If you enjoy using social software sites such as Twitter, FriendFeed, Identi.ca and Seesmic you might have seen the Twhirl client and wished you could run it on your Ubuntu machine, but the current (at the time of writing) front page of the Twhirl site says that it is only available on Windows and Mac platforms. Well, wish no more because it is possible to run Twhirl on your Ubuntu machine (including 64 bit versions), and even on your Easy Peasy Netbook (and anything else running Ubuntu Netbook Remix). I've asked if it is possible to update the Twhirl front page to reflect the fact that it also works on Ubuntu, so hopefully that will change soon.

It has been a very interesting year for social networking, microblogging, the practice of sharing short messages with followers has really caught on and Twitter has certainly enjoyed the most buzz of 2008. A notable feature though of Twitter's rise has been the number of problems they have and its bizarre reverse product development cycle, it now has less features than when I first joined; and all in the name of stability, a goal that Twitter is going through a lot of pain to achieve. In the background though has been the looming presence of FriendFeed, a service that aggregates streams from various web 2.0 services and has the ability for users to post comments. It was founded by some former Google employees and has been adding some very interesting features recently such as rooms and real time feeds. That's right - they've been adding features not taking them away! I've noticed FriendFeed is becoming more and more useful to me as it attracts users and it will be interesting to see how this develops in 2009.