Due to Twitter's inherent limitations, a cottage industry has sprung up around it in an effort to add functionality and circumvent the 140-character limit per tweet. URL-shortening services, picture hosting, GPS location logging all of these features can now be added to your Twitter updates.
The biggest area of development is in the application space. Nothing says "twitter noob" more than posting to your Twitter from the web. To help you avoid the ridicule of others, I've compiled a list of apps you should tweet with.
For BlackBerry users, the go-to app is currently UberTwitter. It has advanced features like support for multiple accounts, integrated link shortening, picture posting and GPS support. It also has an easier to use interface than TwitterBerry the other big Twitter app for BlackBerries. Currently UberTwitter is free, but the developers have said they may start charging for it in the future.
For the iPhone, there are so many Twitter apps available that it can be hard to know where to start. The two I recommend are Tweetie and Echofon, which was, until recently, called TwitterFon.
Tweetie is very straightforward to use, and has functionality for everything you would ever want to do on Twitter even a conversation view for @replies. It is, quite frankly, better than the web site itself. The only downside to Tweetie is that it costs $2.99. For those who refuse to pay for iPhone apps, there is Echofon.
Echofon boasts the same interface as Tweetie, and almost as many features, except it is free because it shows some small ads. To banish the ads and get all the functionality of Tweetie and more, you can also pay for Echofon Pro, which is $4.99.
In many cases, you might want to tweet from your computer, and not your cell phone. For example, you might want to share a sweet YouTube link you found with all dozen of your followers.
If you use a Mac, try two desktop clients by the name of Tweetie (from the same folks as the iPhone app) and Nambu. The two clients take different approaches to displaying all the tweets you are following, so be sure to try both to see which one you like better.
Windows users should take a look at two applications called TweetDeck and twhirl. They both run on the Adobe AIR platform, and allow you incredible amounts of control over your Twitter.
Actually, the Adobe AIR apps will work on Mac OS X and Linux as well. Another Twitter app that works across all platforms is TwitterFox, which is an extension that installs into your Firefox browser.
