In this post Kim Woodbridge from (Anti) Social Development reviews popular Twitter Client – TweetDeck. Follow Kim on Twitter @kwbridge

Tweetdeck is an Adobe Air desktop application used to access Twitter. Tweetdeck is available for the Windows and MAC operating systems. It is made of panes that allow you to take the enormous amount of information contained within Twitter and break it down into parts that are more easily managed.

Default Panes:

• All Tweets – All the people that you are following.
• Replies – All @ messages sent to your username
• Direct Messages – All personal d messages sent to your username

More panes can be added by using Tweetdeck’s features, such as Groups, and can be rearranged by moving them to the left or the right.

Integrated Features:

Search – The search used by Tweetdeck is http://search.twitter.com Followers or all twitter users can be searched and the results open up in a new pane. I frequently run a search on WordPress to discover new resources, help individuals who are having problems, and locate work.

Twitscoop – Twitscoop reports the hot trends on Twitter in a tag cloud format and also lists the top 10 keywords. While writing this some of the top tags are iowa penn, quaker oatmeal (I have no idea what that’s about), and nzelection.

12 Seconds – 12 Seconds is an online service for video status updates. It currently can only be searched by username. As it is still in private beta, it is not particularly useful for the majority of Twitter users.

Groups – Groups allows you to organize your followers into managable chunks. This feature is what makes Tweetdeck outshine other Twitter applications. Once you get above 300 individuals in your network it is difficult to keep up with the rapid flow of information.

I currently have three groups; Network, Soccer and Philly. Network includes those who I’ve worked with, had extensive discussions with and those that I want to learn from. Coincidentally, when I took the screenshot, Darren was feeling “easy like Sunday morning”. I am a Soccer/Football fan so this group contains other fans and soccer related news. I have to be very careful with this group when I miss a match and don’t want to know the score. Finally, I live in Philadelphia, PA so I have a Philly group that contains other people who live here and local news. Recently we had a discussion about the proposed city budget and what we could do to stop 11 branches of the library from being permanently closed.

Settings and Preferences – Tweetdeck contains a limited number of settings and preferences.

Refresh – Refresh is a manual update of tweets if you don’t want to wait for the application to update. Doing this too frequently can cause you to exceed the API limit.

Single Column View – This setting allows you to reduce the application to the leftmost pane. I use this to reduce the amount of space the application takes or if I just want to monitor replies to me.

Tweets/Alerts – This is used to set notifications and sounds.

Colors/Fonts – If you don’t like the default black and gray, you can change the color scheme. The application does not currently contain Themes so setting new colors takes some creativity.

Twitter API – This is an important setting. It allows you to set how much of the Twitter API is used for all messages, replies, and direct messages. If you are running Twitter into other programs, such as integrating your status with Facebook or displaying Tweets on your blog, you can easily exceed the rate limit and not get updates for some time. I had a problem with this because of a WordPress plugin I was using. I reduced my API usage to 30% total, uninstalled the plugin, and am slowly increasing my usage.

Issues

While the integrated features, especially Groups, make Tweetdeck an indispensable program for the power user it is not without it’s problems.

Memory Usage – I have had Tweetdeck open for 5 days and it is using over 600MB of memory. I have heard people report 1GB of usage. If you leave your computer and Tweetdeck running all of the time, you will have to restart it periodically.

Groups

1. If you accidentally close the group pane, you will lose that group and it is necessary to recreate it. Once you have a large network, scrolling through all of the users to recreate the group is tedious. This is more of an inconvenience but for some reason I closed one of my groups twice in the last week. This, however, may be a sign of my own incompetence.

2. Additionally, it is best to wait 24 hours of actively running Tweetdeck before creating a group. Why? Because people in your network will not show up in the list until they tweet. It generally takes 24 hours for everyone to say something at least once.

3. Something I only noticed recently is that all users show up in the list for creating a group even if you have unfollowed them. This is frustrating because it increases the number of users to scroll through when creating the group.

Size

Tweetdeck, even with only 3 panes open, is a big program. Even the author says that is best used on a second monitor.

Overall, Tweetdeck is one of the best 3rd party applications for for Twitter access and management. If you haven’t tried it already, give it a go and let me know it if worked out for you.

Download TweetDeck for yourself here.