I have been using Twhirl, the popular Adobe Air client for Twitter, on my Powerbook now for about a week. I am trying desperately to figure out why. Twhirl has re-implemented the Twitter online interface giving you a desktop client that is platform independent. So the movement towards online applications that are easy to use with creative interfaces is already receding back to the desktop. For Twitter, I think unnecessarily. Twitter is designed for quick bursts of creativity, with short time spans on interacting with its interface. To me having a desktop client for this functionality seems like unnecessary noise. You aren’t writing long dissertations that require frequent saving, and you usually are getting messages through your phones SMS capabilities.

Thats not to say their totally isn’t a space for the Air platform, because there is. Specifically for handling batch tasks that are network intensive, where the connection can be dropped and re-establish. In particular, uploading photos to popular photo sharing sites. I am a Smugmug devotee, but my 1 beef with them is their client uploader sucks. They could REALLY benefit from having a platform independent framework to develop their client on instead of hacking out some terrible disconnected clients for each of the different platforms.

Chime in if you are using Twhirl in a way that I can justify it as one of my everyday tools. Differentiating the signals from the noise in your everyday toolbox is just as important as it is with information.