What are you doing?

That’s the question Twitter has been answering — in 140 characters or less — since its launch in October, 2006. Part instant messaging client, part microblog, Twitter has become a legitimate social networking tool in just over a year. At last count, some 770,000 users were tweeting, with more on the way.

One of the reasons for Twitter’s explosive growth is a new generation of software and services. With 3rd party tools such as Terramind’s Twitter search engine and a host of easy-to-use desktop clients, Twitter seems poised for another big year.

Among the more compelling new offerings is Snitter, a compact and feature-laden Twitter client for Mac and Windows. Originally conceived as a test project to demonstrate the capabilities of Adobe’s new AIR development toolkit, Snitter has quickly established itself a power tool for heavy Twitter users.

The beauty of Snitter is its integration of most of the Twitter website’s key functions. There are paned windows to quickly view recent replies (tweets mentioning a user’s screen name) and direct private messages. It’s easy to look up a Twitter user’s profile and recent chatter, manage one’s friends list, and search for interesting content: all from within Snitter’s IM-like interface. There’s also a full complement of keyboard commands, if that’s how you roll.

Snitter is a fairly lightweight download, though it does require the latest version of the Adobe AIR runtime. Both are available on the Snitter site.

And you’ll find snarfd on Twitter. There’s a dedicate channel with notifications of new snarfd posts, and both Shea and I will be happy to hook up with you. Shea is here, and I’m here. Follow us, and we’ll follow you back.

Link: Snitter (Thanks to Gary for research assistance)