I have used probably a dozen or so Twitter clients at some point. The number of clients is somewhat astounding. Most are free or at least have free versions. I bounce around between two computers at home, my MacBook Pro which is essentially a desktop hooked up to my 24 inch monitor and my MacBook which I primary use in bed, on the couch or on the go. When I am at my desk with a huge monitor I prefer a multi-column Twitter client that takes advantage of screen real estate. On my MacBook, I want something that doesn’t use as much screen space. So that means I have a wide range in Twitter clients.

1. Nambu – This is my favorite client of the moment. It is similar to TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop in the sense that it’s a multi-column client. The difference is that those are written in Adobe Air and this is a native Mac client. That gives it a more polished look and feel and better OS integration (it has dock badges and works with Growl). It saves your scrolling place so you can start where you left off and makes it easy to distinguish “new” and “old” tweets. My biggest gripe is that it’s unfinished. There are advertised features that have been “coming soon” for a while. It also isn’t compatible with Snow Leopard at the moment. The developers are promising to release v2.0 soon which will work under Snow Leopard.

2. Tweetie – I am slowly falling in love with this client. It’s now my primary client on my MacBook. There are just so many things it does right. I didn’t get on board with Tweetie on the iPhone because at the time I didn’t want to pay for a Twitter client and I didn’t like that it did retweets with “via” instead of RT. But both problems get rectified on the Mac (there is a free ad-supported version). I love the way Tweetie shows threads of tweets and previews shortened URLs before taking you there and pops up a window to show you a picture from known picture sites. It’s just so slick. You are locked into one window, which isn’t that big of a deal. You can create saved searches and break them out into new windows. At the moment, Tweetie is rising up the charts. And so far, the only issue I have with it in Snow Leopard is that dock badge doesn’t show message count at the moment.

3. Seesmic Desktop – Another app I only recently got into. I was frustrated with Nambu about a month ago since there hadn’t been any updates in so long and it seemed like it was dead. One of things I initially liked about Seesmic was the Facebook integration. It lets you see comments, “like” things and add comments which IIRC is more than TweetDeck could do. This kind of became irrelevant when I discovered Facebook for Adobe Air which I used then alongside Seesmic (and now use alongside Nambu). It is better looking than TweetDeck in my opinion. I like the “home” column that seems to capture everything. The main advantage over TweetDeck seems to be better Facebook integration which also allows you to add Facebook friends to groups with Twitter friends. It appears to work fine with Snow Leopard.

4.  TweetDeck – TweetDeck was the first multi-column client I used and I really liked a lot about it. The ease of moving columns (something Nambu lacks) is a really nice feature. The ability to see whats “popular” in an individual column is downright badass. But Facebook integration is pretty lacking. It doesn’t do anything but show statuses and doesn’t let you add FB friends to groups, meaning you are stuck with all your friends all the time. The inability to resize text and avatars leaves people with small screens a limited number of tweets. All in all it has more negatives than pluses in my opinion.

5. Twitterfon Pro – This is the only non-desktop client on the list. It should be higher because it might be my most used client. I finally broke down and bought the Pro version a few months ago. Its pretty snappy, it keeps new tweets in a different color which I like. It has ping.fm integration so I can post to FB and Twitter simultaneously. I like how easy it is to access trends. My biggest gripe is that it doesn’t save your scroll position when you exit. That is the key feature missing.