7 of the Best Free Linux Twitter Clients

Micro-blogging is all the rage these days. It is a webservice which allows the subscriber to send short text updates or micromedia such as photos or audio clips and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. Subscribers can read microblog posts online or request that updates be delivered in real time to their desktop as an instant message or sent to a mobile device as an SMS text message.

With micro-blogging, posts are brief (typically 140 – 200 characters) and can be written or received with a variety of computing devices.

Twitter is a popular social networking utility which has gained enormous popularity as a micro-blogging tool, with millions using the service across the globe. Indeed, Twitter is pretty much constantly in the news. It enables friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Registered users can post messages (known as Tweets) via a Web interface. However, many users prefer to use desktop applications that offer more functionality and are totally removed from the web browser. Using a desktop application also means that subscribers do not have to keep refreshing the web browser's page. Having a desktop client polling for updates is very handy.

To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 7 Twitter clients which make micro-blogging easier. Three of the clients featured here (TweetDeck, twhirl, and Spaz) use Adobe's Air application framework to provide cross-platform compatibility. Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is a cross-platform runtime environment for building rich Internet applications using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, or Ajax, that can be deployed as a desktop application.

So, let's explore the 7 Twitter clients at hand. For each application we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, screenshots, together with links to relevant resources and reviews. Start tweeting today!

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Last Updated Saturday, April 13 2013 @ 05:07 AM EDT