Before you get started, you’ll need to fill out a few details or sign up using your OpenID, Google or Yahoo account. Authorize the app to work with your Twitter account(s), and you’re ready to go. The Twimbow screen is divided into three main columns: “Personal Buzz” (your tweets, @ replies, and DMs), “Home Buzz” (your main Twitter stream) and search.

Color-coding your tweets

The “Personal Buzz” column is color-coded by default. As shown by the icons at the top of the column, your tweets are blue, @ replies are green, DMs you’ve sent are yellow, DMs sent to you are orange, tweets retweeted by you are pink, retweets of your tweets are olive, while tweets you’ve marked as a favorite are red. Clicking on one of those icons at the top of the column filters those tweets from the column, so clicking on the red star will remove favorites from the column.

The “Home Buzz” column contains your main Twitter stream. Similarly to the “Personal Buzz” column, it also has color coding, but you’re left to define your own system. You can define labels (such as “News,” “Friends,” “Work,” and so on) and give each label its own color. Apply a label to a tweet and it (and all of the other tweets from that user) will be color-coded. You can also filter the stream to show or hide tweets with each label.

The column to the right has a real-time search feature. Saved searches can be moved to the “Monitor” box at the bottom of the screen if you want to keep an eye on a particular phrase.

Filtering noisy tweets

As well as the color-coding, one other Twimbow feature that aims to help clean up your Twitter stream is the “noise killer,” which enables you to set up a filter to remove tweets containing specific keywords from your stream. This could be useful when an event is happening and there are tweets flooding your stream that you’re not interested in, for example (although you’ll need to make sure to remove the filter after the event has finished).

Twimbow certainly has a pretty interface, but it’s not without a few drawbacks. Despite working well on my smaller laptop screen, there’s no mobile version. You can’t check out trending topics. And while the interface looks pretty, it’s not exactly intuitive — it took me a little while to figure out how the color-coding and search columns worked, for example.

It’s not a full-featured social media dashboard

You should also note that, despite its use of columns, Twimbow is not really a full-featured social media dashboard like, say, HootSuite or TweetDeck. You can’t add additional columns beyond the three that Twimbow provides, nor can you configure how each column works, as you can with HootSuite and TweetDeck. However, as an easy-to-follow and novel web-based Twitter client, it works really well, and for a web app, it’s impressively responsive. If you’re finding it impossible to keep up with your fast-moving and noisy Twitter stream on the official Twitter website, even with the help of lists, Twimbow is definitely worth checking out; it’s free.

Twimbow was previously in private beta and required an invitation to access, but it’s now open to all; you can sign up here.

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Thinking about how we do work takes time. It’s time well spent at the beginning of a project or at critical junctures. However, thinking about the work instead of doing it during a project can be disruptive and counter-productive. When we find effective practices and tools, we want them to become so ingrained in our process that we use them without thought.

Creating a seamless workspace

As a user, be thoughtful when you develop your personal workspace. Consider your options in terms of human skills and needs, technology, tools, and organizational practices — but then get to work once you have found an approach that is effective for the given setting.  Create a system for re-evaluating your design choices, but be biased toward stability rather than change. It may make sense to re-evaluate your workspace by the project rather than by the day or week.

If you are a content, tool, or practice supplier, do not create hurdles to seamless working.  Here are some examples of vendors that have inadvertently created hurdles to seamless working:

• Tool functions that do not match the cycle of the work. In an early use of BlackBerry handsets for law enforcement, the officers found themselves having to re-login in the middle of pursuits.
• Device blocking. The NY Post recently began blocking iPad users who are browsing via Safari. Users are redirected to a page explaining that they must purchase the NY Post iPad app to see the content. This, and all sites that admonish iPad users to download an app rather than just showing the page, break search flow.

Examples of tools that remove hurdles to seamless work are those with options for distraction-free screens (such as iA Writer for Mac) or the ability to easily control notifications (such as Tweetdeck).

Should application design or our personal work design help us navigate these hurdles? Both.

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Obviously different applications have different features and capabilities, but, as a die-hard Twitter website user, I was surprised by the difference in focus between these tools. Just as I expect that the tool you use likely reflects your own approach to Twitter, I began to wonder if the tools we use also shape our expectations of how we can use the service.

Is Your Twitter App Shaping Your Social Media Presence?

Between the Twitter website, Tweetie and TweetDeck, there are some pretty major differences. I can’t easily access @ replies made to you on the website; I can’t easily access my follower list on either Tweetie or TweetDeck; I can’t schedule tweets on the site or in Tweetie; I still haven’t worked out how to search in TweetDeck.

