Twitter is a powerful networking tool to have on your side – you can learn more about Twitter on our Twitter Resources page.

Once you start Twittering you may want to follow others, and others will likely start following you; you may then soon discover keeping track of everything can start to get tricky. If you follow hundreds (or even thousands) of people yourself, finding your way through all the tweets can be time consuming and disjointed. The sheer volume of Twitters 140 character tweets can be too much to cope with, so any method which helps you manage it better is welcome.

That is where TweetDeck comes in. TweetDeck is a desktop application describing itself as being able to “…evolve the existing functionality of Twitter.” and what it does – it does really well.

TweetDeck is a third-party client for Twitter (meaning it is not developed by the Twitter people) and it allows you to make some sense of your tweets by arranging things into easy to manage columns. Some of these columns are provided as standard, but you can customise others for your own needs – you can even group your Twitter friends to make their tweets more manageable.

You can take a look at TweetDeck on their site at http://www.tweetdeck.com.

TweetDeck is a free application presently in beta (public testing). It is available to use on both Mac OS X and Windows – the most recent Vista and XP releases only, it also requires Adobe Air. To obtain TweetDeck you simply click on the download button on the site. TweetDeck can also be downloaded manually for Linux computers. That means you can be up and ready to go within minutes of installing it on your computer.

Some of the benefits you will get with TweetDeck include:

• Manage your feeds so you can monitor specific topics that are of interest
• A @replies column makes it easy to see when other people reply to you via Twitter
• Columns update without any interference from you, making it easy to keep up with what is going on
• Tweets can be filtered according to Twitter usernames, so you can keep up with specific tweeters
• Check the automatic updates that tell you the status of TweetDeck

TweetDeck does not have to be a full size application that takes up your whole screen when you look at it. You can size it however you wish, to keep it close at hand without being overly obtrusive.

I have been using TweetDeck for some time and have found it quick and reliable; two ingredients which make it a regular ‘must have’ application for me. The additional extras built into TweetDeck make it a pleasure to use including:

• Visual indicator of tweets in excess of 140 characters (you can keep typing but the input bar changes colour)
• A choice of URL shortening services
• Translation service converting your Tweets into a host of other languages
• A list of recent hash tags
• Interface to TwitPic for sharing images quickly

You can find the TweetDeck application ready to download at http://www.tweetdeck.com.

You can read more about TweetDeck on their blog at http://tweetdeck.posterous.com/ and give feedback at TweetDeck feedback.