Twitter.com is still, by far, the most popular path for users to update their status on Twitter, but TweetDeck has a firm grip on the lead for third-party clients, according to an analysis of 500 million tweets over the past five months by Sysomos, ReadWriteWeb reported.

Nearly 47% of updates are processed via Twitter.com, ReadWriteWeb reported. TweetDeck is responsible for 8.48%, followed by Tweetie at 2.83%, Twitterific at 1.63% and Seesmic at 1.11%.

However, according to ReadWriteWeb, Sysomos found that for active Twitter users, TweetDeck users send out 1.24 tweets per day, followed by Seesmic (1.18) and HootSuite (1.11), with those using Twitter.com only sending out 0.67 tweets per day.