I finally got around to giving the new Twitter client TweetDeck a try. In a word: interesting.

As pictured below, the most obvious change here is multiple columns. You have one column for your normal timeline (similar to Twhirl), another for replies, another for direct messages. Makes it much easier to see what’s happening on first glance. Twhirl just color codes your messages using differing shades of gray to tell you what kind of message it is.

The Groups function is really cool. You can add certain people you follow into customized groups and track those groups separately. For example, I could group all the other bloggers I know into a group and track what they are tweeting separately from everybody else. Nice touch.

Surprisingly, TweetDeck offers no preferences. At all. I personally find the font size to be too big. I would like to shrink the text so that I could shrink the size of the overall app and get more on screen. But, there is no option to do so. You can’t alter the theme and you can’t change the rate at which it checks for new tweets.

All in all, I admire the different approach they have tried with TweetDeck, but this is no Twhirl killer in my eyes. Twhirl has more options and it takes up less screen space.