Hitting The Deck

I've been a Twitter user (tweep? twitternaut? what is the word for that?) for quite a while now, and I really enjoy it, having got in contact with quite a few interesting people from all around the world. In the beginning, I used the web interface at www.twitter.com to keep in touch with people, and that still comes in handy sometimes, but for quite a while now I've been using one of the many third party interfaces that there are out there.

If you look on the web, you can see which interface was used for each tweet (web, text message etc.) and I'd noticed the program Tweetdeck showing up a few times. My instrument of choice up to now has been Twitterific, which I use on both my Mac and my iPhone, and generally I'm satisfied with it, but I thought I'd like to see what this Tweetdeck thing was all about, so I downloaded that and have been road testing it.

The interesting thing about Tweetdeck is the ability to put your followers into "groups". Now, I've only following 35 at the moment, so I'm not exactly snowed under with incoming tweets - and that's one of the reasons why I've been keeping it at 35, because I'm one of those people who likes to read every tweet that comes in. I'm not sure what the limit of that would be, but I know it's probably in the double figures - no way I could do that if I was in the hundreds. But even with just 35, I still find myself playing favourites with people. Some people's updates are more important to me than others (not wishing to denigrate anyone, it's just human nature) Plus, I have a couple of newswires I follow, and when there's a major story breaking they tend to crowd out everyone else. Twitterific just has all the incoming tweets in one timeline, in order, but with Tweetdeck you can have multiple groups and assign different people to different groups.

So I made one with my favourite followers (and I'm pretty sure the people in question who are on that list will know they're on it). I made another one with the rest of my "mutual" followers on it - those people I'm following who are also following me - and incidentally, I think that stat should be one of the figures tracked in Twitter. It's all very well knowing I follow 35 and have 40 following me, but I'm more interested in how many people are on both lists - there's clearly some shared interest between us if someone's mutually following me and I'd like to know how many there are at a glance without manually wading through the lists. Finally, I put the "corporate" folks - such as the newswires - in a third group. Obviously I'm still getting used to having multiple "timelines" of tweets but I think the concept works well, and I'll probably refine it a little more as I get used to Tweetdeck.

Another thing you can do is set up a "search" timeline, a sort of live Twitter version of Google, which I'm also experimenting with. I can type in something I'm interested in, such as "aliens" and any tweet with that word in it will find it's way to that column. This could be great for seeking out new contacts that I'm genuinely interested in, rather than the hit-and-miss methods I've been using in the past. I could see myself tracking interesting memes or adding more people in this way - and the amount I follow wouldn't matter so much as I can use my system of groups to concentrate on those who I'm most interested in, and maybe browse through the rest on an occasional basis.

So, I think I'll keep using Tweetdeck and experiment with it a little more. Getting used to the new interface will be a bit of a hassle for a while though - and unlike Twitterific it doesn't work with Growl, which is a shame. I'd set things up with Twitterific and Growl so that if someone replied to me or DMed me, I'd get a different notification sound than if it was a "regular" tweet. I have the sound to the Mac piped to my stereo rather than my TV, so if I was watching TV full-screen and I heard that sound, I knew there was a message for me waiting (and could maybe switch over to the Mac display during the commercials) Tweetdeck has it's own notification sounds and they're all the same, so not as good for me :( But hey, everything has pluses and minuses - and I've still got Twitterific so maybe I could switch to that when I've got the TV running - it's just a couple of clicks after all.

See you on Twitter, yeah?

ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK - MESSAGES
(from the album "Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark", 1980)