TweetDeck: Just What Twitter Needs

I've been experimenting more with Twitter over the past two months and I'm happy to report that, similar to my iPhone experience, I've got from skeptic to advocate.  It started slowly with the twhirl client on my laptop and any one of a number of apps formerly on a Blackberry and more recently on my iPhone.  Each of these tools and approaches were useful but the real breakthrough came when several people recommended TweetDeck.

What's so special about TweetDeck?  It's all about the columns.  While other clients offer a number of ways to filter and rearrange tweets, TweetDeck's column approach just feels much more natural.  A column can be configured to just show tweets from a list of people, so I have one set up to show all the tweets from my O'Reilly colleagues, for example.  And while that's nice all by itself, an even more useful function is the ability to save searches in TweetDeck columns.  I have a column for "Kindle" and another one for "iPhone," which enable me to quickly scan the Twittersphere for all the latest tweets covering both of these gadgets.

My only beef about TweetDeck is that you can't stack columns.  Every column extends from top to bottom of the window, so even though I may only care to see the last 2-3 tweets for each column I'm forced to see an entire screen's worth.  This is a pretty common complaint so I'm hoping it will be addressed in a future version.

Finally, here's another confession I need to make about Twitter: I find I'm more active on it than I am on either of my blogs these days.  I still try to feed both blogs regularly but if you'd like to see more frequent, albeit bite-sized, commentary from me, look for me on Twitter.