Twitter | Twitter

Twitter is the millennial megaphone, turning anyone who signs on into a 140-character broadcaster. It's also a fantastically efficient way to find out what's occurring at this historical moment, from an array of perspectives. The app takes that experience and puts it in your pocket.

The first generation of third-party Twitter clients for mobile devices were what made the service take off. The company spent time studying those early adopters, then bought the best one , the iPhone-only Tweetie, and turned it into this multi-platform must-have.

Nobody wants to read long-form on small screens, so Twitter added a "Read Later" button that sends links to Instapaper . It can wrangle multiple accounts without requiring you to log in or out; keeping up with, say, a work account and a personal account is actually easier on a device than on the web. Built-in location services let you broadcast your 20 to the world and see what's going on around you. The movable interface makes the most out of gesture controls, with cascading windows as slick as any riverbed. And the embedded browser and video player let you see what's the happs without leaving the app.

One caveat: Twitter's quality varies wildly across platforms. It soars on the iPhone, cruises along nicely on the iPad, and is about as pretty as a plane crash on Android - and just as much fun, too!