Twhirl is designed to enable you to get Tweets automatically fed through to your desktop, a bit like using a typical Instant Messaging service. You can also post Tweets using Twhirl as well. Most of the features available on the Twitter website are accessible through twhirl, too.

Here is the blurb from their own website:

• runs on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX
• connects to multiple Twitter and Friendfeed accounts
• notifications on new tweets
• shorten long URLs (using snurl, twurl or is.gd)
• cross-post updates to Pownce and Jaiku
• post images to TwitPic
• search tweets using TweetScan
• timeline filtering
• localized to English, German, Italian and Spanish
• color schemes
• automatically check for new versions

There are a lot more things twhirl can do to improve your twitter experience, and it offers various configuration options to adapt to your personal needs.

This is a nice and simple tool to use, just enter your Twitter account details and press enter. But to be honest, I’m not really sure what value it adds to your Twitter experience. Unlike Google Analytics, TweetStats can’t tell you what phrases other users used to find your Twitter account and it can’t tell you how many people have read your Tweets.

But, it’s free, and it does present you with some interesting (if not that useful) information, such as when you post Tweets, what method you use to upload your Tweets and how many Tweets you have written.

But for me the best feature is the Tweet Cloud which shows you how often you use certain keywords. This is really useful for you to quickly and easily see the underlying themes of your Tweets and the phrases that you focussing on.