Twitter Clients: Final Evaluation

It has almost been two weeks since I finished my Twitter client experiment. Although I originally said that I would provide a conclusion on which client was best for who the day after I published my final client review, I have – obviously – made some changes. This is mainly due to the fact that it had been four weeks since I started the experiment and, if I’m honest, I had forgotten the details of which client had which features and what I liked and disliked about them. So, over the past few days I have gone back over the clients and used them all for a day each and, in addition, I returned to the twitter.com experience so that I could provide a solid, reasoned comparison. If you work that out – that is one week and four days – which brings me up to today.

What I have done it tried my best to logically think of what clients where good at certain tasks that are available through twitter.com and tried my best to analyse which clients offer an equally good experience – or a better experience if applicable. What I have been able to discover is that some of the clients that I had not preferred over others at the initial review are in fact more effective than I thought – and vice versa, some clients that I thought were amazing were, in fact, lacking some functionality that was offered elsewhere.

Moving on then, to my final review of all of the clients:

First I will rate the clients in order of my personal preference:

1. DestroyTwitter 2
2. TweetDeck
3. Echofon
4. MetroTwit

I will also rate them based on the experience an average consumer used to using twitter.com:

1. TweetDeck
2. Echofon
3. DestroyTwitter 2
4. MetroTwit

Overall conclusion concerning tech-savvy people:

Personally I feel that DestroyTwitter 2 offers the best experience for us technology enthusiasts because, not only does it offer good functionality and efficient usability once you have become familiar with the interface – but it also offers the widest range of settings of all the clients – which allows the user to make themselves completely comfortable. TweetDeck came second for me simply because it was so fluently integrated with twitter.com – leading to an impressively natural experience and it would have come first if only it offered more settings and customisability – but it doesn’t, and that is disappointing. I was impressed with Echofon, but at the same time it wasn’t as good as I would have liked. It delivered everything that it had too, with no fuss. But it offered nothing else, no extra features to make my experience better; it was a Twitter client at the lowest level of ingenuity. However, I must say that it is a new app that only recently came out of the beta stage – so maybe more could come in the future. MetroTwit was not good enough for me, yeah it looks awesome. But it was slow, had intruding adverts and lacked the raw functionality that needs to be offered to have a good experience, in my opinion. You are better off with twitter.com than MetroTwit in my honest opinion.

Overall conclusion concerning the average consumer:

TweetDeck is a great starting point, offering an integrated experience with twitter.com, meaning that anyone who has used twitter.com for years can – with a level of painlessness and ease – switch over and rely on TweetDeck for 70%-90% of their Twitter activity on the desktop. Echofon is also good because the average consumer will not mind ads – most people don’t mind ads, anyway – and they won’t need anything more than what twitter.com provides them. Plus it is integrated with the OS (whether you are on Windows or OS X) so the layout of key functions is familiar to most people and will be fairly painless to use for the majority of their Twitter activities. DestroyTwitter 2, I feel, could be too complicated for your average Joe, with its vast array of settings I think that average people could easily become overwhelmed by the client and simply uninstall and return to twitter.com. MetroTwit is again, the worst option for the same reasons – although its downfalls would be less significant towards average consumers – but I still think that twitter.com is a better alternative for now.

So, there you have it, my thoughts on a variety of clients – for two different audiences.

Also, as I final note – I have, as a result of this experiment, been partially converted to using a client for my Twitter experience and that client is DestroyTwitter 2. However, I do use it in combination with twitter.com for viewing photos, and reading all of the tweets that came in overnight while I was sleeping as I find the layout easier to fathom when reading a large number of tweets – especially with conversations. I would say that my Twitter experience is now roughly 70% (DestroyTwitter 2); 25% (Twitter.com); and 5% (Twitter app for Android).

I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed reading this series of articles as much as I have enjoyed producing them. Please leave a comment on your thoughts on my conclusion – and if you also have experience with these clients and your preference rating is different, leave a comment and let the world know your opinion – it’s free!

If there are any more clients you would like to recommend, please leave a comment – I may consider extending this experiment at a later date.

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