twhirl, a desktop client for Twitter & Friendfeed, has been updated. It looks like it’s moving in the direction of becoming a general social networking client.

According to it the official announcement:

We took our time to make Friendfeed a lot more usable and add a few very nice features, including rooms support for Friendfeed, auto-throttling for reduced Twitter API limits, hiding old Twitter messages from previous sessions, system status notifications and much more. And, finally, summize.com search!

Here’s a screenshot of the new version:

New Features

Highlights of the new version:

• Better Friendfeed support: Twhirl now displays the user’s avatar, his name, and the date when the item was originally posted at the top, and includes all other information below. Comments are now scrollable inline if they extend a certain height, just click on the comment area to make the scroll bar appear. The icons for comments and likes now work as buttons to add your own comment or show that you like an entry.
• Auto-throttling Twitter API usage – If you have the option “follow reduced API limits” enabled (it is by default), twhirl will not use more than 80% of the currently allowed requests for automatic refreshing.
• Status information – twhirl now displays status about the app and Twitter.
• No more old new messages – twhirl now remembers what it has already received in a previous session, and will not show these tweets or messages again the next time you start it.
• Search using summize.com – you can now use summize.com to search twitter. Just go to the search panel, select summize from the drop down list, and enter your query

twhirl also now supports Seesmic, too. Here’s Seesmic founder Loic Lemeur announcing the new feature: