In a recent blog entry, Adium developer Zac West discusses the progress of integrating Twitter into the multi-service instant messaging client's already abundant offerings.

"The current base of Twitter clients often leave something to be desired, behave in a weird way, or just add an additional application you need to keep open," West explains before detailing how Matt Gemmell's MGTwitterEngine is being used to provide Twitter for Adium.

The concept is quite different from existing clients, but makes perfect sense for Adium. Twitter feeds can be followed or unfollowed by adding and removing them from your contact list. If you IM them, it'll send them a direct message. Your Twitter feed comes displayed in a group chat that you can keep open or closed as you need it. It's also very easy to reply to random Twitter links that you can find online.

West hopes to build in additional features such as autouploading an image to TwitPic when it's dragged into an IM window. I would love for some of the additional features that are found in TweetDeck, such as TweetShrink and translation at the click of a button, to be added as well.

Read the full details, complete with screenshots, on the official Adium blog.

We're at a new juncture in the course of iPhone development, I believe. Twitter has basically monopolized the "text exporting" function of your iPhone -- if you want to broadcast text from a mobile device, most of us do it through Twitter. But now, we're seeing a whole host of sites and services aiming to be the distributors for your richer media: photos, audio, even video (as well as the iPhone can handle it, anyway).

Radar is one such service, and they'd really like to handle any photos you want to send out into the world. But unlike a site such as Twitpic, they're not content with being just the repository. They want to host, share, and deliver. Whenever you want to mess around with pictures on your iPhone, whether that be taking them and sharing them, browsing your friends' pictures from Flickr, or looking at funny shots from CollegeHumor, Radar wants to be there.

They gave TUAW an early look at their new software, just released to the App Store, and we were duly impressed -- they've got hooks into a surprising number of places, and it's clear they've worked hard to make themselves fit somewhere into your photosharing flow. But is it worth it to have yet another site acting as a go-between for you and your photo content? Read on to find out.

Since it's turned into Twitter Thursday around here... In a moment of sheer frustration with Twitterrific, I sent out a call on my Twitter feed for recommendations of a desktop Twitter client. Several folks replied with a nod to TweetDeck, an Adobe AIR-based client currently in development for OS X, Linux, and Windows.

TweetDeck is a pretty neat program. The selling point is the ability to split your main Twitter feed into subfeeds that you can then organize into different groups. You can have Twitter be as narrow as a single column while you scroll back and forth in it, or you can make it full-screen and have your monitor filled with nothing but tweeting goodness.

There's a lot of features as well. If you go over the 140-character limit, you can hit a "TweetShrink" button that will turn some of the words to LOL-speak in order to fit the limit. You can upload pictures -- clicking on the TwitPic button will upload the image file to TwitPic and give you the URL for your feed -- and you can shorten URLs via your choice of service by clicking the "Shorten" button.

Another very cool feature is the ability to translate your tweets into another language. The translation is pretty accurate -- even for more difficult languages such as the Japanese I tested with the application. The program itself is highly customizable, and you can tweak the colors and fonts to whatever you like. You can also set different update times for various feeds: for example, you can have your main friends update every minute, but your private messages every five minutes.

TweetDeck is extremely polished for a beta client and I've yet to get the error messages that plagued me with Twitterrific. If you're searching for a free desktop client for Twitter, it's hard to beat this one.

TweetDeck is in public beta and requires the Adobe AIR runtime, which is a Universal binary and needs OS X 10.4.11 or higher. AIR will be installed during the TweetDeck installation process if you do not already have it.

The crash and near miraculous rescue of the passengers and crew of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 in New York City has been big news for the last day. Like many news events, it has been extensively covered by news agencies, and, as we are seeing more frequently now, by the public using camera phones.

With the popularity of the iPhone, a breaking news story is never far from our favorite cellular device.

Janis Krums, a Florida businessman, was on a Hudson River ferry boat when the pilot plunged the airliner into the frigid waters yesterday afternoon. His picture of the sinking aircraft, with passengers knee deep in water on the right wing helped tell the story in a single image, and his dramatic shot was splashed on front pages across the country. Krums used Twitpic to publish his photo, and that service was soon shut down by high traffic. He was interviewed on MSNBC and kept his friends up to date on his Twitter feed.

Flickr is also displaying lots of photos from the scene, many of them taken by iPhones. Not much happens today out of the sight of a camera or a camera phone. Janis Krums scooped just about everybody using only his quick wits and his favorite mobile phone.

[via PDN Pulse, news services, MSNBC]]

The Iconfactory and its chief typist, Craig Hockenberry, have been hard at work on Twitterrific 1.1, a substantial update to their mobile Twitter client for the iPhone and iPod touch.

The update features much smoother scrolling, larger tweet capacity, the ability to save pictures to the camera roll before uploading them to TwitPic, and secure HTTPS server communication. It also squashes a large number of bugs. A full accounting of the changes is available on Twitterrific's app store page and on the Iconfactory's website.

The app was included in both Mike's and Steve's list of favorite apps for their respective iPhones.

Twitterrific is still available in two flavors. Twitterrific (the free version) periodically shows ads via The Deck, similar to its free counterpart for the desktop. Twitterrific Premium is $9.99, and omits the advertising.