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A full review on Twhirl!

By Amarendra Bhushan for CEOWORLD Magazine Updated:December 12, 2008

twhirl is a social software desktop client based on the Adobe AIR platform.

Basically it’s a desktop Twitter on steroids. Includes posting images to TwitPic, cross posting to your Pownce or Jaiku accounts and you can search your tweets using tweetScan or Terraminds.

Once you have entered your login details for Twitter you then get a separate window showing your tweets for that account. The more accounts you add the more windows open up. You also get 9 different view types from the drop down menu, including timeline, your own tweets and tweets from just those you are following.

Some of twhirl’s features:

1 runs on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX
2 connects to multiple Twitter, laconi.ca, Friendfeed and seesmic accounts
3 notifications on new messages
4 shorten long URLs (using snurl, twurl or is.gd)
5 cross-post twitter updates to Pownce and Jaiku
6 post images to TwitPic
7 search tweets using Twitter Search and TweetScan
8 timeline filtering
9 color schemes
10 automatically check for new versions

twhirl started supporting the identi.ca microblogging site with the last official release some weeks ago. Since then, many users have approached us to add generic support for any laconi.ca based site to twhirl, so they could use it with their favorite (or own) laconi.ca microblog. As a Twitter-compatible API is now part of the laconi.ca distribution, this turned out to be straight forward. With Leo Laporte setting up his TWiT Army Canteen, we found a great partner to run a solid beta test of the new feature, and provided a preview version before we officially pushed an official update.

Add a laconi.ca account

Here are the instructions how to add a laconi.ca account to twhirl, taken from our previous post:

1 open the accounts dialog (click on the top left hand twhirl icon in a twhirl window)
2 select “laconi.ca” from the drop-down list at the bottom left hand corner
3 enter your username and the laconi.ca-site’s domain as your screen name. Example: to add the account “twhirl” on the http://army.twit.tv, you would need to enter “twhirl@army.twit.tv”. Don’t include the http:// part, just use the domain name
4 Press Return or click the “+” button to add the account
5 select the new account in the list and click on “Connect” to open a window for this account

View the public timeline

To view the public timeline, click on the new button right to “Home” in the button bar at the bottom. By default, twhirl will automatically update the public timeline together with your user timelines. If you don’t like that, you can disable this on the “Network” tab in the account’s configuration.

IdentiSpy

twhirl now also supports incoming messages tracked via the popular IdentiSpy service by Dustin Sallings. Just use the same account for IdentiSpy that you added to twhirl, and you will see the tracked updates with a small “flame” icon in the top right hand corner. Should you not want to see your tracks in twhirl, please disable the “show tracked messages” option on the Network tab.

Twitter API catch-up

Due to security concerns, Twitter needed to change some behavior in their API. This caused problems in twhirl for some actions, e.g. when you tried to follow or unfollow other users, or were trying to favor a tweet. With this release, these issues have been resolved, and all actions on Twitter should be working again now.
How to get it?

As usual, we will make the new version available through the automatic update process, so twhirl will find out about the new release the next time you start it. To manually install this version, please go to the twhirl website and use the installation badge in the “Get twhirl” box.

There are many additional features that are not available on the standard Twitter site, such as favorites settings, URL shortening, customizable color schemes, multiple Twitter account connections, localization, and cross-posting capabilities to Pownce and Jaiku!