Some readers took issue with our list of Top 21 Twitter Applications (According To Compete), wherein we tried to gauge which Twitter Web apps were gaining the most benefit in the form of trickle -down traffic from Twitter. Most Twitter apps don’t even register on the majority of site measurement services. We chose Compete because at least they had stats on a good many of them. We figured even if the absolute numbers are wrong, at least we’d get an interesting ranking.

What Compete does not measure very well is Twitter traffic from desktop and mobile clients. One service that tries to measure that is Twitstat. So take your pick, clients versus Web apps. Which is the stronger list (meaning which list has the most companies likely to amount to something)?

Below are the top 21 Twitter clients from its bigger list of 99, ranked by percentage of users who opt for that method of Tweeting. The Web ranks No. 1 with 32 percent (presumably that is Twitter.com itself), followed by Tweetdeck and Twhirl (there, are you happy Loic?), with 16 percent and 7 percent, respectively. Twitstat also counts services such as Ping.fm (no. 12) and FreindFeed (no. 14) as Twitter clients, although they do a lot more than just support Twitter. But then again, the majority of activity on those services is Twitter, so you could argue it either way.

Image courtesy Mykl Roventine.