Name: Twimbow

Quick Pitch: Twimbow is a colorful, web-based Twitter client with a focus on filtering.

Genius Idea: This app embraces the concept that, for some of us, Twitter is the new email.

At first glance, the interface will remind you of Tweetdeckand Seesmic Web so much it’ll make your head hurt. The feature sets are almost identical, with both Seesmic and Tweetdeck having the relative advantages of age, stability, and a generally more thorough toolbelt for users, including multiple apps and multiple accounts.

(Note: While Tweetdeck doesn’t yet have a web-based client, we saw them demo one at Google I/O.)

Twimbow’s main distinction lies withing its bright and shiny interface, which lets you assign a different color to different users and groups and change the color of a tweet shown in the app by adding a #color tag. You can then sort and filter tweets by color. In the end, it works kind of like Gmail’s labels and folders.

In future iterations, you’ll be able to track and color-code keywords, too, making Twimbow an interesting and viable option for brand managers and social media marketers.

All your conversations, DMs, favorites and retweets are contained in a single column; the colored filters do the sorting for you, even turning certain people or “colors” on and off at your discretion. (This is a particularly great feature when a buddy is attending a conference and decides to start live-tweeting a panel that has no relevance to you. You can temporarily “mute” the chatterbox without unfollowing him or her.)

Twimbow’s creators used HTML5 and CSS3 to create this interesting and useful web app.

If you think this app is something you’d like to test or use, go to the Twimbow site to sign up for notification. The app is currently in a gloriously buggy pre-alpha with a proper alpha coming in a few weeks and a more stable public beta rolling out this fall.

How do you think Twimbow will fare in the competitive market of Twitter clients?

Fans of the popular Seesmic Twitter client’s web-based interface have some good news today. A major update to the web interface brings in a brand new contact manager, drag-and-drop full Twitter list management, photo uploads with geotagging, Tweetmeme support and a conversational threading feature that lets you call up back-and-forth exchanges you’ve had on Twitter into a collated conversation pop-up view.

We had a chance to check out the new features and are especially excited about the conversational threads feature. Pictured below, the new option aggregates Twitter conversations into a pop-up chronological view of @replies that transpired during the Twitter exchange between you and user user(s). It’s a great way to pull in a cohesive view of a Twitter conversation, available wherever you see the “in reply to” link beneath an individual tweet. It doesn’t even have to be your own conversation thread; you can enable it to get a clearer picture of conversations among those you follow as well.

The other big new addition is a contact manager, a new feature exclusive to Seesmic (pictured below). At the top left you’ll see toggle buttons between Home, Messages and Contacts. Clicking the Contacts button takes you to the new address book-like tool that collates information about your followers, the people following you, and members of any of your Lists. You can send messages and follow or unfollow individual Twitter users from here, see their bios, and drag and drop them into existing lists (or create new lists).

List management is another new feature in this Seesmic Web update, and the drag and drop functionality is intuitive and easy to use. Inline photo uploading is also now supported, with the status update entry box containing a “Picture” button at the bottom allowing you to include a photo in your tweet from either your local machine or the web. The “Location” button next to the Picture button also allows you to enable the geolocation information to be sent with your update (requires Google Gears to be installed).

In addition to the new functionality, Seesmic Web also got a number of design tweaks and improvements for an easier-to-use interface. Are you a user of Seesmic Web? What do you think of the changes?