Twitter has rapidly become the social networking tool that everyone and his or her dog is using.

Apart from keeping up with your favorite celebrity though is its very real use as a promotional tool. Plenty of Twitterers are simply talking up their services, blogs and websites.

If you’re an early adopter you probably have a number of Twitter clients installed including the once top dog Twitterific.

Current favorites among the Twitterati are TweetDeck and the downright ugly but feature rich Twhirl. If you like the feature set of TweetDeck but not the problems associated with running Adobe Air applications then Nambu is worth a look if you are a Mac user.

It’s a native OSX application with a familiar face, similar to Apple Mail. But it has some nice features including three different views, multiple columns, search, and threaded conversations.

Other features that set Nambu apart from its competitors include the ability to translate any tweet into English with a simple keyboard shortcut You can add users to a group from a right-click menu. Nambu can also auto-complete the names of users you follow when you write a new message. Nambu also supports more than one Twitter account, and for URL-shortening, it currently defaults to tr.im, which was developed by the Nambu team.

Nambu is still in beta but the developers are active and working hard to iron out the bugs and add features. There is also a nice Nambu iPhone Twitter app and the developers are planning to add syncronisation between this and the desktop application.

So if you like TweetDeck and are on a Mac, Nambu is well worth a look. And it’s free.