Split your Twitter friends into Groups with TweetDeck

I wrote a post about Twitter Following Habits on Xfep yesterday and spoke about Michael Arrington’s recent post about Twitter needing a fake follow button so that you didn’t offend people who followed you by not following them in return. Twitter and FriendFeed have hinted that in the next few weeks a group function may be integrated into their systems which I think would be a great feature and would help prioritize who you want updates from.

In the comments section of my post, Bill Deys and Rebecca Atkinson (Muller) both recommended a Twitter client called TweetDeck. I tried out several Twitter Clients in May but I went back to using the main Twitter website as I found the constant updating distracting.

TweetDeck

Twitter is a fantastic tool however the updates from people you follow are all displayed on the same page. This isn’t ideal as some people send dozens of Tweets a day whereas others only send one or two updates and sometimes these people post more relevant updates (for example great links or breaking news or whatever). TweetDeck looks to solve this by enabling users to split their main feed into topic or group specific columns allowing a broader overview of tweets. I have spoke before about how following too many people can make Twitter unusable so this is incredibly handy and helps manage this problem more effectively.

By default TweetDeck loads with 3 columns : All Tweets to the left hand side, replies to your Tweets in the centre and direct messages to the right hand side. Direct messages is something that I personally don’t get a lot of so I deleted this column. In it’s place I set up two groups, one group has bloggers I follow which usually post newsbreaking links, the other is a group of bloggers I speak to on a regular basis so I’m more interested in what they have to say (compared to some other people I follow who I’ve not had any dealings with).

It’s amazing how easy it is to customize the display to suit your needs. I do hope Twitter hopes some group functionality in the future but until then TweetDeck will be a regular feature on my desktop. If you use Twitter on a regular basis I recommend checking it out.

Link : TweetDeck

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