The Rolls Royce of Twitter clients!

Twitter is making the transition from niche social networking tool to mass market craze, and there are increasing numbers of ways to ‘tweet’. Blu is a Windows Vista only Twitter client, so you can keep abreast of your friend’s thoughts and activities without your browser.

What makes Blu stand out from the crowd is its flashy and slick translucent interface. It opens with a very modern graphical flourish, with a smoothly animated logo that then sits on the client. The opacity can be set as you like, although that’s the only visual change you can make. The twitter feed itself can be scrolled endlessly – as you scroll down it loads up your history accordingly. The bottom of the panel features buttons to write a twitter update, refresh the feed, read your direct mail and check out your favorite twitter friends. One cool feature is URLs pasted into your update are automatically converted to tinyURL, saving you precious letter space.

Blu should be lauded for having a name that doesn’t feature some the prefix ‘Twit’, but it is not perfect. firstly, the feed only updates every 2 minutes – it’s not ‘live’, and it would be better if when minimized it sat in the toolbar, as having a client like this open all the time will add to the clutter on your task bar. The biggest problem with Blu, however, is its memory usage. When you refresh the feed Blu flashes, and it looks great, but really eats into your CPU usage, as do all of Blu’s functions! If you have a powerful computer, this won’t worry you much, but it seems unnecessarily hungry for an app of this type.

If you have Vista, a super fast computer and you really love Twitter, Blu could be the client for you, but essentially it’s just too system hungry.