Once you get a consistent follower base on Twitter—we’re talking more than a thousand or so—you will find that the traditional web interface won’t keep up with the huge amount of tweets you have to read and sometimes answer to. You will need a Twitter client to organize the flood of information you are being attacked with. Now comes the never-ending debate: which one is better, a desktop or an online tool? You might have read that a lot of tweeters are using desktop applications. This article will outline some pros and cons of using a desktop Twitter application.

The Pros:

• Excellent for low bandwidth connections. If you install such an application on a laptop, then you will get real time tweets even when you are driving outside the 3G area and can only get a lousy GPRS connection. A 120 character tweet requires as little as a couple of kilobytes of bandwidth and your application can process it in real time, no matter how sloppy your connection is. Web applications, on the other hand, have to refresh most of the web page when displaying a new tweet, requiring up to tenfold worth of bandwidth.
• It pops up when you start Windows. Even if you forget that you are to tweet every once in a while, the log in window popping up every time you start the computer will remind you that you have a job to do.
• Speed. Twitter desktop clients tend to be faster than web based applications, no matter how good your Internet uplink is. A program with no plug-ins that does only one task is always faster than a browser.

The Cons:

• Little to no support if you’re using anything other than Windows. Only a handful of providers offer cross-platform software, i.e. a program that will run on MacOS, Windows and Unix/Linux distributions. Most of them cater only on Windows and don’t care about the other 25% of the world. So, if you are running Debian Linux as your main operating system, you should think twice before using a desktop application.
• As opposed to the point above, desktop applications can be an awful experience for the non-technical user. If you have never installed a Windows program and can’t work your way around installing and configuring a new program, then you are far better to use a web interface. It’s significantly easier to use something you are accustomed with, like the browser window, than dealing with something you’re not familiar with.
• It’s really a sucker bet if you tweet from more than one computer. If you tweet from your office desktop, your mobile phone, your home computer and from neighbor Bob’s laptop, then you are better off using a web application. You will run into issues like synchronizing the private comments you make on your followers, for example. In the long run, this can cost you valuable time and money.