A lot of bloggers in Oman are starting to use Twitter these days and it was really fun having a number of people giving us live coverage of Gulf Cup matches using twitter.

One thing I noticed is that the majority of people are using the standard Twitter web portal to tweet, which is extremely bare and does not provide a lot of fuctionality, I am not sure how mny people know that there many different standalone Twitter clients that can enhance your Twitter experience.

I tried a number of clients on the PC and the iPod touch, but the one I would like to talk about today is TweetDeck. This is is a desktop client available for Windows, Mac and Linux that is built on AIR - an Adobe technology for creating desktop applications with online functionality. 

TweetDeck runs on your computer like any other application, it can be minimized to the toolbar. Whenever someone makes a tweet you will get a small IM like notification. TweetDeck has one-click URL shortening, message shortening, TwitPic upload, and friend groups. Like the majority of AIR applications, it is extremely light and has a clean UI.

TweetDeck is free, so if you are a Twitter user there is no reason for you not to give it a try. You will need to install the Adobe AIR runtime if you don’t have that already.

I have previously also tried twhirl - another AIR based desktop client, twitterfic – an application for the iPhone/iPod touch, Twitter Tools – a WordPress plug-in for making tweets (currently using this for Republic of Code twitter account), and the official Twitter Facebook application for posting my tweets as Facebook status updates.

I used the Twitter Mobile Portal in the past, but now I make most of my on-the-go tweets using SMS.

I’m not sure if anybody else uses any special Twitter clients, but Muscati seems to be using TwitterBerry on his Blackberry as you can see from the screenshot above.