Occasionally, someone will ask me how do I manage all those people that I follow on twitter. One comment I’ve gotten is: “there’s no way that you can pay attention to what 4,000+ people are saying.” Which is true.
If I were to use the web interface to keep up with people, there would be no real way to keep up with everything.
I’ve tried using a lot of different programs, to manage my twitter feed. After trying many different ones, I found one that works well for me. I use a program called Tweetdeck.
Tweetdeck lets me separate people into columns, or groups and the groups are stored on a Tweetdeck computer somewhere in the ether. What that means is that no matter what computer I sit at, if it has Tweetdeck installed, I will have access to my columns. Tweetdeck even has an iPhone version of the application. I’ll go out on a limb and say that the reason that the Twitter website now supports “lists” is because so many people used Tweetdeck for the columns that they had no choice but to adopt that feature.
The picture below shows my tweetdeck columns. I have about 9 columns, but I only display 3-4 at any one time. Click on the image to see a much larger version of it.
Columns, aka groups, are easy to setup in Tweetdeck and the 3 standard Twitter columns (All tweets, @messages and Direct Messages) are setup for you by default. If you have a preferred Twitter client, what is it and why do you use it?
