Most modern Twitter clients try to add as many bells and whistles to their feature sets as possible. The latest version of the Seesmic Desktop, for example, now features a plugin architecture that lets you add over 40 different services and social networks. Sometimes, however, you just want a very basic Twitter experience on your desktop. That’s where Itsy comes in. Itsy is a Twitter client for the Mac that offers no more than the bare minimum of features to make Twitter work.
Itsy has been around for a while, but it has been getting some good press lately, so we thought it was time to give it a try ourselves. Most of us here at ReadWriteWeb use a column-based Twitter client like TweetDeck or Seesmic. The reason for this is that we use Twitter extensively to do our jobs and tend to track multiple lists and searches at the same time. For most Twitter, users, though, this can be overkill.
Itsy is a one-column client that is somewhat reminiscent of Twhirl – one of the most popular clients during the early days of Twitter. It is definitely not a client for power users (it doesn’t even feature lists), but thanks to its minimalist design and Growl integration, it’s perfect for novice Twitter users who only follow a limited number of other users and don’t need persistent searches, lists and integration with other social networks.
It does feature all the necessary tools, though. You can, for example, view images inline (though not upload them), see reply chains and use Twitter search.
If you want to give it a try, you can download it here.
