Yesterday, when I wrote that Tweetie was the best iPhone Twitter client not everyone agreed. Fair enough, there are a few other really great ones including Birdfeed (which we’ve covered here) and Echofon (the app formerly known as TwitterFon). And the team behind Echofon has today rolled something that puts it ahead of Tweetie in at least one regard: A native Mac client that syncs with the iPhone client.

While Tweetie does have a (very nice) Mac client, there is no syncing between it and the iPhone version just yet. It is coming, but Echofon has beaten them to the bunch. This puts in in the league with TweetDeck, which also has a desktop and iPhone client that sync, but Echofon is nicer because it’s a native Mac app rather than running on Adobe Air. (Seesmic also has an iPhone app in the works that will sync with its desktop client, though that is again, Air-based.)

So how is Echofon for Mac? It’s great. It’s super simple and very fast. It has a very clean design that is entirely silver and white which features your tweet stream, a new tweet input box along the bottom, and columns for Mentions, Messages, and Search along the top. You are alerted to new message updates by a number (the number of messages) placed next to the column name in which the new messages reside. Updates seem to come in quickly (every couple minutes or so).

Adding a picture to a tweet is as easy as dragging one from your desktop into the new message area. Clicking on someone’s name or picture unveils a new tab that displays all of that users information, including most recent updates.

And yes, there is multiple Twitter account support. There is also the ability to set different types of notifications for new messages including badging dock icons and Growl notifications. Also cool is a Highlights area which allows you to keep track of keywords that you don’t want to miss. Yes, this is basically saved search, but it gives you alerts, just like track of old.

Another nifty little feature is that when you click the reply button on a tweet, the message you’re replying to appears right above the tweet entry field so you remember what you’re supposed to be talking about.

It is important to note that sync only works right now for Echofon Pro users, but if you’ve been addicted to Echofon, hopefully you are using that anyway. (If not, get it, it’s $4.99.) Eventually, the plan is to offer the syncing funtionality with the free version of Echofon as well.

Currently, Echofon for Mac is being offered as a public beta. That means it may be a little buggy, and also missing some features (un, manual refresh?), but is also free. Eventually, when it’s ready to launch, it will carry a price (just as Tweetie for Mac does). Find it here.

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Social media applications are increasingly abstracted from their web-app roots, be it in Adobe air or an iPhone app. Devices like the Chumby have made some inroads towards completely breaking something like Facebook away from your desktop, but they haven't been popular enough or good enough to catch on.

I doubt that will change too much with the Lighthouse SQ7, but I'd be happy to be proved wrong. It's just that incorporating voice recognition technology into your device seems like overreaching, as cool as it would be if it worked.

At any rate, it's good to see companies still plugging away at what seems like a sort of awkward tweener device, but honestly, one I might like to have around. A combination alarm clock, social media doodad, and lightweight browser — fitting somewhere on the twisted continuum between tablet computer and digital picture frame.

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One of the original goals of Google has always been to help people find the information they are looking for and get out of the way as fast as possible. It was a point of pride, and in fact a design principle, to get people off the search results page to other places on the Internet. Yahoo was the site that tried to keep you from ever leaving, Google was the opposite.

Well, it was easier to send people away when Google was just a search engine. Now it has apps and Gmail and Google Maps and Google Books, and a lot of other reasons to stick around on Google itself. But there is still a clear demarcation between its content/communication sites and search. At least there was until late last week when it launched Google Places on Google Maps. Google Places is a local search page for restaurants and other local businesses that brings together the address, phone number, Website, maps, description, directions, photos and reviews all on one page.

When you click on a pin for a local business or place of interest on Google Maps a bubble will open up, and if you click “more info” sometimes it will take you to the Google Places page. So far, so good. Google Places is simply making Google Maps better, right?

The concerns arise, however, back on Google’s main search page, where Google is indexing these Places pages. Since Google controls its own search index, it can push Google Places more prominently if it so desires. There isn’t a heck of a lot of evidence that Google is doing this yet, but the mere fact that Google is indexing these Places pages has the SEO world in a tizzy.

And Google is indexing them, despite assurances to the contrary. If you do a search for the Burdick Chocolate Cafe in Boston, for instance, the Google Places page is the sixth result, above results from Yelp, Yahoo Travel, and New York Times Travel. This wouldn’t be so bad if Google wasn’t already linking to itself in the top “one Box” result, which shows a detail from Google Maps. So within the top ten results, two of them link back to Google content.

Your chances of clicking on a Google page for this particular search are pretty high. Google isn’t sending you away anywhere. And if you do go to the Google Places page for Burdick Chocolate, it is made up of rehashed content from other sites: snippet descriptions from InsiderPages, Judy’s Book, a menu link from AllMenus, photos from CityGuide and Yelp, and reviews from Igougo and CitySearch. On the right is a small Google Map and below that are Google search ads.

It’s actually a pretty useful page, and there is certainly value in aggregating all of this information in one place. Google might even license the data, which would mitigate any protests that it is “stealing” the content like we see with Google News. But nobody really cares about that. The real issue is whether or not Google is going to favor its own pages in its index when it comes to local search. SInce Google’s algorithm is a black box, there is no way to know one way or another. But the question is out there.

Maybe the Google Places page for Burdick Chocolate ranks highly only because Google used it as an example in its pre-briefings and a lot of bloggers subsequently linked to it. The point, though, is that these Google Places are getting into Google’s index. (Tartine Bakery is another example). Even if they make it onto the first page of Google search results for legitimate reasons, their very presence goes against the fundamental principle that Google’s main purpose is to link out to the best information on the Web, not to hoard the links for itself.

We know what will happen if it keeps going down this path. It will turn into Yahoo.

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On the Web there are easy ways to search patents, but trademarks are still lost in government websites that are not particularly search-friendly. One of the DemoPit companies that launched at TechCrunch50 is addressing this problem with a website that makes trademark search a breeze.

Trademarkia let’s you search all U.S. trademarks filed since 1870, including dead marks. The company has scans of all the marks and returns results in a very appealing visual grid. You can search by company, theme, product category, or even filing attorney. Companies can also file a trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office through the site.

Trademarkia is a great resource for anyone researching trademarks, companies getting ready to file a trademark, or even product and brand logo designers. It operates much like a domain registrar like GoDaddy. Instead of searching for available domain URLs, you search for trademarks, and if they are available, you can register them for a fee.

Let’s say you want to use a Pegasus for your company’s new logo. On Trademarkia, you can search all trademarks with a pegasus to make sure you are not duplicating someone else’s mark. You can search for dead marks, and if you like one, you can register it for $159.

You can also can look at all 408 trademarks registered to Apple, or sort them to see just the 85 marks Apple has allowed to expire. Some of Apple’s toss-aways include “Mactel,” “iMusic,” “Vingle,” “Xray,” and something called the “Graphulator.” At one point Apple also trademarked “Cougar” and “Lynx” for its Mac OS series, but it let them die. Those are currently available.

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