What are the best desktop social media clients available?

[elnano42]

Its so confusing whats what and what each does. Seesmic, Tweet Deck. Just looking for some clarity.

[mack verma]

1. Skimmer: It’s hard not to love this app. Not only is it beautiful to look at it, but it also tracks your favorite social sites. Skimmer’s certainly not an application for the social media beginner, but power users of Facebook, Flickr, YouTube (YouTube), Blogger (blogger), and Twitter, will appreciate the aggregation of content, filtering options, view types, and enhanced content viewing experience.

2. Radian6 Engagement Console: A desktop client built on Adobe AIR, the engagement console lets your both track and engage in the conversation taking place on blogs, videos, forums, boards, Twitter, Flickr, Google Buzz, LinkedIn, Facebook fan pages, public discussion groups, and mainstream news sites. The site also allows for assigning of tasks from within the platform, enabling users to access workflow from within the client.

3. TweetDeck: TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR desktop application for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, Foursquare, and MySpace.Facebook status updates are part of the standard program.Also supports MySpace integration.This includes the ability to set user moods, a feature specific to MySpace. In addition adds LinkedIn integration, as well as new Twitter features.TweetDeck also added integration with the Google Buzz and Foursquare social networks.

4. Onlywire: Onlywire is a wonderful free service where you can submit your website address (including your articles, blogs, etc) to various social networking sites with one click in order to garnish you more traffic. Follow these easy steps if you find the tutorial on the site itself a bit daunting. It's not hard, honest.

5. Social Marker: Marker makes it really easy to submit your site to 51 of the best social bookmarking sites in just minutes with a single click.

6. Ping.fm is a free social networking and micro-blogging web service that enables users to post to multiple social networks simultaneously.Making an update on Ping.fm pushes the update to a number of different social websites at once. This allows individuals using multiple social networks to update their status only once, without having to update it in all their social media individually. Ping.fm groups services into three categories – status updates, blogs, and micro-blogs – and updates can be sent to each group separately.

7. Destroy Twitter: Certainly not your most sophisticated Twitter client, but definitely above average and packing a few hidden nuggets. Destroy Twitterdestroy twitterdestroy twitter is a single account, single column app (but does allow for multiple columns in the expanded view), that’s clearly not for power users who have multiple presences to manage. It does, however, have a simple yet powerful groups feature that supports groups of users or groups of multiple keywords. The only problem is that accessing those groups can be a challenge.

8. Seesmic Desktop (Seesmic Desktop): This really is the everything Twitter app. It features support for unlimited Twitter accounts and columns, a smattering of URL and photo options, hands down the best Facebook (Facebook) integration we’ve seen, and unlimited saved searches. We’re really in love with Seesmic Desktop, and it seems to be evolving at record pace.

9. PeopleBrowsr: The desktop version is just as complicated and feature-rich as the web app (you’ll need to log in to the website to find the download link in lower right-hand corner). With PeopleBrowsr you get a full-featured Twitter app that is bloated with features like export, sort by Twitter name or number of followers, map or gallery views, stats on stacks (which are like columns), an aggregate view of tweets across stacks, simultaneous posting to other services, quick access to a number of different filters, and so much more. And we haven’t even begun to discuss the integrations with every popular social site on the planet. Even though the light mode is a little easier, this app is better left to extreme power users. Plus all those features seem to really slow it down.

10. Digsby: The beloved IM, email notification, and social networking application also does Twitter, but it’s only available for PCs at the moment. On the social networking side, Digsby (Digsby) pulls in Facebook, MySpace (MySpace), Twitter, and LinkedIn (LinkedIn) so you can get a more complete view of what’s happening across your entire social presence.

11. DigiTweet: This open source desktop Twitter client for Windows (Windows) is built on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and allows for a lot of customization in the layout and view of your Twitter stream with an interactive dockable pane. DigiTweet has also evolved to include multiple search tabs, color coding users you follow by categories (kind of love this), alerts for specific users, follow/unfollow, and link preview.