When I first started using Twitter it was unimaginable to me that anyone could follow a thousand or more people. Today I follow some 6,000 users and have over 7,000 following me. Best of all, I have formed great friendships with a very large chunk of them.
So how do I keep it all straight? I use several applications and Web sites to help organize.
TweetDeck
A robust and widely used app TweetDeck is also one of the most annoying things a person can use out of the box. It runs on Adobe Air making it available on the PC, Mac & Linux. The annoying part is that TweetDeck goes out of its way to get your attention, making noises, popping up messages and jumping out at you as much as possible. Do yourself a favor, after install go to Preferences and turn those things off.
The great thing i
s that TweetDeck allows you to organize your tweetstream into columns, where only the messages you want show up. You can have a column just for @replies, Direct Messages, one for the entire stream and columns that just show the tweets from users you group into lists.
Other things you can do? TweetDeck integrates with Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn so you can send one message to multiple places and keep an eye on all of your contacts and connections. TweetDeck also connects into bit.ly the popular url shortener. So if you have a bit.ly account every url you shorten within TweetDeck will automatically be recorded, giving you access to statistics on everything you share.
Too complex for your tastes? Try Echofon
Tweetie 2
Tweetie 2 is my favorite iPhone app, period. Tweetie gives you the ability to access and organize your lists in a way that begins to make perfect sense and is intuitive to navigate. The application looks great and I have rarily experienced a fail (Though it did fail on me while writing this, of course!)
With that said, there are two things I wish Tweetie 2 would change immediately:
1) I wish it would integrate with bit.ly instead of the other url shortening services.
2) Tweetie does not handle RT’s the way users do. Instead of hitting a RT button and having it appear as RT @tippingptmedia the program reposts the tweet with a / via @tippingptmedia instead. Every time I retweet I copy and paste off the last part and have to delete the /via. It is a major pain.
Other than that I cannot recommend the program enough!
Hootsuite
Last but not least is a program that combines all of the great features of TweetDeck with a Web interface so you don’t have to download a program, you can just login from the Web. There is not much to say that hasn’t already been covered, Hootsuite has columns and can connect with different services. The one key addition is the ability to schedule status updates. So if you run multiple accounts or want to say something specific but won’t be around to say it live, you can just schedule it.
We have been using Hootsuite more around the office and recommending it to people because of its portability and ease of use.
This entry was posted posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 8:23 pm and is filed under Favorite Fridays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
