Impressive Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce application

Yesterday Scott posted a link on Twitter to a website called HelloTxt. I had seen the service before but I decided, on visiting the site again, to register an account and try the service out.

HelloTxt is a simple service that allows you to post a message directly to Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Facebook and Plaxo at the same time. Now one has to ask why anyone would need this functionality but I find myself in a situation where I have an account with all of these sites and posting messages to each one individually is not only a mission but also not happening.

Over time Twitter has become my medium of choice simply because it has the highest adoption rate in South Africa for micro-blogging platforms. Personally I prefer Pownce over all these services but there are almost no people using the service that I know.

The HelloTxt service works brilliantly and does what it claims to however the down side to it is that you can only post messages from the HelloTxt website. This is a major issue for me as I prefer to post messages via Instant Messaging and after doing some research I found that there is no way to integrate this service into an IM client.

In a random set of events I stumbled upon Twhirl, the micro-blogging application to rule them all. Twhirl is primarily a Twitter application that allows you to post to the site and the latest version also includes integration with Jaiku and Pownce.

The Twhirl desktop application uses Adobe’s Integrated Runtime (AIR) that enables a cross-platform experience that is gaining big traction with developers and users. One AIR application I use religiously is the Google Analytics Reporting Suite and I’m sure there are many more cool applications out there.

Twhirl features multiple Twitter accounts and once you’ve added one you’re presented with a super-cool interface with full Twitter functionality including; replies, direct messages, favourites and re-tweeting.

By clicking on the settings icon on your Twitter window you can change various settings including adding your usernames for Jaiku and Pownce.

What is really smart about this integration is that replies to Twitter users (i.e. @username) are not posted to either Pownce or Jaiku. As a user of all three services I quickly became aware that replying to someone with the @ symbol is a unique Twitter way of doing things and Pownce evangelists hate it when you try and reply to them in this fashion. This is sure to keep your Pownce buddies happy.

I’m loving Twhirl and I’ve finally found a micro-blogging application that works the way I want it to.