Don't Have Time for Social Media

Let's be honest here: we're all a bunch of social media addicts. We're junkies. Whether it's a new Twitter app, a new Facebook feature, or a new social anything service, we're all over it. But we may not be the norm. The truth is, being involved in social media takes time, something that most people don't have a lot of. So how can regular folk get involved with social media? And how much time does it really take?

Where's Our Real World Data Portability?

In a recent Slashdot thread, someone sought advice on an electronic cash register set up that would output sales data in an open format. While the asker was looking for information from the point of view of a shop owner, it got us thinking about data portability. There's been a lot of clamor over the past few months about who owns attention data and a major online movement has started with the aim of pushing companies into granting access to that data to the users who create it. But what about offline attention data? Should we demand access to that as well?

13 Seed Funding Options For Entrepreneurs

One of the most difficult parts of starting a startup for any entrepreneur is finding that small bit of seed capital to get things going. As evidenced by small seed funds like Y Combinator, a little can go a long way for startup entrepreneurs, but raising that chunk of change to get started can be tricky. Luckily, there are a number of different roads you can take to get from concept to Series A. This post lists 13 seed funding options for startup entrepreneurs.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

However, we have to question whether either app is delivering users what they really want or if they are both just caught up in one-upping each other on features.

Yesterday's announcement of Alert Thingy's "Twitter support," for example, simply added a button that allowed you to tweet from the app, but the ability to reply via Twitter was still not present.

Meanwhile, today's Twhirl update - so new that it doesn't even come via the automatic update feature - introduces FriendFeed support, which displays in a separate window, essentially making it feel like you're running two applications anyway.

What neither app does is include all the features people want - a combined interface with the optional ability to pop-out into separate windows, replies via Twitter, and, of course, the duplication of FriendFeed's feature set in AIR form, such as the ability to do things like push "likes" to the top and display additional comments within the app.

Despite the rapid inclusion of new features and overnight updates, it appears that instead of pleasing fans, some people are actually becoming somewhat concerned. Take, for example, the comments on FriendFeed surrounding the update (from here and here):

• "I share your concerns about horses for courses and the fact that these tools may split and having done one thing very well, may end up doing many things poorly" - Andy C
• "With the latest reverse development, now it's chaos!" - Charlie Anzman
• "Urgh, 0.7.9 is really buggy. I'm going back to the current stable version." - Voyagerfan5761
• "AlertThingy and Twhirl are both driving me batty."  - Carla Thompson
• "Two windows definitely not working for me...needs consolidation and twitter posting ability. ...via twhirl" - Adam Deyong
• "o great, now i've got two windows showing the same twitters... ...via twhirl" - Samuel Bostock
• "Why two windows? Can't they integrate to one UI? ...via twhirl" - Wayne Schulz

While it's entirely possible that future releases of one or both of the clients will do away with the inconveniences that are apparent now, we wonder if users would not be better served by slower to appear, major releases that include all the requested features instead of having to deal with the hassle of incremental, unfulfilling updates on an extremely fast-paced schedule.

Comcast is Watching You

The trend of companies being tuned in to what's being said on the web may not have begun with Comcast, but even if they were not the first, they are the company receiving the most attention around their activities as of late.

Given the nature of their business as an internet provider (as well as some of their questionable practices - like bittorrent throttling), they were sure to attract the attention of the internet-connected folks who blog, socialize, and use Twitter.

One of the more notable examples of Comcast in the Twittersphere was their response to Michael Arrington's internet outage, something that he railed about on Twitter after Comcast support failed to resolve his issue - a method that worked rather well.

Even though Arrington's Comcast experience gathered a lot of attention, a Comcast rep notes here that this practice is something the company has been doing for going on six months now and that most people find the experience a positive way to interact with the company.

Other Customer Support Experiences on Twitter

Comcast is certainly not the only company using Twitter for customer service. Let's run down some of the other major players gaining attention for their Twitter-savvy:

Another big name on Twitter today is Dell Computers. The company actually has several customer service people on Twitter who find complaints and address them. Unlike Comcast, though, their Twitter activity hasn't received a large amount of attention, outside of marketers and social media pundits. (Perhaps because there are fewer complaints?)

