On a hot tip from Guillaume Laforge, I checked out Nambu tonight as a Twitter client. And hot damn this is what I’ve been waiting for! My old stand-by Twhirl is hitting the trash can tonight.

So here’s a short list of reasons Nambu is the shit:

1. Choose your interface – just your timeline, an “email-style” interface with folders left and tweets right, or a column view ala Tweetdeck. Personally, the email style is exactly what I’ve been looking for. The left column shows Home (your timeline), Mentions (replies), Direct, Sent (oh so useful), Favorites, People (followers/following), Groups, Links, and Search. Each folder shows an unread item count like Mail.app.
2. Smarter links – shortened links are replaced with the target hostname in the tweet. On hover, you see the shortened url and the full url. Seeing the host gives you a clue and seeing just the host keeps it concise. Nice compromise along with the hover.
3. Received/sent links – see JUST links you’ve received or sent, each in its own folder, sans tweet in full form. Very cool for just dipping into the stream for some links.
4. Persistent searches – I can’t live without persistent searches. Twhirl did a good job but Nambu does better. It’s easier to create the search (no need to “activate”), you can mark all items in a search bucket as read or trash them with a click (twhirl desperately needs this).
5. Groups – to me this was the one big benefit of Tweetdeck. I think Nambu does it better plus I don’t have to use that stupid multi-column interface. It does seem like some of the gui around adding/removing users to groups is a little flaky. There are suggestive buttons about groups in the per-tweet menu in a timeline but it doesn’t always seem to be enabled when I think it should be. Still not sure about that. But in general, it’s already helping me find tweets I would have missed before.
6. Translate – if you have a tweet from a different language, there’s a translate button! I tried it on a few Japanese tweets and it worked great. Very cool.
7. Multiple accounts – I have a personal account and an account for the Strange Loop Conference. Nambu makes it easy to use both – just add the new account and you get a new set of folders in your sidebar.
8. Trends – kind of a silly extra but good if you’re really bored.

There are a few little things like replies and retweets that I like marginally better in Twhirl but overall the comparison is not even close. Give it a try!