I'm a big fan of Twitter clients that allow grouping your followee's into groups. Tweetdeck was probably one of the first to do this, and it was a big step forward. Lately, I've been using Nambu and Seesmic Desktop on the desktop (which I feel are about on par with — or slightly better than — Tweetdeck feature-wise, but more importantly: not ugly), and Nambu and BrightKite on my iPhone. BrightKite's auto-post to twitter and built-in image posting (and hosting) makes sites like TwitPic and Posterous seem very kludgy, and I'm happy to be done with them.

It always seems like the latest & greatest twitter client comes along and makes switching seem worth it, so we all switch. That's great. But now, with the advent of grouping, we've run into a problem. Every time I switch clients, I need to re-enter all of my groups, and so far, nobody has found a way to make doing that quick and easy.

Tweetdeck was probably the best and fastest way for creating groups from scratch, with a long list of checkboxes for everyone you follow. That can get a little bit cumbersome when you follow several hundred people, but worse: the list doesn't seem to update often, and it's not really known when that cache updates, or how to force an update, if you even can.

Nambu has a nice dialog for creating and editing groups — when it doesn't cause the client to crash — but it's about this big —> <— (tiny!) and that makes going through a list of 200+ people a royal pain in the ass.

Seesmic Desktop requires you to see the person's tweet in order to add them to a group. You can search for the person's username, but that counts as an API request, so you're limited to a certain number of those per hour, and you share that request pool with updates, so it isn't ideal. And trying to find a single tweet in the "Home" column — which shows several hundred of them — is like trying to find a needle in a hay stack. Worse yet, some people just don't tweet that often, so not only do you have to find that needle, you have to be searching while it's still in the haystack. I like the interface for adding users to groups after the group is already established, but this is far from ideal for creating new groups.

Something I wish all clients had, and I've voiced this on many occasions in the various feedback forums the clients have, is a special group that shows tweets by people that you don't have assigned to any groups. That would make any of these interfaces much more usable, in my opinion, since it's the catch-all bin for anyone that slips through the cracks.

I used a great web-based client, KinkyTwits, that basically accomplished this by allowing you to set an option so that users from groups were not displayed in the Home list. Actually I really loved this client, but it still has some bugs that are show-stoppers. I hear Ben has been thinking about updating it or rewriting it altogether, but haven't seen anything about it in a while.

As much as I would love to see that feature get implemented and become popular, that's not my biggest concern. Switching clients is a hassle. Any time I switch, it takes at least a few hours to get my groups set back up. This is not a unique problem. Think about RSS and having to switch RSS reader applications for one reason or another. Any RSS reader worth its salt can read and write OPML files, which are the standard format for sharing a list of RSS/ATOM feeds.

We need that. We need some sort of standard to develop for storing groups of twitter names. It's really rather simple, and could be represented very easily in XML. If clients started supporting the import and export of these files, trying a new client out could be so much simpler.

Here's just a sample of what I have in mind:

There are so many different ways to skin this cat, but I hope that someone, somewhere, starts this trend, and it catches on. I think it's desperately needed, considering how often a better twitter client surfaces that makes switching worthwhile.