Then there is Twhirl, a somewhat obvious example of a company that would use the medium as they are makers of the popular Adobe AIR Twitter client. For instance, Mack Collier posts about his experiences with Twhirl's support via Twitter on his blog:

Case in point, a few months ago I started using the Twitter client Twhirl.  One day I tried to sign-onto Twitter with Twhirl, and Twhirl said it didn't recognize my password, and wouldn't let me sign-on.  Frustrated, I posted on Twitter that I couldn't get Twhirl to work, and that I was going to download and try Snitter (a competing service to Twhirl), instead.  Almost instantly, someone from Twhirl contacted me via Twitter, and walked me through the process to get Twhirl working for me again.  I have used Twhirl ever since.

Southwest Airlines is also heavily involved in the Twitter community, using the service to inform their customers know about deals among other things. Jackie Huba reports getting a tweet from them explaining that if she booked a ticket using PayPal, I'd get $50 back in PayPal credit.

Southwest is also known to tweet press happenings and pointers to blog posts, while also staying tuned into conversations about their brand. David Armano had recently flown Southwest Airlines and found the airport check-in a two-button breeze, something which he mentioned on Twitter. He received a "thank you" from the airline a few hours later. How nice!

Blogger Cyndy Aleo-Carreira ( @fourlittlebees ) said she had received support from Socialthing! !, Twhirl , and Toluu developer CalebEston via Twitter. When I spoke to her about her experiences, she describes a recent example when she had an issue with Toluu:

I got my invite and went to log in. Whenever I can, I use my OpenID because I'm tired of entering passwords in Passpack. However, OpenID failed. I have a low threshold for fails of that variety, so I Tweeted that it was a bad first impression. Within about two seconds, I had a response from @calebelston asking me what issue I had, could I describe it, etc. Best part is that I sent him the info, as well as the issues I was having importing my complete OPML file to Toluu, and then forgot about it. You know how it gets when you are trying 85 apps at a time. Then I get an email from him: Hey, we've been working on this issue. Would you be willing to try it again and see if it works? I was floored that he remembered to come back and contact me.

She also detailed her issue with Socialthing on her blog, saying:

They must have been monitoring Twitter, because my short little blip about the error received an immediate reply asking for a screenshot, and a blog post about the issue went live shortly after. Socialthing was back up and running quickly.

All Companies Should Get on Twitter!

Social news up-and-comer, Mixx, is another company monitoring tweets. Blogger Helen Thompson had some trouble with the service and tweeted a negative comment on Twitter. She explains what happened:

Next thing I knew, Mixx had added me on Twitter. This led me to joke that perhaps I could invoke Johnny Depp and get the same response. Sadly, this wasn’t the case, but the good folks at Mixx patiently sidestepped the joke and asked what hiccup I had run across. I wasn’t able to reproduce the problem...However, I was very impressed: within a few minutes of making a complaint about a technology, the technology folks approached me with “Hey, I see you had trouble with our platform. What can we do to make it better? OMG if VW had done this with me when my Jetta was made of fail, I might not be driving a Toyota today!

That last bit is worth a second look - companies could potentially lose customers when they appear to not care about your issues. Without knowing what her Jetta issues were, it's hard to say whether VW was ever given a chance to address them, but it's still interesting to think that even a frustrated customer like her could have been turned around had someone responded to her problems.

Maybe car salesmen should keep Twitter accounts? Wouldn't that be something! What if every business you interacted with had a Twitter address? You wouldn't have to follow them per se, and be inundated with marketing drivel (unless of course, you wanted to), but if you ever tweeted a problem, they would be right there to help.

It could be that, at some point, the companies that aren't on Twitter will begin falling behind in customer satisfaction without even knowing why...and losing customers in the process. Maybe not a car manufacturer as big as VW...as least not yet...but here on the web, these Twitter conversations could be the "make or break" point for new internet startups.

