richardbarley.com

I blogged a while ago [here] about the toss-up between Thwirl [website] and TweetDeck [website] as my Twitter client of choice. Having given TweetDeck a good run out, I did eventually go back to Twhirl, finding it just did everything I needed in a nice, slick, compact manner. TweedDeck was a bit rough around the edges and, although I really like the ability to group people and have their tweets visible in separate columns, i found the multi-column interface just too clumsy for me. I like my Twitter clients slim, trim and straight up-and-down .

However, a recent comment from Leezl [here] pointed me toward a new contender in the arena,  namely Feedalizr [home page]. So, always one to try out new stuff, I gave it a go.

Feedalizr (they just had to miss out a vowel somewhere) is an Adobe Air application, just like Twhirl and TweetDeck, that combines some of the best aspects of both rival clients into one pretty slick package. It manifests as a single column,  but with the ability to create separate tabs for items filtered by username or service (Feedalizr supports Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr and Jaiku). This is reminiscent of the filtering offered by TweetDeck, but not quite as flexible. The tabbed interface is a big improvement though, and is something that TweetDeck should really look at implementing.

Overall the interface of Feedalizr feels good. Everything is smooth scrolling and the flipping effect when opening the “options” dialog is cool, if rather unnecessary. Click on someone’s name and their entries will appear in a new column. A nice slick way of picking out the signal from the noise.

One very nice feature that  that both Twhirl and TweetDeck lack is de-duping of FriendFeed items. If Feedalizr spots that someone has tweeted something, and that tweet then appears in that user’s FriendFeed list, it will hide the duplicate entry so you don’t read what your firends are eating for breakfast two times over every day.

There are a few niggly issues that take the polish off this potential Twhirl-beater. It doesn’t have Twhirls ability to click on an @name to display that users profile. And the pop-up notifications for new messages contain a rather spurious explanation, which I found unnecessary and distracted from  my reading of the messages.

It is still early days for Feedalizr, which, naturally,  is still in beta, but it’s certainly a promising start and I shall continue to look out for updates. I have added a few of my issues to their site on Get Satisfaction [here] so I’ll see what their response is.

Could Twhirl finally lose it’s crown? Not yet, but maybe soon.