My favorite iPhone clients for IM, Facebook, Twitter and Delicious

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I have found social services such as IM, Facebook, Twitter and Delicious to be very useful on mobile devices. In general, I prefer native mobile applications to web-based mobile applications for their speed and usability.

Beejive IM (App Store link)
Cost: $16
Beejive is a multi-protocol IM client for mobile devices. Bejive version is well-established. In addition to a well established BlackBerry client, Beejive makes a native iPhone client, a web-based iPhone client a Windows Mobile client in beta. The software is more expensive than the average iPhone software although in my experience Beejive is far and away the best mobile IM application. The application is responsive, relatively quick to connect and the user interface is well done. Beejive will cache your connections so that switching in and out of the application does not cause you to disconnect on the iPhone. There is a hack to use Mobile Me to notify you of incoming messages when you are in another application. This hack should be unnecessary once Apple releases the official notification mechanism. My primary gripe is that it does not automatically use existing address book information to attach names to AIM users. If you do not make frequent use of IM from your mobile device it might not be worth the cost. IM+ is a free alternative that is not nearly as nice, but is certainly fine for light use.

Facebook (App Store link)
Cost: free
With the 2.0 release of the Facebook iPhone application (not the web version) most of the limitations of the previous version were removed. It’s not perfect, but it has a nice user interface and is well done overall. It is fast enough to work well over EDGE and allows you to access most features and data you might want including the news feed, notifications, photos, and friend management. There are enough different views for it to be useful. If you use Facebook regularly and you have an iPhone the application is well worth a download.

Twittelator Pro (App Store link)
Cost: $5 (non-pro version free)
Twittelator is a native iPhone Twitter client. There are many competitors although I prefer Twittelator’s user interface and feature set. Twittelator allows you to quickly look at different segments such as friends, replies, everyone, and trending topics. The application supports multiple Twitter and Identi.ca accounts, search, location enhanced features, copy and paste and bookmarking people for quick access and a fair amount of customization. My main gripe is that it does not have an explicit direct messages view. I found I preferred Twittelator to Twitterific or Twinkle.

MyDelicious (App Store link)
Cost: $1.99
MyDelicious is a native Delicious client. It supports searches, tags and offline use. Bookmarks are automatically resynchronized on startup and individual entries can be viewed in either a built-in browser or Safari. Three levels of detail are supported in the views to maximize the amount of information on the screen. I preferred MyDelicious to the Bookmarks Delicious application.