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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.

For a service that simply takes 140 characters of input and then blasts them out in front of potentially hundreds of thousands of readers at a time, there has been a lot of work by people and businesses to figure out the best way to re-interpret and re-group Twitter posts in to meaningful categories, trends and threads.

Two common ways that have developed are link tracking and meme tracking. In the first case, it's fairly simple - just take all the URLs posted on Twitter, uncompress them if necessary, add up the uniques, and sort them by popularity. But today we are going to focus on the latter case, services that look for a specific keyword, topic, or hashtag (all falling under the fuzzy category of meme or viral idea) and cluster related tweets together.

Lately, we have seen a number of interesting attempts to combine various social networks and other social media services into one application. EventBox is a good example of this. It's an interesting Mac-only application that combines Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Reddit, Instapaper, and Google Reader into a sleek desktop application. From within the application, you can easily check and update your Twitter and Facebook streams, read your feeds, or check up on the most recent stories on Reddit. You can also upload photos to both Flickr and Facebook.

OneRiot, a relatively new real-time search engine, launched a new Twitter search engine this morning that takes a very different approach to Twitter search from similar ventures we have seen lately. Instead of surfacing specific tweets, OneRiot focuses on shared links instead of just doing a keyword search on Twitter. While Twitter's own search, for example, will show you the conversation around the leaked copy of Wolverine, OneRiot will actually find the latest shared links about this topic on Twitter.

Twitter announced today that it has decided to hold back on its planned redesign, which would have integrated Twitter Search at the top of its users' homepages. Instead, Twitter is now testing a new version of its integrated search feature, which will surface the search on the side on the right sidebar. The new search feature will also automatically load search results on the same page, and Twitter will give users the option to create persistent searches.

Yahoo released today a new application that brings Twitter's real-time search engine to the desktop. The Adobe AIR application allows users to create persistent real-time Twitter searches that can be grouped together in Sideline's tabbed interface. The application is meant to be a showcase for using Yahoo's UI Library on top of Adobe AIR, but it is also a good real-time search client for Twitter in its own right, with a number of interesting advanced search features.