Leaving aside the usability of these services (I only worked out how to access a user’s @ replies through trial and error on Tweetie, and there was no feedback to indicate what the app was showing at the time), it’s clear that each of these tools focuses on different aspects of social networking.

The question is: is your chosen tool impacting your social media presence?

You or Them?

Does the tool you’re using focus on you, or on other people? When I attract new followers, I like to check out their profiles, so that I know roughly who I’m talking to. I also like to check out the followers of certain contacts occasionally, to see if I’d like to follow any of them. To do that, I access the list of people I follow, and my friends’ followers — something that’s not as easy to do using either Tweetie or TweetDeck as it is on the website.

Spontaneous or Planned?

Does your Twitter application let you schedule tweets? How usable is the mobile app? For those using Twitter for business, the answers to these questions may drive adoption of a particular tool; those using it purely for fun may well get more out of — and give more to — the experience if it meets our needs on the go as well as when we’re desk-bound.

Broadcast or Consume?

If you simply use Twitter to broadcast your news and views, you probably don’t care whether or not your chosen tool gives you the ability to search for topics or contacts. For me, being unable to search Twitter easily means I’m restricted to relying on my contacts to discuss the topics I’m interested in, or I’m trying to research. In effect, it reduces my independence. Does your Twitter tool let you search easily?

Control or Acceptance?

Tools like TweetDeck offer pretty deep levels of control: not only can you schedule tweets, but you can filter out tweets from your contacts on the basis of content, customize the interface, and keep a very close eye on the responses and retweets your tweets attract. Other tools leave you more at the mercy of your memory and motivation. Customization promotes engagement and ownership, but it also lets you shape the way you use the service to meet your specific desires — provided that’s what you’re after.

Digest or Engage?

All three tools I looked at provided fairly easy access to my @ replies, but the at-a-glace, no-click default view of replies, retweets and direct messages in the TweetDeck interface puts a clear focus on engagement. Tweetie and the Twitter website don’t exactly hide this functionality, but it’s not included in the same view as tweets from the people you follow. With those tools, reading and responding to people you follow is easy; responding to those you don’t follow is more of a challenge.

It may seem like I’m splitting hairs — what does it matter if I have to click a link to see @ replies my contacts have made to me? — but we all know that those clicks add up through the day if you’re particularly interested in that feature. Looking at the default view of any tool is a good way to get an idea of its focus, but if you’re into control, check for customizations, too.

Do you think the Twitter tool you use is affecting the way you engage with the social network?

Image by stock.xchng user pxl666.

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Here’s a handy list of community and communications iPhone apps to help you network:

• Sprouter. Sprouter — the global collaboration and networking community for entrepreneurs — has a new iPhone app. Although my Sprouter account is woefully neglected, I do like how it feels similar to Twitter, but with a clear focus on work. From your mobile device, you can manage posts, filters and communications.
• Gist. This service connects your inbox to the web and feeds you important business-related information about the people and companies with whom you’re interacting. It’s like having a personal assistant at your ear ready to feed you critical bits of info about the person you’re about to meet.
• Foursquare, GoWalla, BrightKite, Loopt, Whrrl. Are you ready to check in? Are you willing to announce your location to your friends? Your activity on these sites is predominantly mobile-based as you use your device’s GPS to provide location-related status updates. Want to check into multiple services from the same place? There’s an app for that: Check.in. There are even hyper-regional location-based social networks cropping up, such as TriOut for the Triangle in North Carolina.
• LinkedIn. Of course, the top social networks have their very own mobile apps, including MySpace, but LinkedIn’s is particularly robust. I can check updates, update my own status, view connection profile updates, monitor discussions, access my connections list, check my inbox and respond to correspondence, manage invitations, and connect instantly with other LinkedIn users (both parties need Bluetooth enabled on their mobile devices). Kind of like Bu.mp but integrated into your LinkedIn account.
• Facebook.The Facebook app lets you review your news feed where you can “like” or comment to your heart’s delight; access your profile page, manage friends and friend requests; read or send messages; view photos, events and notes; and even chat live with other FB friends. What I really like about the app is the ability to add Facebook Pages so I can monitor and manage them. (Note: When using the iPhone app, any posts to a Facebook page will be made via your personal Facebook account.)
• Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Seesmic. Some of the most popular cross-channel social media management tools have iPhone apps. You can post to multiple places such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn from a single dashboard and create multiple views or columns to monitor different aspects of your account such as @ messages and DMs on Twitter, along with your Twitterstream. Cotweet still does not have a native mobile app but does provide mobile access at http://m.cotweet.com/m01.
• Skype. Skype takes care of a lot of my conference call needs, long-distance calling and IMing. The iPhone app does the same for me on the go, plus you can connect by voice to another Skype contact, although you need to make sure you have a good and steady connection.
• Tumblr, TypePad, BlogPress, WordPress (please see disclosure at the end), Posterous. Avid blogger? You can feed a blog post straight from your mobile device to your specific blog. The Posterous app, PicPosterous, makes it easy to manage sets of photos or videos.

