TweetDeck

March 5th, 2009

Available at http://www.TweetDeck.com

The first thing that happens once you start expanding your Twitter network; it becomes overwhelming communicating with all your tweople (people).  You login to Twitter, and you have hundreds (or thousands) of people in your stream.  Some of those people you communicate with often, others rarely or not at all.  Everything is in the same “main” stream, with no filtering, which makes for a difficult time to look through everyones’ tweets.

TweetDeck is the perfect tool that helps break down twitter into manageable, smaller pieces, and best of all its free.  Just like when you are getting hundreds of emails every day, you need to prioritize which ones you are actually going to reply too, which you will forward to friends and which you will delete or ignore.  TweetDeck allows just this by filtering based upon groups.  For example you can have one group for all of your twitter friends (main stream), another group for your VIP people, and another group for family and friends.  You can categorize your groups however you please, but the beauty is now you have different streams with different importance.  Also very important, is the fact that you have a group for all tweets that are replies to you or reference your @name in the tweet, and another group for all direct messages.

Here is an image of TweetDeck and notice how each group is displayed in a separate column or stream, keeping things manageable.

This makes it a hundred times easier to respond and interact with the people that are important to you on twitter, as well as those that you are trying to build a relationship with, not just the random passerby.  Once you start using TweetDeck and have it set-up to your preferences, it will be very difficult to go back and use the standard interface available by Twitter.  Even with your already filtered groups, you can then filter even further, based upon time, username, etc.

Besides being able to create groups to your heart’s desire and filter your main twitter stream, there is a lot more useful functionality in TweetDeck.  Since we all know that we can only have a 140 characters per tweet, we need to save as many characters as possible when posting tweets.  The easiest way to this is shortening URLs that are included in a tweet.  TweetDeck has interfaces into a couple of these free services and lets you shorten a URL before you post it into your tweet.  Also is the ability to upload images right form your computer and post a TwitPic into your tweet.  Another cool feature is the ability to shorten your tweet, meaning it will take words like “too” and convert them into “2” and so forth, like you would when “u txt msg some1”.  Another neat feature is the ability to translate your tweets into another language.

When you hover over your friend’s name, there are also a bunch of options.  You can follow and unfollow that person, reply, retweet, add to a group, direct message and view that person’s profile(which can be done without going to an internet browser), as well as  plethora of other options!  By now you should be starting to see some of the power that TweetDeck gives you

The options are really very abundant.  You can change color and fonts and all of the other aesthetics to make TweetDeck pleasing to your personal style.  A search function and advanced options are available to determine how TweetDeck uses the API calls and other technical mumbo jumbo.  I would recommend learning the functionality as need be.  Start with separating your main stream into groups.  As you start tweeting, most of the functionality is self explanatory and will be easy for you to figure out on your own.  I have talked to a number of Twitter power users, and they all use TweetDeck.  Just like anything else TweetDeck is evolving, as more ways to use twitter become uncovered, more functions get added, I believe I have already seen 3 or 4 updates since I started using TweetDeck.

Entry Filed under: Twitter Tools