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Twitter for Mac got a major update today that brings new features and fixes to the client for the first time since debuting with the Mac App Store in January. The original version of Twitter for Mac was a powerful iteration of native Twitter clients and this update brings some tweaks that should greatly improve the user experience.

Foremost among features, it now has multi-window support and a new primary window design that makes it easier to create a tweet. One of the initial complaints of Twitter for Mac was that it had no compose-tweet box in the main window. A new button in the bottom left of the deck fixes that.

ITV, the oldest commercial television network in the UK, just announced that it will use Twitter as a backchannel for its coverage of the FA Cup final between Chelsea and Everton tomorrow afternoon. The ITV Twitter app was built by thruSITES using Twitterfall, and the ITV team will use Audioboo Pro for moderating the Twitter stream. Given how popular Twitter has become in the U.K., this is definitely a smart move by ITV to use it as a backchannel.

While soccer (or football, for our European readers) might not be your thing, it is interesting to see how many TV networks have now made Twitter a part of their daily routine.

As many of us know, the usefulness of Twitter lies in the user's ability to find, refine, and engage with a network. Most of the invalid complaints about the service revolve around signal-to-noise ratios; of course you, Naysayer #583, don't want to know what I ate for breakfast. Neither does anyone else. This is called "noise," and it's what smart Twitter users are trying desperately to avoid.

Everyone raves about Tweetdeck's allowing users to create groups, which nicely sorts much of the information available in a collection of streams from followers. However, there are features beyond groups that could be useful for social noise reduction. Mixero has added filtering and channel creation to the current mix of available Twitter tools with interesting results.

Freely moving from one service to the next is clearly part of the nature of the Internet today. On Twitter, Twhirl was the de-facto standard desktop client just a few short months ago, but now, TweetDeck has taken this position. The last version of TweetDeck, however, had some serious memory leaks, which led a lot of users to look for alternatives. Now, in its latest version, TweetDeck has rectified this problem. In addition, TweetDeck has also  brought support for Facebook messaging to the stable version of its application, as well as a number of smaller updates.

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

If you are looking for a desktop client for Twitter these days, you will most likely be overwhelmed by the amount of choices, but according to TwitStat, the most popular desktop clients right now are TweetDeck and Twhirl, and TweetDeck is the clear choice of Twitter's most active users. This weekend, however, we came across Nambu, a new Mac OSX Twitter client that packs the best features of both TweetDeck and Twhirl into a native application, and which adds a number of very interesting additional features, including threaded conversations, three different views to choose from, and the ability to filter columns by keyword.