... But Don't Forget Traditional Customer Service

Social media blogger, Corvida of SheGeeks, frustrated by an auto-reply email message that MyBlogLog sent in response to her support request, twittered her frustration and received a response from the company only 10 minutes later.

SheGeeks Tweets

This particular incident, though, points to a larger issue - as is often the case with Comcast issues, people are venting on Twitter as a last resort after the company failed to deliver quality support via more traditional channels.

While it's nice to know that Twitter is available as a way of getting a company's attention, all methods of customer service and support should be treated with the same consideration.

By pouncing on the Twitter complaints while ignoring the emails, one has to wonder if the company is, in fact, more concerned with reputation than they are with service.

For Companies: How To Track Tweets

A Salesforce community manager, Kingsley Joseph, explained how he monitors tweets so quickly - he uses a Yahoo Pipe that tracks Salesforce's online word of mouth. He even coded a generic pipe which people can use to track mentions of their company. Here's the pipe.

Via the Church of the Customer blog, here's how to use the pipe:

In the search field, fill out the terms you want to track. For example, Salesforce Ideas could use: "salesforce+ideas", ideaexchange, ideastorm, dellideastorm, mystarbucksidea. Usually the second field (URL fragment to ignore) should be .yourdomain.com . This is to prevent posts made in the your own blog/community from showing up. The dot before the domain is important. The first time you run the search, Yahoo might return an empty list. To force it to go fetch feeds, click "More Options" and then click "Get as RSS". You can then hit back and re-run the pipe successfully. Titles are de-duplicated and sorting is reverse chronological. Multiple search terms can be used and the matched term will be prefixed to the title of the post.

Salesforce's Yahoo Pipes Tool

Other methods for tweet tracking can involve using a service like Tweet Scan, which performs real-time monitoring of Twitter. Take a look at a Tweet Scan for keyword "Starbucks," for example, and see what we can learn:

• Rom wants to know about the new Pike Place blend
• Winterheart is drinking Italian Roast.
• Stlplace thinks Starbucks should be worried because the McCafe iced latte not too bad and it's cheaper ($2.79 for medium size, no extra for syrup)
• RonHubbard is also digging the new Pike Place blend.
• tdcool is listening to Starbucks' Ambient Luxe album and thinks it's quite relaxing music

And this was just a cursory look.

Starbucks Tweets

But Tweet Scan isn't the only way to search Twitter. Quotably also does Twitter searches where conversations can be followed in a threaded fashion. Matt Dickman rounds up even more services that may be of use.

For more advice, Charlie O'Donnell good job listing ways a company can use Twitter.

And for companies needing even more help, companies like Radian6 are now offering social media analysis and monitoring solutions for PR and advertising professionals.

For Customers: How to Get Support

In addition to the companies mentioned above, several businesses have "community managers" active on Twitter. These reps act as evangelists, customer service reps, and public faces for the company the represent. Blogger Mario Sundar posted a list of the community managers he found on Twitter (which I edited to remove the people whose Twitter username he couldn't find):

1. Will Pate: Community Evangelist - ConceptShare (@willpate)
2. Mario Sundar: Community Evangelist - Linkedin (@mariosundar)
3. Eric Skiff: Community Evangelist - Clipmarks (@ericskiff)
4. Marilyn Pratt: Community Evangelist - SAP Labs (@marilynpratt)
5. Brett Meyers: Community Evangelist - Zloop (@brettmeyers)
6. Ryan Knight: Community Manager - Yahoo (@yank)
7. Jennifer Puckett : Community Manager - Disney (?)
8. Jim Lynch: Community Manager - Ziff Davis (@jwlynch)
9. Jake McKee: Community Guy - Formerly Lego (@jakemckee)
10. William Azaroff: Community Engagement - VanCity (@wazaroff)
11. Carole McManus: Community Specialist, formerly Yahoo 360 (@puttopal)
12. Asa Dotzler: Catastrophist, Mozilla (@asadotzler) 
13. Anand Iyer: Developer Evangelist - Microsoft (@anandiyer)
14. Damon Billian: Director of Customer Evangelism - Mint (@dbillian)
15. Domini Perri: Community Manager, Utterz - (@domjp)
16. Daniel Ha: Disqus (@danielha)

Dominic Perri, the Community Manager over at Utterz, introduced himself in that post's comments, too. (@domjp)

Let's also add Flock (@Flocker) whose community manager is @evanhamilton, Lookery (@Lookery), and Toluu (@calebelston).

