More than 30 friends on Twitter? You need TweetDeck!
by Richard on Oct.21, 2008, under Technology
Twitter [www.twitter.com] is great. Its a really easy way to keep in touch with people you know, but also to keep tabs on people you don;t know but would like to, and also those who you will never know but only dream about.
My friends fall into 3 distinct groups:
- Real friends - People I know and have possibly even met
- Publishers - People who say stuff on Twitter that I find interesting and/or useful
- Celebs - Not just true celebreties but generally people who I will probably never meet
I interract with these groups in very different ways.
- For my real friends I want to read every tweet as it comes in so I can react and hold conversations with them.
- When a publisher tweets I may well read it it it is relevant to me and possibly respond.
- My celeb tweets will generally only be read at the end or start of the day.
i have also divided up my friends geographically so I can focus my attention on conversations in the USA, UK, France and the rest of the world.
How on earth do I sort through all these? By the power of Greyskull TweetDeck [www.tweetdeck.com].
Got to get grouping!
As I have blogged previously, my Twitter client of choice has been Twhirl [www.twhirl.org] , but recent improvements to TweetDeck caught my eye and I decided to give it a go. And boy am I glad I did as I am now so happy with it.
Basically the big win for TweetDeck over Twhirl (and every other twitter client that I know of) is its group function. I can assign each of my Twitter friends to any number of groups, and the tweets that fall under each group are displayed in their own column. So this then allows me to seperate out my conversations with my friends down the road from the ramblings of Scobelizer and chums. My “publisher” friends have their own group so I can pick out what is relevant, while the “celeb” group gets pushed out to the right-hand column where it can be viewed late in the day over a glass of wine.
Monitoring your brand
And groups are not just limited to individual users that you select. You can also create a group from a search. So, when it was the recent Future of Web Apps conference in London and I wanted to keep up with the chatter around it, I simply searched for “FOWA” in TweetDeck and that became a new column. Every time someone mentioned FOWA in a tweet somewhere on Twitter, it showed up in my FOWA column. Perfect!
Want to keep a look out for your brand name being mentioned? Search for “eDoofers” in Tweetdeck and everytime someone mentions “eDoofers” in a tweet, you’ll get it right there in your client. Better than alerts as you don’t need to check an email or read a text message. Everything you need it there in the client.
Iain Dodsworth [www.twitter.com/iaindodsworth] the developer is a very active tweeter and seems very open to new ideas and reports of problems, which is really encouraging. At the moment I am eagerly awaiting the release of v0.20 which is expected to bring big improvements due to a reworking of the underlying structure of the client
And don’t get me wrong, there is still room for improvement. The manner in which you create groups of people could be better, and it is still a little rough round the edges. The notifications could be better too (I like the notifications from Feedalizr [www.feedalizr.com], mentioned in my last post [here] ).
The must-have tool
But overall TweetDeck is now a gerat product and should really be on the desktop of every windows-based Twitter user. Especially those with a large number of friends. How one can manage more than 20 or 30 Twitter friends without TweetDeck is beyond me. It has become one of my most essential communication tools and I look forward to seeing what else it has to offer in the future.
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October 21st, 2008 on 7:59 am
Ok - sold - will try later - I gave up on twhirl a while back..not even sure why if honest.
October 21st, 2008 on 9:20 am
Ah good man. About time you got out of the dark ages…