I try gwibber (the default twitter client that comes with Ubuntu Lucid) and I don’t like the UI that they proposed. I also tried the echofon firefox extension but I wanted something integrated with the OS.
I will give it a try to Turpial it seems lighter and more intuitive.
http://turpial.org.ve/downloads/
the deb package
https://launchpad.net/~effie-jayx/+archive/turpial/+files/turpial_1.0-0ubuntu1_all.deb