I'm sure this list is woefully incomplete, but, despite the numerous Twitter apps, no unified resource of this information is currently available. We encourage companies with a support rep or community manager on Twitter to respond in the comments on this post with your information so our readers can beginning building their own personal Twitter service directories.

And if you've received customer service via Twitter, please feel free to share your stories here.

Web Products

How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients

Last November we put up a guide to the most popular Twitter clients. For that post we looked at a random sample of 717 tweets from a handful of heavy Twitter users and identified 19 different ways people interacted with the service. Twitter has one of the fastest growing application ecosystems of any web service outside of Facebook. For this post, we looked at 37,248 tweets and found 142 different ways in which people interact with the Twitter service. Some of the results, which we presented in this post, were rather surprising.

Seesmic + Twhirl is a Vision of the Web's Future

Loic Le Meur's video chat service Seesmic announced this week that it has acquired leading 3rd party Twitter client Twhirl. Seesmic is still in closed Alpha status right now - though we have invites if you'd like them: email marshall@readwriteweb.com with the word Seesmic in the subject line and we'll send you one.

How could the acquisition of an app that runs entirely on the Twitter API, by another service that isn't even publicly available yet be a big deal? Let us count the ways...

Chumby Gets $12.5M...Here's Why It's Taking Off

Chumby Industries, makers of the Wi-Fi video and widget displaying device, the Chumby, have just announced $12.5 million in Series B funding today. The company notes that this new financing is going to be used to "accelerate growth of the company, and expand and broaden the Chumby Network to other screen-based Internet connected devices." How did this little gadget get so popular? And why would you want one? Read on to find out.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Flickr's New Friend Finder: Data Portability or Privacy Violation?

This week Yahoo! owned photo sharing site Flickr launched a new feature - the ability to search your Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail contacts list for people on Flickr so you can add them as contacts. Many services let you do that, but almost all of them require you to give up the user name and password for your email. Flickr did it right and it was exciting, for us at least. GMail users are taken to a GMail page, where GMail asks for their usernames and passwords - then asked if Flickr should be given one time access or ongoing access. That's great. We've been calling on applications to use best practices and emerging protocols to access user data without asking for passwords for some time. The risks are too great, otherwise.

Some Flickr users, though, are really upset. They don't want anyone who has sent them an email to be able to easily find their photos on Flickr. What some people call Data Portability, others call a privacy violation.

MySpace Becoming a Portal to Artists' Own Networks

When MySpace first launched, one of its main draws was the music offered by independent artists on the site, something which generated a strong following among new musicians and their friends. These young artists were using the platform as a way to get their name out there, share their tunes, and attract a fan base.

Related: Live and in concert: Why MySpace music has a chance against iTunes (last100) and MySpace Music Store: Where's the Long Tail? (RWW)

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

April Fools Highlights

Top 10 Places to Get Fooled on April 1st

Observing April Fools Day has become a time-honored tradition for many web companies. Much like changing your logo to celebrate holidays, pulling a fast one on your users on April 1st is something that many web services and applications have really taken to heart. But keeping creative year-after-year is tough, and some companies have learned how to consistently deliver.

Exclusive: Sneak Peak at Google DreamAds!

ReadWriteWeb has discovered the existence of a stealth Google project, called DreamAds. It is a very ambitious project, topping even the wireless balloons which Google is also looking into. Essentially DreamAds is Google's latest plan to extend AdSense - this time into our dreams. It may sound far-fetched, but an inside source at Google told us that it is very possible thanks to the latest in cheap magnetic resonance scanning and mind-reading techniques developed at Stanford University. Our source also revealed the thinking behind DreamAds: Google is aiming to become the first company to monetize a totally wasted period of time in human life: sleep, which takes up almost 1/3 of our lives.

