Background: I’m an active Twitter user and have been using what I would consider the best Twitter client, TweetDeck, for a couple of months.

Sure it’s had some weird idiosyncrasies like having to shut it down so I could run more bandwidth-intensive applications or MMPOGs on my system, but on the whole, it’s been a pleasant experience (read my earlier review)

I may or may not be the typical Tweetdeck user – here’re my usage habits:

• My computers are on 24-7. I run mainly Windows XP operating systems (a combination of Professional and Home editions). I reboot when virtual memory drops “dangerously low” or I get a BSOD (blue screen of death).
• I follow about 200+ Twitter users, some of whom tweet as many as 50 times a day or more.
• I live in a GMT+8 timezone (which is 13 hours ahead of EST now. My night is your day. I’m snoozing while you’re working)

As a result, it’s not uncommon to wake up to 500+ tweets during the 6 hours I’m sleeping.

Particularly today, my machine crawled to a grinding crawl, and pulling up the Windows Task Manager (hit alt-ctrl-delete to see this):

Coming in at #1, TweetDeck with a pretty monstrous 334 MB of memory usage (followed by Firefox where I had about 30 tabs open).

And a screenshot a few minutes later:

So I’ve had to shut TweetDeck down, as almost every other application was pretty unusable.

Dave Davis AKA RedFly mentioned that TweetDeck’s memory leak issue had been Dugg (the orig post has since been removed) though I found another blog post mentioning the leak.

There’s speculation that the Adobe AIR runtime is responsible for the memory leak. Others are saying TweetDeck is the culprit.

With some probing, I saw mentions on the TweetDeck posterous/wall/blog or on TweetDeck founder/developer Iain Dodsworth’s twitter stream.

In response to a user’s complaint that TweetDeck had swallowed 1.4 GB of ram, Iain responded: “yep will fix ASAP – in meantime just restart app to release memory and go back to starting memory usage amount”

Iain has also mentioned incremental upgrades are on the way with a major release scheduled soon. Hopefully, Iain will kill the memory problem dead.

I still think TweetDeck is still the best fraking Twitter app out there, especially if you’re following more than 50 twitter users. The memory leak issue should be addressed soon.

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Update: If you leave TweetDeck on 24-7, it looks like you can keep a maximum of 500 backlogged/unread tweets, so there is a buffer for 500 tweets. As new ones come on, the old ones fall off your viewable page.

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Follow me on twitter.

If you are a Twitter user, you might want to take a close look at TweetDeck, especially with their recent feature upgrade.

Having gone through a couple of other Twitter clients (they essentially bring Twitter updates to your desktop via the API and provide additional functions) like Twhirl, I will be using TweetDeck for a long time.

For starters, with the recent v0.21.5b upgrade, the client includes the option of a 4th column, you’re also able to perform a search within TweetDeck and setup groups and follow friends more easily.

Unless you’re a strict stickler to talking to 1 person at a time, the multi-threaded approach to managing conversations makes Twitter more managable, especially once you’ve breached the “100 people you are talking” to mark.

Here’s one use of the search function: Being able to search by username or keyword and looking at the progression of the topic:

Take note that these functions are not groundbreaking or new, you could already follow these searches by opening up multiple windows and heading over to search.twitter.com and typing in keywords or usernames.

But what is useful is how TweetDeck makes these functions more accessible through icons, rather than bookmarked or type-in URLs.

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Additionally as you build up a group of followers, you can sort them using the groups function.

Sam Harrelson has got about 4 groups set up now, and this is a good way to keep work and family separate (although your boss will still read your “had too much to drink, gonna call in sick” tweets in your public timeline.

To the veteran Twitter user, these changes aren’t as much revolutionary as they make Twitter less of a pain in the butt to use.

For neophyte Twitter users, the simplication process can smoothen the learning curve.

I just wonder if Twitter users increasingly move towards client programs to access updates, rather than visit the site, does this change from a presence-based model (the idea of visit a “website” to get your site) to a “pulled content” model signal a change in the winds?

If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, you can follow me at: http://twitter.com/andrewwee