So many iPhone apps, so little time — yet I actually find I save time thanks to these useful ones. And in case you’re curious, Sparkle (shown in my iPhone home screen image above) gives me access to my Second Life account for my avatar, Cybergrrl Oh.

What apps are you using on your mobile device for communications and community?

stock.xchng image by lusi

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

One of those better options is Twitter. Twitter has the advantage of being a great way to open a direct line of communication between yourself and a potential employer before you even forward your work history or even any professional information at all. It’s almost the virtual equivalent of landing a job based on a conversation with a seatmate on an airplane.

JobDeck aims to make the process of looking for work on Twitter even easier. It provides a refined search that allows you to drill down and find job offers and information about prospective employers and employees, and it does it all in the familiar environment of TweetDeck, so as long as you’ve used the popular Adobe AIR-based Twitter client in the past, you won’t have to go learning a new interface all over again.

In fact, JobDeck really isn’t much more than a standard install of TweetDeck with some colorful rebadging and a couple of very special unique columns that will help you in your job search efforts. All the regular features are there, too, so you have access to your main timeline and all the time-wasting fun that could potentially go along with that. My advice? Create a new Twitter account devoted solely to job hunting in order to keep your focus and avoid distraction.

As mentioned, there are two new columns introduced in JobDeck, which is powered by TwitJobSearch, a site that provides search results from Twitter pre-filtered and tailored to job hunters. The first is a “Job Search Experts” user list. It’s a good way to pick up tips and find interesting articles about the job market and career development in general, and it has the benefit of allowing you to keep these people out of your main Twitter feed, where they might not be as appreciated or could get lost.

The other column is a dedicated column that returns results from the TwitJobSearch main feed, which searches the web, returns relevant job search results and organizes them into a single stream. As of right now, a lot of the traffic is related to the JobDeck app itself, but scrolling through the feed reveals that it does do a decent job of collecting career hunting info. Unfortunately, it’s also hit or miss, including info for jobs ranging from KFC front-line employees to iPhone app developers.

It’s nice, but it isn’t yet impressive enough to merit its own dedicated client in my opinion. It reminds me more of the Blink-182 branded TweetDeck release than a new and unique tool. The TwitJobSearch site itself is a much more useful tool, with customizable advanced search options and an experimental job map feature. Not to mention that the interface is quite attractive and highly usable, and there’s a browse function that lets you see job tweets by category in case you aren’t yet sure what exactly it is you’re looking for.

If you’re already using TweetDeck and you’re looking for work, using the JobDeck special edition isn’t going to cost you anything, and might provide you with a few useful links and/or tips. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for something that will dramatically change they way you look for work, skip this release and just use the web-based or iPhone version  of TwitJobSearch, especially if you’re not a fan of the TweetDeck interface.

Landed a job through Twitter? Tell us about how you did it!

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Built-in Lists support means that you can create columns from Lists and explore your friends’ Lists within the app. You can export your existing TweetDeck Groups into Lists, and create new Lists right within the client. You won’t be able to create TweetDeck Groups anymore, as they’re redundant now that Lists are available.

Retweet support means that new-style retweets will show up in your timelines, flagged with the retweet indicator and showing both the original tweeter’s picture and the retweeter’s picture. But it also still supports old-style retweets, so you have a choice of which to use (I much prefer old-style retweets).

Twitter now supports geolocation data in tweets. Any tweets with geolocation data will be identified in TweetDeck by a red pin at the bottom of the tweet. Clicking on this pin will reveal an inline map showing the location from which the tweet was sent.

LinkedIn support enables you to keep tabs on LinkedIn contacts from within the app — you can add a LinkedIn column to view updates from your network, view profiles and comment on your contacts’ status updates.

The new version of TweetDeck (it’s an AIR application, so works on Windows, Mac and Linux) can be downloaded here.

Let us know your thoughts on the new TweetDeck below.

