Twitter is slowly becoming one of the more powerful ways to pass information to a wide array of people and to also find out what your friends and family are doing. For those of us who use Twitter it is well known that the webpage, twitter.com, can at times be extremely slow to use. So instead of using the actual website we use different applications, some web-based, to send our tweets.

There are two really great services out there you can use, Twitterific and Ping.FM. Twitterific is a Mac OS X application that installs on your computer and allows you to see your friends tweets and allows you to send tweets. The program is free as long as you can deal with advertisements and there is a paid version where you can pay to remove the ads. I like the free version just find and have no problems with the ads, but there are problems. I often get this error while trying to download tweets,

Twitter returned a “bad request” error. This happens when you exceed 70 requests per hour. Avoid running other Twitter applications or refreshing too frequently.

The other way, my preferred way, to ping is Ping.fm. Its a website that lets you send tweets, and a whole lot more. The website allows you to send updates to more than one website. For example I have my Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter all set up so all I have to do is type my status update once and it gets pushed to all of the websites. The service is straightforward and easy to get started on.The website is in private beta and you will need a code to get in. Because I am a nice guy here is the current code (as of 6/25) “pingofpings”

Overall I prefer to use ping.fm over Twitterific. So what service do you use to Twitter?

Twitterific

Ping.fm