Scott Design

If you’re having a hard time making sense of all the tweets in the Twitter stream, it might be time for you to start using a Twitter application to organize your tweets for maximum readability. With a Twitter application, you can group the tweets in logical categories and really start to read only those tweets that interest you.

If you think of all the tweets that are being sent as a wide stream, all of the tweets from the people you follow are a small branch of that stream. At any time, you can dip into the river and take a look at those tweets going by, just by looking at the 20 tweets on your Twitter.com home page.

But if you follow a lot of tweeters, you should consider using one of the Twitter applications that are available to help you manage your tweets. I use TweetDeck, which is available as a computer application and iPhone and iPad apps.

Using TweetDeck, I can add people to Twitter lists or TweetDeck groups that I create so that it’s easier for me to follow the tweets. Each of the lists or groups appears in a column on TweetDeck, through which I can easily scroll. I have lists for people I know, fellow designers, news outlets, people who share business news, and more. I also have columns for messages I’ve sent and received, as well as for search terms that I follow. There’s also a column for the tweets from people I haven’t added to lists yet.

And, TweetDeck also lets you add columns for your Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections so you can monitor their status updates from TweetDeck without having to visit those sites.

Now that I’ve started using TweetDeck, I don’t think that I would be able to work without it! It truly turns the wild river of Twitter into a nice meandering stream.

I’d love to hear how other people are taming the Twitter stream. Which Twitter applications do you recommend?

Tags: social media, twitter

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Technology . 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.