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I don’t generally like living on the bleeding edge, but some betas are very usable, and I’ve already incorporated them into my daily workflow. Others look promising, but are not stable or are lacking too many features right now. But all of the following are worth trying, and watching as they develop. We’ll review them more thoroughly as they mature.

Adium is my favorite IM client for the Mac OS. Its latest beta supports all of the instant messaging protocols, and also has rudimentary support for Twitter and Facebook Chat. Unfortunately, the latter is not working as I write this, although a fix is expected shortly.

VoxOx is an ambitious program combining IM; social networks (Facebook, MySpace and Twitter); SMS texting; faxing; private email; file sharing; video conversations; and voice connections. As I wrote a few days ago, it is very rough around the edges now, and desperately needs improved tools for managing contacts.

Imo.im is a web-based multi-system instant messaging client with some intriguing features, like shared whiteboards. This service is listed as being in alpha, so we can assume that it has considerable development ahead of it.

Brizzly is a web-based service that looks a lot like Twitter’s own web interface, but with improvements. It supports multiple Twitter accounts and has recently added Facebook support. The multiple accounts aren’t as well integrated as I would like, but I assume that will come.

Tweetminer is another web-based service that includes support for multiple Twitter accounts, tweet scheduling, and RSS feeds. Its interface is attractive, but features are minimal at the moment. There are also Adobe AIR or Fluid-based desktop versions, for those who prefer standalone apps.

Socialite (formerly EventBox, which Imran wrote about here) has just released beta 2, which seemingly broke support for Facebook updates. When this issue is fixed, Socialite could become my favorite, as it combines support for Facebook, Facebook Pages, multiple Twitter accounts, RSS feeds and Google Reader in one attractive interface.

Seesmic Desktop is another Twitter and Facebook program which has worked well for me, but it shares with many Adobe AIR programs some ugly screen fonts and a propensity for using large amounts of memory. Seesmic also has a promising web version, but so far, it lacks support for multiple Twitter accounts, and for Facebook.

Nambu only does Twitter, but does it very well, in what I think is the most attractive interface of any program of its type. I can choose three different layouts, and switch between them easily. Nambu’s development is very rapid, with a new beta released every couple of days.

I find the popular Tweetdeck to be totally unreadable and unusable, due to its AIR interface. I wish Adobe would make AIR on the Mac look as good as the native OS X fonts and windows.

There are lots more betas out there, of course. What beta software and services do you use?

Image credit: Stock.xchng user OmirOnia

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So how do you keep from “wasting” time on Twitter? Here’s my advice on how to spend no more than 15 minutes a day on your Twitter account but still reap the rewards, particularly for your work. This is not a good tactic for everyone, but if you or someone you know is very resistant to Twitter and simply needs a manageable plan for tweeting, you can try this at work or home.

First, determine how you’ll most likely access Twitter and interact with others. If you’re old school (like me) and want a large, straightforward interface, use Twitter.com. If you don’t mind downloading, installing and configuring applications on your computer, go for a tool like Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop. If you’re always on the go and love typing on your mobile device, try something like Tweetie for the iPhone or TwitterBerry for the BlackBerry.

Now here’s how to spend your time efficiently and effectively on Twitter:

5 Minutes: Listen, Retweet
Start by “listening” on Twitter to get a sense of what people you’re following are talking about. Scroll down a page or two’s worth of tweets and skim until you see the ones that grab you. Then retweet them by copying their tweet being careful to give them credit. The tweet could be a compelling quote, a useful tip, or a link to a relevant blog post or article.

There are two “accepted” forms of retweeting, and they both seem to be used almost equally. You can put RT in front of the tweet you’ve copied and cite the originator of the tweet like this:

“RT @kellyecrane Great idea: PR consultants, let’s use the #soloprpro hashtag to share information! http://bit.ly/3wkIZu”

or you can credit them at the end of the tweet like this:

“PR consultants, let’s use the #soloprpro hashtag to share information! http://bit.ly/3wkIZu (via @kellyecrane)”

Personally, I much prefer the RT in front because of too many situations where people misread a retweet as a tweet from a person and confusion ensues. For example, one woman retweeted another who said her daughter was in the hospital and was suddenly barraged with messages ranging from “our prayers are with you” to “I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

Retweeting is a way of not only passing along valuable information but also giving kudos to the person tweeting — both great ways of building your following and strengthening Twitter relationships.

5 Minutes: Listen, Respond
Next, listen to see who is speaking about something of interest to you or something you can respond to authoritatively. You should also check who has mentioned you or addressed you in their tweets in your client or by searching for @yourtwittername.

