This week, everyone who is anyone on the internet is in Austin, Texas for the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) interactive and music festival. It can be quite overwhelming to a newcomer (or even someone who has been before!). There's is so much going on that you need real-time information to catch panels you want to see. What better source of real-time info than Twitter? In fact, they debuted Twitter at SXSW 2007.
Many people use Twitter from the comfort of their desktop computer, but people at SXSW are constantly on the go. So here's a list of the must-have iPhone Twitter apps to help you keep on top of the madness of SXSW. Who knows, it may help you get into a panel that was announced last-minute, or run into someone you wanted to meet! Without further ado:
The Best iPhone Twitter Apps
- Tweetie 2 - Without a doubt the king of Twitter apps. This smooth-as-silk app hums along, and it's "pull to refresh" feature is actually fun to use! It excels at searches with its username and hashtag pickers. You can quickly search within any stream, in case you want to pull up a tweet you saw earlier. It also has a great interface for looking at other users, so you can quickly find and follow people you meet on the street. If you take a break from Twitter you'll probably miss some tweets, but Tweetie will notify you when it had to skip tweets by showing a jagged gap in the stream. Just tap the gap to see the older tweets. Finally, no Twitter app belongs in this list without image uploading, but Tweetie goes the extra mile and allows you to upload video as well. Great for all those life-streamers. At $2.99 it may scare some people off, but trust us, this is not only the best Twitter app, but one of the most high-quality iPhone apps period!
- TweetDeck for iPhone - Taking a page from its Adobe AIR counterpart, TweetDeck for iPhone gives you a multicolumn layout that lets you stay on top of all your saved searches simultaneously. This is important as you can easily get lost in the regular #sxsw stream, it has over 100 updates per minute sometimes! Bring on the fail whale! This app is free, so give it a whirl, you have nothing to lose.
- Tweetings Mobile - Tweetings Mobile doesn't have as big of a following as the others on this list but it is a great, feature-packed iPhone app. It features Push Notifications so you can receive updates even when the app is not running on your iPhone. Tweetings is $1.99 for the full version but there is a free Lite version as well.
- Twitbird Pro - Twitbird Pro is another underdog that packs a wallop. Also featuring Push Notifications, Twitbird Pro lets you stay on top of the SXSW action. With multiple accounts, saved searches, and other perks like image uploading and URL shortening, you can't go wrong with Twitbird Pro. Another $2.99 app for those who don't like Tweetie.
These are some of our top picks, but it's not a complete list. Check out all of our iPhone Twitter app reviews or add your favorite to the comments at the bottom!