Ok first of all, I’m a girl geek. This post could terrify you if you are not an iPhone mad Twitter addict and I just want to say now that you do not have to go to these extremes in order to Tweet productively & efficiently. However, if you are as geeky as I am, love iPhone, and effective Twittering is an important (and official) part of your job description then you will understand that 1 app is really not enough. Neither is 2. So I run a total of 3 apps.

These are the 3 different iPhone Twitter apps I love and why:

1. Echofon Pro

My primary app at the moment is Echofon, which I switched to last weekend having used Twittelator for the last 11 months.

Features I love about Echofon are:

- Sleek user interface, simple navigation
– Conversation view for DM’s
– ‘In reply to’ button on tweet which shows the conversation thread
– List management (add user to list via user profile only)
– Lists tab easily accessible via navigation bar
– Push notifications (I love this feature & it really is a MUST HAVE in my opinion i.e. number displayed on icon like SMS, pop up message notification & sound alert)
– Auto completes @usernames (brings up the picture & Twitter Id of common contacts) and #hashtags in compose tweet box

It also has a simple but really useful Mozilla Firefox add on for when you are at your desktop, this syncs with your iPhone app too. It’s a pretty stable app but does tend to crash sometimes when navigating lists etc.

Admittedly, I am a lunatic and I work this baby hard.

It doesn’t have:

- Comprehensive list management (such as view members, edit members)
– Drafts management (although Echofon saves a tweet or message closed in progress as a draft, it does not allow more than 1 draft to be saved)

Nb: This is a shame because I use drafts as my ‘read later’ area and sometimes I save thoughts or quotes and links to be shared another time. The lack of the save/manage drafts feature almost lost me to Tweetie which is very similar to Echofon but less intuitive in my opinion.

2. Twitterlator Pro

My secondary app is Twittelator – a feature packed app which I have happily used over the last 11 months. I love it because it has a comprehensive drafts management tool, as well as many, many other cool functions such as:

- Built in list management (all the way down to view & edit members)
– Über handy built-in ‘Twitlonger’ feature (so if you want to post anything longer than 140 characters but don’t want to post a full blog, this is a great alternative.)- A configurable navigation bar (choose which shortcuts you want at the bottom of your screen)
– It also has built in emotes, smilies and image icons to jazz up your tweets.

Unfortunately although it offers the convenience of being feature packed, the payoff is an app that hangs and lags. *Note: I have just upgraded to the latest version and this has improved.

The interface navigation also takes a while to get used to but this is mainly due to the vast amount of features and shortcuts.

All the same I still have a soft spot for this app & its creator the eccentric Andrew Stone, an interesting Twitterer, who fondly Tweets pictures of wild & wonderful garden finds & freshly prepared gourmet dishes for the delectation & delight of his followers.

3. HootSuite for iPhone

And finally the new HootSuite for iPhone is one other Twitter gadget that I like to keep handy.

Recommended by social web geek @LeeSmallwood, this app is highly configurable with the ability to create personalised streams of feeds including searches, lists and favourites. You can also create new tabs and set them up with streams as you wish them to appear. In my experience Hootsuite has the most customisable interface I have seen yet.

It has built in stat tracking but only on your ow.ly links, and … coolness of coolness a ‘post later’ option with built in date and time picker. Sadly, the HootSuite developers have omitted the option to send later without selecting a specific time which means that there is no save drafts function. Sync support is offered with the Hootsuite desktop client, however since my Twitter useage is restricted to my iPhone this is not something I can comment on at the moment.

The HootSuite app has potential but for now there are too many key features missing for me to consider a complete switch.

In a nutshell

I use Echofon for all my Twittering except saving and managing drafts, editing Twitter lists or long tweets for which I revert to trusty Twittelator. If I ever needed to schedule tweets in advance or post a URL that I would like to track stats on, I would use Hootsuite.

Of course if @echofon are reading this and integrate the missing functions into the gorgeous Echofon app, my heart would be theirs. For now.

I welcome your comments.