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

We used the Twitter API to monitor the public feed and capture data on 37,248 tweets over a 24 hour period. We had usable data after about 2 hours, but wanted to let the program run overnight to remove any geographic biases due to timezones. It is interesting to note, though, that the top ten results basically didn't change after the first couple of hours -- though a couple of services swapped positions. That suggests that for the most part, people probably interact with Twitter in the same methods on either end of the globe.

Because we ran our script on a shared host, we limited our script to running at 60 second intervals and grabbed the 20 tweets listed in the public feed every 60 seconds. Since there many have been more than 20 tweets each minute we probably missed a handful of them (if there were less than 20, we only grabbed the new ones). Even so, our 37k is enough data to draw conclusions from.

The script that we used to do this was created for us by developer Kelli Shaver, who also compiled the data for the PDF report linked to later in this post.

The Results

Let's get right down to it. One trend that carried over from our November sampling, was that the web continues to be the #1 way in which people post to Twitter. It accounted for 56% of all tweets that we recorded. IM and txt (SMS message), which were also popular in November, remained popular, accounting for 8% and 5% of all tweets respectively.

But that's where the similarities end. Twitterific, which once ruled Twitter alone as the most popular 3rd party client, suddenly has company at the top. Twhirl now serves slightly more tweets than Twitterific, though both account for about 7% of the total. Snitter, which we found served 4% of tweets last November, has fallen out of favor and is now just the 15th most popular method of interacting with the service; it accounts for less than 1% of the tweets we recorded.

Below is the a list of the top 20 ways we saw people tweet and a graph showing the Twittersphere share of the top 10 post methods:

1. Web 56% (20734)
2. IM 8% (2975)
3. Twhirl 7% (2754)
4. Twitterrific 7% (2462)
5. TXT 5% (1683)
6. Twit 3% (1182)
7. TwitterFox 2% (1114)
8. movatwitter 2% (718)
9. P3:PeraPeraPrv 1% (459)
10. Netvibes 1% (266)
11. TwitBin 1% (260)
12. Twitter Tools 1% (222)
13. TwitterPod 0% (159)
14. TwitterIrcGateway 0% (152)
15. Snitter 0% (147)
16. BeTwittered 0% (106)
17. Tweetr 0% (95)
18. NatsuLion 0% (84)
19. Facebook 0% (79)
20. PocketTweets 0% (70)

Key Takeaways

Some of the main things we learned from this study:

• Twitter.com is good enough for the majority of Twitter users. Though clearly the API has enriched the service (142 different post services identified in 24 hours! -- and that doesn't include non-client uses of the API such as the polling startups we covered yesterday), the service is still bringing the majority of its users to its site. That potentially bodes well for some type of ad based monetization down the road.
• Twitter users are early adopters (that's not something we learned from this study, but something we already knew anecdotally), and early adopters are also often iPhone users. It's probably important to note that unless you're using an iPhone specific Twitter client like PocketTweets or iTweet from your iPhone, those tweets are counted under "web."
• For all the press that FriendFeed got last week for allowing people to post replies directly to Twitter, it was still 65th on our list and registered barely a fraction of total tweeting activity. Some analysts think FriendFeed is a threat to Twitter's existence, but remember that 56% of users still interact with Twitter on the main site, and Twitter makes up 44% of activity on FriendFeed. So which service is really more reliant on the other?
• There are a ton of Twitter clients out there. We saw 142 different ways to interact with Twitter in just 24 hours of monitoring the site's public feed. That's an amazing amount of activity on their API, and their application ecosystem is growing every day. Clearly, Twitter has struck a nerve with developers and users alike.
• We saw a large number of foreign language clients that we didn't see in November (especially from Asian countries). This is most likely due to that fact that we monitored the public feed this time around, while in November we looked at tweets from the contacts of just a handful of users -- and thus had an unavoidable language bias built in.
• We also saw a growth in posting from non-client outside sources such as Facebook, Netvibes, and yes, FriendFeed.

You can download our raw data (the full list of post methods that we logged) here (PDF).

What else do you think these stats tell us? How do you post to Twitter? Let us know in the comments below.