We are proud to have our first guest author at Microblink and today’s post is by Julio Ojeda-Zapata (@jojeda). Julio has been on the front lines of the Internet and computer revolutions as a syndicated columnist, editor and award-winning reporter for more than a decade. He covers consumer technology for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and recently published “Twitter Means Business,” a field guide for companies seeking to master the world of microblogging.

Meet M.A.T.T. (multiple account twitter tweeting)

Like other Twitter power users, I juggle multiple identities.

I have a @jojeda account that is a blend of personal and professional, a @twitinbiz account that is connected with my just-published book about Twitter, and a @PiPress account tied to my newspaper-columnist day job.

All this juggling means I am ravenous for tools that allow me to manage all my Twitter identities more efficiently. A number of such options are available now, or coming soon.

I’ve been testing two promising ones, M.A.T.T. and Splitweet, with mixed results.

Both have a key feature: They let me update any, some or all of my accounts from a unified interface. This is important because sometimes I’ll tweet to both my @jojeda and @twitinbiz tweeps, for instance. It’s great to compose once and send to multiple places.

I am huge on elegance, too, and both services have unusually attractive designs that sucked me in, initially.

I’ve become frustrated with glitches on both sites, though. Log-in issues keep cropping up in both places, for one thing.

Splitweet, like M.A.T.T, lets users post to multiple Twitter accounts from a single, unified interface.

M.A.T.T., short for “multiple account twitter tweeting,” periodically coughs up a fatal-error message (playfully presented but still annoying) and forces me to re-enter my particulars.

Splitweet stubbornly refuses to recognize my password much of the time (yes, I checked that I was typing it in correctly, and even had the service send it to me).

I experience sporadic problems when using M.A.T.T. Updates fail on certain accounts, at times. Lately, for instance, tweets will not go out on my primary account and I have to resend them in the conventional way.

Splitweet is giving me headaches, too. It has an unusually twitchy interface that periodically eats tweets in progress, forcing me to compose them again (and again, and again).

This is a shame because Splitweet, aimed at corporate Twitter users like me, has to be rock-solid (Twitter’s own hiccups are bad enough).

I do like its built-in keyword tracking, which helps me monitor what is being said about me and my brands in the twitterverse, but I won’t use this feature if the site doesn’t behave. There are plenty of other keyword options (such as Twitter’s own search engine).

I really want to like Splitweet, especially, since it has more features than M.A.T.T. and would therefore be my default choice for multi-account updating (though M.A.T.T. has a slight edge in attractiveness and usability).

I also dig that the Splitweet team is Spanish-speaking (como yo). So, guys, a plea:

Arreglen estos problemas, por favor. Se los ruego. (Please fix these problems, I beg of you.)

Update: When I tweeted about this post to my three accounts, I used neither M.A.T.T. nor Splitweet. Nope: The bit.ly URL shortener, it turns out, is a terrific tool for tweeting to multiple accounts in some situations.

In this case, I shortened the Microblink URL via a Firefox bookmarklet, and then had the option to post this directly to one of my accounts. Since all three are registered, I posted to the other two in quick succession.

Nice!