If you find someone tweeting something to you directly, a response is usually expected so reply to them either publicly using @ and their Twitter name, or privately using a direct message (or DM) if you are “friends” with them (meaning you follow them and they follow you back). If you don’t personally know the Twitterer, but you are following them and want to respond to something they’ve said, you can still @ them. While it is perfectly acceptable to @ strangers, be thoughtful about how you address or respond to someone you don’t know.

Here’s an example of a tweet and a response.

“@alizasherman Most of the Seattle neighborhoods have a Twitter account for the neighborhood blog (e.g., @wallyhood for wallyhood.org)”

“@pathable Oh, totally cool. Seattle is so on it! @wallyhood for wallyhood.org? Thanks for the tip.”

5 Minutes: Promote, with Care
Let’s face it — many of us are using Twitter to promote who we are, what we’re doing, and even what we’re selling. There is nothing wrong with promotion on Twitter, but do it with context — think about how the information fits into your Twitter persona.

If you’re known as an SEO expert, you can promote your blog posts about search engine optimization. If you’re a finance expert, tweet regular personal finance tips with a link to articles you’ve written. If you’re a marketing expert, go ahead and tweet a link to your helpful marketing podcast each week. If your retail store is having a sale, that could be tweet-worthy to your followers.

Keep in mind that often the most effective self-promotion can happen when you promote others. As you promote your own articles, blog posts, products, etc., don’t hesitate to mention others that you’ve found worthy of promoting. By sharing the spotlight, you generate good will while still demonstrating your expertise.

After 15 minutes, walk away from the computer or shut down your Twitter application. Keeping your Twitter time under control doesn’t only mean having a plan. You have to exercise some self-discipline as well.

How do you keep your Twitter usage under control?

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Twitter

If you’re like I am, your Twitter stream is probably public. For me, the value of Twitter is its ability to let me share news and comments that current and potential clients may find useful. I also use it as a way of interacting with clients if our regular communication channels are down.

So I certainly don’t say anything using @chcs (my company Twitter account) that can’t be public. I also have a personal Twitter feed, @HamiltonChas, that mostly focuses on my comments regarding local politics. I also tweet using @GrowTrains, an account that reflects my interest in improving passenger train service.

Most of the people I’ve talked to compartmentalize their Twitter activities this way. Many of my WWD colleagues have several accounts, each of which focuses on a different aspect of their professional and personal interests. Third-party Twitter clients like Tweetdeck, Brizzly, Nambu and Hootsuite, make it easy to manage more than one account.

Others, however, don’t like this approach. WWD writer Scott wants to see our personal lives — he states”Telling me in your bio that you don’t post personal tweets guarantees I’m not going to follow you back. Aren’t you interesting?” I certainly hope so, but I’m not sure that my clients want to hear me babbling on about the upcoming election in Seattle, or about how we need high-speed trains.

But now that my tweets will be included in search engines, having multiple Twitter accounts will make it possible to make one or more of them private, should I decide to do so. However you use Twitter, make sure that its privacy controls are set in a way that’s appropriate for your needs.

Facebook

I doubt that too many people will be upset by the addition of Twitter messages to Bing and Google, since Twitter’s own search and services such as OneRiot have been around for a while. Facebook searches may prove more controversial.

It’s likely that most people think of Facebook as a much more personal communication outlet than Twitter, since generally, people have Facebook’s privacy controls set to display content only to those they’ve “friended.” And as I wrote about this morning, one can even give different levels of access to certain people — my “personal friends” group can see more of my Facebook activities than my “business contacts” group can.

But I certainly hope that Facebook will give us a way of opting out of having our status messages show up in search engines. At this point, it’s unclear how Bing’s Facebook searches will work (they aren’t live yet). Google will reportedly take a personalized, opt-in approach, only showing status messages of your Facebook friends if both you and your friends tell Google which social networks you use.

It’s also not clear how Facebook Pages and Groups will be searched, although they are generally more public, and mostly used to encourage interaction with fans, or advocate for causes.

So in the coming weeks, web workers will want to evaluate how we balance our privacy against the marketing boost which might come from having our comments appear in Bing and Google searches.

Will you let search engines index your status updates?

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Photo by Flickr User Orange_Beard under Creative Commons

Josh Bernoff wrote about the modern listening problem and compares it to those speaker phones where you can’t talk and listen at the same time. On those not-full-duplex speaker phones, you are either talking or listening, but not doing both at the same time. In the social media age, we need to be both listening and talking, but many people are only doing one or the other. On Twitter and other social web sites, we talk about what we are doing and listen to other people talk, and we do it simultaneously.

