Gwibber does one thing that no other microblogging app I’ve ever used can do. It’s simple and obvious, and in my opinion makes it an indispensable tool for someone with multiple accounts on Twitter and/or Identi.ca

And here it is. Can you see it? I’ve got a pair each of Twitter & Identi.ca accounts, and Gwibber displays all my messages in a single stream.

And that’s pretty much it.

Oh, you can colour-code your messages like I’ve done to quickly figure out which account they’re coming from, and you can also display the message stream from any individual account. But displaying everything in a single pane allows me to keep Gwibber and my browser window open on the same desktop. Like this.

It’s such a simple thing, but no other app that I know of does this.

Version 2.0 of Gwibber has support for the following social networks:

The advanced functionality for many of these networks is a bit sketchy — liking on Facebook or FriendFeed, upvoting on Digg, etc. — but support for Identi.ca and Twitter is rock-solid.

Gwibber 2.30, the version bundled with the latest Ubuntu and its variants, drops support for Brightkite and OCS but adds the ability to display multiple tabs, as you can see in the screen grab above.

Is there a downside to Gwibber? Absolutely. It uses a lot of system resources when running and the latest version freezes up altogether on at least one of my machines. And if you need full support for networks beyond Twitter and Identi.ca you’re probably better off looking somewhere else.

But Gwibber gives me that one thing that no other app can, an aggregate of four networks displayed in a single stream. It’s not perfect by any means, but for the moment it’s the best microblogging client for me.