echofon.com

What, another Twitter client? Well, every developer of a Twitter app for the iPhone with any semblance of success is going to want to transport that success onto the Mac, so why not? (If you have no idea what success Echofon has, that’s because it was better known as Twitterfon.)

Facing Tweetie, or even Twitterific and its simple functionality but fancy black window, Echofon is the plainest Twitter client of them all — and I kinda like that about it. It’s a simple, regular OS X window, with just a title bar, tabs, and a content view; and it handles multiple accounts, Growl notifications, permanent keyword searches and so on.

As for the multiple accounts, they’re modal — à la Bluebird, where you switch from one account to another, and you’re only really logged into one account at a time. Which is not very convenient if you want to monitor incoming messages on all your accounts at the same time, without having to cycle through all accounts on every hour in order to check them up — and I’m still slightly puzzled as to who on Earth wants their multiple-account Twitter client to work like that.

Well, the thing is, I partly do, because Tweetie, with ten accounts open simultaneously, becomes an unreliable resource hog… so I’ve gotten to use Tweetie to monitor my many accounts (for which process I’m currently trying to switch to an online solution — Splitweet seems to work okay) and have Twitterific always running on my main desktop just for my main account. So I can now dump Twitterific for a simpler application, with a less attention-craving interface, that also lets me switch accounts for occasional needs. (The litmus test for me being that it seems to let you seamlessly reply to a message with another account than the one that originally received it — that matters to people who use separate accounts to group their subscriptions, by theme or whatever.)

Oh, right, and it also syncs with the iPhone app, which I couldn’t care less about (I don’t think I ever even installed Twitterfon.)

Conclusion: I’m using it for now, and you should probaby check it out, but seeing how simple it is the final version better not be too expensive. (And, since I’ve never paid for a Twitter application anyway, there better be an ad-supported version, too.)