Twhirl Review

Twhirl is an application that allows you to monitor and post to Twitter with ease. It also allow you to post to Pownce and Jaiku. It runs on the Adobe Air runtime, and works with Mac OS X (both Intel and PPC), and Windows. No Linux yet, but according to the Adobe Air FAQ, a Linux version of Adobe Air will be available in the second half of 2008.

Twhirl comes with various skins, so there's probably something there for everyone. With Twhirl you can view the Timeline, just see replies (those you've made and those made to you), an archive of your previous tweets, and direct messages. It also lists your friends, and your followers, lets you lookup people by screenname, and allows you to search the public timeline for specific terms. When twhirl is not the active window, it becomes semi-transparent (using alpha transparency) and looks very nice. You can shut this off, of course, to save resources.

While I like this program, I have 2 beefs with it. First, you can't just watch the public timeline, which I like to do from time to time. You're stuck with just searching it. Secondly, it consumes system resources on my machine way out of proportion to the program's functionality. I think it's likely that Adobe Air is the beast that sucks up the resources. (And I believe this is true because other Air apps on my system do the same exact thing). The list of system requirements specifies 512 mb of ram, but I have 1 gig of ram and still notice lag in other software as soon as Twhirl is up and running. I'd be interested in hearing if other people have this issue, or if it's specific to my machine's configuration.

So, would I recommend it? Well, I've been using it everyday since I installed it. It makes monitoring twitter easy. I like that you can also post to Pownce and Jaiku (though you can't monitor those timelines). But I wouldn't run this on a system without at least one gig of ram. If you're not a twitter nut, the web interface is probably fine. But if you like to monitor Twitter often, a program like Twhirl is a necessity. If they added the ability to watch Pownce and Jaiku at the same time (in a seperate window, or even the same one will color coding), it would be a killer app for me.