A couple of months ago, I suggested that HootSuite was the closest thing we have to the perfect Twitter client.

Since then, and really over the past fortnight or so, I’ve switched completely to HootSuite for all of my desktop-based Twitter interaction. I no longer use any downloadable Twitter client.

Here’s why:

1. Wherever I go, when I log into HootSuite it’s configured exactly how it was when I last left it.
2. My columns, lists, searches and setup are all right there. All the time.
3. This is the beauty of all web-based apps, of course (see later for more on this) – whether I’m at home, at work, looking at HootSuite on my iPhone, or even at an internet café or friend’s house, it’s enormously comforting, as well as productive, to know that when I log onto HootSuite, I’m getting exactly what I want.
4. I manage several client accounts on Twitter, and HootSuite is far and away the best and easiest way to do this. It makes CoTweet look like a dinosaur in comparison. Especially as the iPhone HootSuite app means you can monitor and respond to brand mentions essentially 24/7.
5. Scheduling tweets is a breeze (as is editing those that are pending).
6. The one-click conversations feature is super-useful, especially when you get a very random, out-of-nowhere reply to something that you’d long forgotten about.
7. The audio notification is really subtle (and doesn’t scare the life out of you like on TweetDeck).
8. There’s some syncing available with some downloadable Twitter clients, but it means installing the software everywhere you go. This often isn’t an option at work or at a new location, and that means a juggling act between the client and the next best thing.
9. I’m a big fan of owls.

HootSuite still isn’t perfect, and the inability to choose the URL shortener I want – bit.ly being the only shortener anybody should be using (assuming, you know, you want people to read and retweet your stuff) – is still a problem. I use bit.ly sidebar for every link I share, which is fine and something I’m now very much used to doing, but if you have to leave an app to get the feature you want, that’s a problem. Most people won’t bother, and that’s a shame, as HootSuite nails virtually everything else.

There are other web-based options, of course. Lots of folks love Brizzly, but it just hasn’t quite clicked for me, possibly because I’m a big fan of columns. I spend most of my time in lists, mentions and searches, and in Brizzly that means constant clicking from one-to-another.

It also niggles that I have to be on the home screen to actually write a new tweet. Plus, every time I visit Brizzly, it tells me I have loads of unread direct messages, which I do not. Sure, I can tell it to ‘shhh’, but that’s one extra step I never have to do on HootSuite. A minor irritant, but an irritation nonetheless.

Still, Brizzly does have something, and enough people I respect rate it to prevent me from dismissing it entirely without further investigation. (This includes Brizzly for iPhone, which I’m downloading as I write. Still, it’ll have to get up very early in the morning to supersede Tweetie as my mobile app of choice.)

Others rave about the Seesmic web app, but I find the features there a little lacking, notably the inability to manage multiple accounts. It all seems a little cold, too.

Both of these score a hefty win over HootSuite by incorporating the new-style Twitter retweets (although the way Seesmic web manages retweets of me is essentially useless), and as I find myself using the internal RTs more and more it’s a feature that’s notably missing from HootSuite. Again, I have to visit Twitter.com to monitor all of this, or to actually do a Twitter-style RT at all, which is another sign that something is broken.

But HootSuite gives me enough that this is something I’m prepared to put up with. For now. You see, us Twitter users are fickle beasts, and prone to hop over to the next best app when it offers a solution to something that has started to eat away at our very souls. Or has simply become a nuisance.

I’m encouraged by news that a pro version of HootSuite is on the cards (confirmed here). Assuming it’s not priced at ludicrous Rupert Murdoch-style levels, solves all of these issues and gives us some cool new stuff to play around with, I’ll happily pay for the privilege of accessing and interacting with Twitter in the best way that I possibly can.

All that being said, this reminds me of my previous comments about how a plugin-based Twitter app, which would allow us to pick our favourite elements from HootSuite, Brizzly, Seesmic, TweetDeck, Tweetie and every other app out there, is still, in this Twitterer’s opinion, the best way forward.

Does this sound familiar?

1. You buy a fancy new piece of computer technology, perhaps an iPad
2. You hurry home with your new toy and, excited, search for, download and install all your favourite software that you used on your last (once equally-adored, now essentially abandoned) device. (If you bought an iPad, this almost certainly includes TweetDeck. And why not? It looks gorgeous.)
3. You carry on using that software the exact same way you always did
4. Repeat

Technology continues to improve all the time, often at a rate that’s hard to comprehend – think about what the average person had access to in the 60s or 70s, or even a decade ago, compared to today (certainly in the West and Asia). It’s mind-blowing.

The thing is, while it’s certainly true that the tools are always developing, many times we, as individuals, are content to stay the same. We don’t adjust with the tech. We maintain the same old habits, often to a level that’s self-destructive. And all the more exposed.

So many bloggers will come bursting out of the gates to upgrade to WordPress 3.0, raving about all the bells and whistles – and then carry on updating their blogs the exact same way they always did.

How many beautifully-crafted Facebook pages with tens, even hundreds of thousands of fans are almost entirely ignored by their creators a few months after the novelty has worn off? How many never do even a single wall post?

Here’s the thing: it’s dangerous (if normal) to assume that new tech means a new you. If nothing has changed except the equipment, then nothing has changed. Sure, the iPad might make using Twitter a more enjoyable experience (certainly on your commute), but it won’t make a lick of difference to the way that you use Twitter – or anything else – unless you make sure that you grow and improve, too.

