Okay, so as you may already know I’m a big fan of any software solution that does what I need in a portable and platform agnostic way, particularly if it does it ”in the cloud”.

What you may not know, is that I’m addicted to Twitter and I’ve been going through desktop based Twitter clients faster than my Cadillac beer bongs fuel!  My affair with desktop clients started with TweetDeck, since it’s used by a lot of my friends on Twitter and it seemed to be a front runner.  The problem is that it’s in beta, and it’s a bit buggy still.  Worse yet, it doesn’t run on my linux box.  In fact, no decent Twitter client does work on my linux box.  I’ve also tried Twhirl, and DestroyTwitter.  Both of which lack all the features TweetDeck has, and none of which work “quite right” on my linux box.

And, as if to add insult to injury the company I work for has recently been acquired by a MUCH bigger company which is imposing a lot of new restrictions to the use of our desktop computers.  Meaning I’ll likely not be able to install a Twitter desktop app on my computer in about a month.

Enter TwitterGadget, pictured above.  It’s an iGoogle gadget so it runs in my browser, on windows or linux, without installing!  And it’s quite featureful too! It has built in URL shortening which is one of the features I miss most from other desktop apps.  The one feature I hope to be included soon is TweetShrink integration, but I’ll live without it.

Hopefully I won’t have to change Twitter clients for a while now!  :-)