There are lot of good desktop Twitter clients, such as TweetDeck, and Twinja. All of them of course need to be installed on your PC, and you need to install them on each PC that you use. TwitHive is a free Web based Twitter client that does not needs any download or installation, and works pretty well. Best thing is that you can use it from any browser on any machine, and it comes packed with interesting features.
As I started using TwitHive to write this review, I really loved the features that it provides.
Here are some of the features that this free web based Twitter client provides:
Create custom channels
One of the best things that I liked about TwitHive is the ability to create custom channels. Essentially, you can define custom channels to see exactly the type of tweets that you want to see. You can setup a channel to scan all the tweets for mention of some particular keywords. You can create another channel to see all your retweets. Possibly another channel to show all the tweets from those who you are following. This makes TwitHive almost an ideal client for me, as I try to continously scan Twitter for mention of words “free software”, or my mentions. Now, I have setup custom channels on TwitHive that will keep doing that for me, and just a glance at my TwitHive window can tell me if there is some new tweet that fits my criteria. Love it!
Track Multiple Twitter Accounts
TwitHive lets you easily track multiple Twitter accounts. This makes it an ideal tool for Twitter marketers, and those who have more than one Twitter account. In the same window, you can define custom channels for different Twitter accounts. So, you get a unified view of all that you want to track on Twitter.
Send Tweets, Retweet
Apart from advanced feature like Channels, TwitHive also has all the basic functionalities that you would expect from a Twitter client. You can easily update your status. Each tweet on your browser has an option of Retweet also with it. Just click on that, and you can directly retweet that tweet. Definitely the easiest way to retweet that I have found in a long time. Similarly, you can very easily send direct messages, and follow/unfollow people.
Completely AJAX based
TwitHive is completely AJAX based, so your channel data keeps on refreshing itself without a need to submit your window. The refresh frequency also seems to be pretty quick. Each channel also has an option of one click on demand refresh. So, you can easily do a quick refresh as well if you want to see latest data.
One Click URL Shortening
TwitHive has built-in URL shortening based on bit.ly. You just need to enter the long URL, and click the Shorten URL option. TwitHive will automatically shorten the URL.
As you would have seen from above, TwitHive is really feature packed. TwitHive uses OAuth based authentication, so you do not need to share your Twitter credentials.
As I mentioned in beginning, TwitHive is almost my ideal Twitter client. There are just a few more things that I would have loved to have in this free Twitter client:
1. Some feature to mass follow/unfollow users, like BuzzOm and Tweepular.
2. Better way to follow/unfollow individual users.
3. Some option to define custom height of channels, so that multiple channels can be arranged vertically.
To be fair to TwitHive, it is still in beta, and still is a killer product. I definitely see myself using this one for a long time. This is a good one.