And if you have to choose, it’s far better that you invest in yourself than new technology. (Cormac McCarthy wrote nearly all of his novels, screenplays and correspondence, from 1960 to the present, on this vintage Olivetti typewriter.)

That is, unless you’re content to be invisible, to not stand out from the pack. As Elbert Hubbard once observed, “One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”

A 3.0 web, and all the tech, wonder and opportunity that brings, needs a 3.0 you. Anything less is a waste.

I like Twitter.com for its speed, lack of API call worries and because it’s still the easiest way to follow (and unfollow) somebody, but it doesn’t support columns, nor does it provide me with a one-click way to retweet (in the style I prefer) or send a direct message.

I like HootSuite a lot (it might actually be the closest thing we have to perfect), but it defaults to ow.ly URL shortening, which lots of readers don’t like, and doesn’t let you change this to anything else, like bit.ly. Which means when I want to use bit.ly, I have to go to bit.ly. Which takes me away from HootSuite.

I like Seesmic Desktop – or rather, I did – but the latest build defaults to Twitter’s style of retweet and they’ve removed the buttons from the account pane (which I loved).

I like TweetDeck on the iPhone, but unless you’ve got a strong 3G signal (or access to wireless) it runs super-slowly (if at all), and loading new tweets can take forever.

I used to like TweetDeck on my PC, but it started to have fits when you followed a large amount of people and was prone to ignoring the tweets of some of my network altogether. And while I like the audible notification, I really, really hate the sound it makes.

The thing is, nothing is perfect. We’ve still yet to see the ultimate Twitter client. There is always, without fail, some kind of compromise. You find the software that does most of the things you like well and either ignore or put up with the rest. And this is why whenever a brand new client comes out and gets some hype, many of us will install and try it out. We have some loyalties to our existing software, but they only go so far. If a competitor’s client has what we have now plus one, we’re very likely to abandon ship.

This is why I really believe that a plugin-supportive Twitter client is absolutely the way forward. If you want function X, then you install it. If you don’t want function Y, then you uninstall. Reality check: no Twitter client will ever be perfect for everybody. But with plugins, it could very easily be perfect for you.

My moan about the latest build of Seesmic Desktop yesterday got me thinking about what it is that I need from the perfect Twitter client.

The biggest problem is the things that I like and want – and, conversely, all that stuff I don’t need or want to see – might be at a complete polar opposite to the rest of that application’s userbase. It’s impossible to please all of the people all of the time, but if pleasing most of the people means pissing me off, any software development team would be insane to do what I want at the expense of everybody else.

But then it hit me: plugins.

Those of you who blog and have spent a little time fooling around with WordPress will be well-versed in the multitude of plugins that are available for the publishing application. There are plugins for almost everything, from comment and spam management to analytical tools and database backups. Add-ons have been huge on Firefox, too.

Wouldn’t it be great if somebody developed a pretty basic Twitter client that you could configure exactly how you liked by downloading and implementing any of a series of plugins?

For example, I’d like to see plugins for:

• Backing up, and being able to restore my profile and all of my tweets (including the metadata)
• Analytics: it would be nice to see things like which users retweet my posts the most, who I retweet the most, who I reply to the most (and the other way around), all within the app
• A way to edit my tweets
• Tweet scheduling
• Spam filters
• Keyword filters
• An improved direct message system
• A variation on Facebook’s suggestions system, that alerted you to when people who you used to communicate with regularly have dropped off the radar

And so on. Not everything here is important to everybody, but that’s kind of the point. If you wanted, you could just stay with the stripped-down, basic build of the client, maybe just adding the one or two plugins that you wanted. Other people could (and would) add dozens.

And yes, some apps and websites already do some of these things, but if you could download and action everything YOU wanted via plugins, you’d never have to go anywhere else.

Ever again.

Believe me: the first company that comes up with something like this – particularly if they get Twitter on board and build a community around open-source plugins – is on to a huge, huge slice of win. I mean, Twitter exactly how YOU want it – what’s not to like?

Last week I wrote a post that gave advice to people who were new to Twitter and wanted to get off to the best possible start. The article has been quite popular and follow-up conversations I’ve had with readers led to me thinking a little bit more about the subject.

Here are five more tips that I think will help anybody who is using the platform for the first time. If you have friends who ‘don’t get it’, or are finding Twitter disappointing, then please share this with them.

And if you consider yourself a veteran of Twitter, there’s still plenty of value to be found!

1. Twitter Isn’t Third Person

Remember the old days when Facebook status updates were always third person? The status box used to come with a fixed ‘is’ before each message, which encouraged you to always be doing something – i.e., Jack is eating his dinner, Jill is going for a walk, etc.

Because it was so limiting, Facebook eventually dropped the ‘is’ part of the status box, but the majority still updated in the same way. Recently, likely in an attempt to emulate (and keep up with) Twitter, Facebook has almost entirely abandoned the third person status update, and most people (certainly those with whom I interact) update in a similar way to Twitter (albeit with less character restrictions, and significantly less reach).

Twitter has never been third person. Each tweet is a standalone piece of news delivered in 140 characters or less. It is not your name doing or saying something. It is not an action. It’s a message.

Hence, you should NEVER write tweets such as:

I see this all the time with new Twitter accounts (and many established ones). This is partly Twitter’s fault – by specifically asking of us, “What are you doing?”, they encourage people to think of their tweets in the same way they used to think of Facebook status updates.

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