twitter clients on the droid: new year's update

I posted before about twitter clients for the droid. I was very enamored of one from xeeku because it was (as far as I could tell) the first droid app to support twitter lists. between that and a look I found much more appealing than that of clients like twidroid and seesmic, I was prepared to overlook a few rough spots.

but the little stuff that bugged me about xeeku didn't get fixed. for example, xeeku offered notifications for both new mentions (@replies) and direct messages, but clicking on the dm notification didn't go to the direct message screen. instead, it went to the mentions screen, and there was no way to access the correct screen without closing out and reopening the app. in fact, for a week or so I couldn't access direct messages at all through xeeku and had to use another client (the swift twitter client) to read my dms. I like swift's look, but no lists.

meanwhile, the crowd caught up on the twitter lists feature. @loic continued to send me emails letting me know about new features seesmic was incorporating on its various clients, including the droid version. seesmic fans tweeted about how much they liked it. so I would re-download it, try it out and uninstall it again. I would report I just didn't see what was so great about it.

@xeeku advised me that the issues I reported to them would be fixed in an upcoming premium version that would be "equal to tweetie on the iphone." I didn't give a crap about iphone apps, I just wanted my favorite droid app to work right. I was ok paying for it, but I wasn't going to pay for a premium version of something until the basic version worked. yesterday I got a message from @xeeku letting me know the premium version was available and that I could try it free for 24 hours. so I did.

happily, the direct message glitch seems to have been fixed. the app still has a look I prefer to the other guys. but check out this screen shot of my stream:

lists and trends are available right on the main screen - no hunting around in the menus. that's cool. but what's the deal with the avatars? @cmajor, not shown here, filled up the whole screen. not that I don't prefer that to, say, a poster size shot of robert scoble, but the tweet's the meat, okay?

@xeeku was tweeting about the features it claimed were unique in the marketplace, like the info provided in profiles. below, xeeku on the left, seesmic on the right:

again, I like the xeeku's presentation of the information more, but it's not giving me more information (except for whether the user allows geo tracking, which is a nice touch). and is it worth paying $3-4?

one more (premium) xeeku shot. I like that it provides so much info on people in your stream.

that said, I was soured on xeeku's "we'll fix it in the pay version" attitude and elected to give seesmic a more substantive trial. and I really do like it.