Last week, my company-owned PC was rebuilt after a hard disk failure. Whilst my IT department got me back to a point where I had all of the standard apps installed, there are many others that I use that are not part of the standard build. Some of these are company sanctioned (e.g. I use Office 2010 rather than the company standard of 2007, as well as Cisco WebEx productivity tools and CUCILync softphone); others are not “official” but are an important part of my workflow (e.g. Google Chrome browser). One of the apps in this second category is a Twitter client.

In the past, I’ve tended to use TweetDeck. Unfortunately, after Twitter bought TweetDeck, they wrecked it. In common with many other people, I’ve been running the old, unsupported, Adobe AIR version of the app but I really didn’t want to have to install more Adobe middleware on my PC (it’s bad enough having Adobe Reader and various browser plugins for Flash, etc.).

I started to look around for alternatives but it seems that Windows client apps for Twitter are a bit thin on the ground (unlike for mobile operating systems, where they are two-a-penny).

• There’s MetroTwit but it only has single account support, unless I pay for the professional version, and I’m not sure how long it will be before Twitter kills off client apps (paid or otherwise) as part of it’s apparent desire to self-destruct (I’ve since been told that it’s possible to run multiple instances of MetroTwit).
• Some people recommend Seesmic, but they have been swallowed up by Hootsuite.
• Hootsuite is another option, but I’m not paying a tenner a month. The free version would probably serve my needs but it only seems to have apps for mobile platforms – and I really do want a desktop app, not another tab to be lost in the melee in Chrome.

So, TweetDeck it is, Adobe Air or not.  It’s still a decent app, if a little resource hungry, and it integrates with my Bitly.Pro account for custom URL shortening. If you are looking to track down “old” (yellow) TweetDeck because hate the new (blue) version, then there are a couple of posts that might help from David Amador and Jon Choo.