LostInTechnology

TweetDeck is a Great Desktop Twitter Client

Posted on 30. Jul, 2008 by Kyle Judkins in Software

A little over a week ago, I posted 26 Ways to Update Twitter where I mentioned several desktop clients for Twitter.  After playing around a little more with TweetDeck, I decided it was worthy of a post of its own.  TweetDeck adds new functionality and flexibility to your average Twitter desktop client by adding multiple columns, groups and search with Summize.

Columns

One column is never enough, and TweetDeck completely agrees by allowing you to have up to ten columns.  Four is enough for me (All Tweets, Top Friends, Replies and Direct Messages), but maybe you have more friends than I do.  Upon the addition of new columns, you can customize the placement of all of your columns except for the All Tweets column.  That column will always stay on the left, which should be fine for almost every user.

Groups

Twitter can get a little overwhelming when you are following over a few hundred people that all update frequently.  Usually within all of your friends, you only want to see every update from just a handful of them.  TweetDeck lets you make groups of your friends in order to make it easier to keep up to date with your top friends.  As mentioned above, you can have a maximum of ten columns, so there are lots of possible group combinations.

Search

TweetDeck uses the popular Twitter search engine Summize to do the heavy search lifting.  Summize is the premiere search engine for Twitter and was recently purchased by Twitter for that very reason.

Conclusion

TweetDeck has tons of promise and adds lots of the functions that have been asked for, but it isn’t nearly as smooth as other desktop clients like Twhirl.  For now, I’m sticking with Twhirl due to its polished and snappy nature, but I’m sure that after a few more updates I’ll switch over to TweetDeck.

Related Posts

• Multwiple: A Feature-Rich Web Based Twitter Client
• 5 Great Alternatives to the Twitter Interface
• 26 Ways to Update Twitter
• SocialAddict Brings Social Networking to Your Desktop
• How to Sync Your Twitter Status, Google Chat Status (Gmail Status) and Facebook Status

Tags: adobe, air, client, desktop, tweetdeck, twitter