Listening

I tend to automate as much of my listening as I can using various monitoring tools. These are two of my favorite ways to monitor and listen to what people are saying, and we’ve covered both of them in more depth in previous blog posts.

• TweetDeck: I have several different searches that are set up in TweetDeck, and I get real-time notifications when someone mentions my name or several of the projects that I’m involved in.
• Yahoo Pipes: More sophisticated monitoring with Yahoo Pipes looks for mentions of a list of keywords across many different social media sites, blogs, Twitter and more.

Responding

Now that you can find the conversations and have started listening, the hard part begins: finding the time to respond. Depending on the volume, this could be a small task or a huge effort. I do a pretty good job of finding and listening to feedback, but when I get busy, I sometimes find it difficult to carve out the time to respond. If I respond right away, I won’t forget to respond, but responding immediately can really disrupt my work flow. If I put the responses off and do them in batches, I am probably more productive, but I run the risk of missing opportunities or forgetting to respond. The key for me is finding the right balance to respond quickly, but without disrupting my ability to be productive and efficient in my other work.

How well do you listen and respond?

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While a fire hose of notifications and feeds can be too distracting when I’m working on things for client, if I’m looking for inspiration for a new blog post or new venture of some sort, I want to see as much information as possible in the hope that something will catch my eye and provide the inspiration that I need.

Here are a few of my favorite tools for embracing information overload. Please beware that these tools are known to sap productivity and suck up precious hours that can never be regained! Use these techniques at your own risk.

FriendFeed Notifier will send you pop-up messages every time one of your friends posts something to FriendFeed or comments on a post. For maximum information overload, make sure that you select the following options: show updates when someone comments on my posts, show updates from my home feed, and show posts and all comments. For the wimpier among us, you can choose to show updates only from a small list of friends or show posts only.

Tweetdeck or other Twitter clients with notifications turned on at full blast. I’ve talked about using reduced notifications with Tweetdeck to get targeted notifications for groups and searches, but for the full effect, you can also get notifications for the “all friends” feed (in other words, notifications for every single tweet). If you set this up right, you can get duplicate notifications for all of the tweets posted on FriendFeed and the tweets coming in through your Twitter client. I’m joking! I suggest only using one of the two options presented so far at a time, unless you really are a glutton for punishment.

Snackr gives you a scrolling RSS ticker with news from your feeds. You can even import everything from your RSS reader and have huge quantities of information scrolling across the bottom of your screen all day. I admit that would probably be a bit much. I took a subset of my feeds with my favorite tech news blogs along with a few interesting people, and I imported that subset into Snackr.

What are your tips for embracing information overload?

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Installing the app and setting up your account is simple — just enter your username and password. By default, TweetDeck sets up three columns: “All Friends,” “Mentions,” and “DM.” “All Friends” contains your entire Twitter feed; “Mentions” contains tweets mentioning your username (@replies); and “DM” contains your direct messages. You can navigate between columns by swiping left and right. Tapping zooms in so that the column fills the entire screen. Tap on a tweet, and the screen fills with the tweet, and you’re presented with options for sending an @reply, replying by DM, retweeting, favoriting, and emailing the tweet.

On all screens, there’s a large button at the top-right that will let you compose a new tweet. The compose screen includes everything you’d expect, including a character counter, URL shortening and photo support. In all, the interface is very intuitive and looks great.

Adding extra columns to the home screen is easy — tap the large “Add Column” button, and select what column type you’d like. As well as the columns I’ve already mentioned, you can set up columns for groups of users (handy if you follow a large number of people and find it hard to keep up with everyone), and for saved Twitter searches (useful for building a monitoring dashboard that you can access while on the road). TweetDeck supports multiple accounts, and one of its best features is that there’s no need to clumsily switch between all your accounts. You can just add extra columns for each account (so, for example, I have columns for my personal account and the @webworkerdaily account).

A really great feature of TweetDeck for iPhone is that you can synchronize it with your desktop TweetDeck, so that you can have the exact same columns on your phone as on your computer. This should be really useful if you have multiple accounts or a fairly complex and changing Twitter monitoring setup. To enable the sync feature, a new version of the TweetDeck desktop client has also been released, which includes the same multiple account support found in the iPhone app.

One annoyance I’ve found with TweetDeck for iPhone so far is that it’s crashed a few times; hopefully, this is something that the developers can fix in a revision. However, it’s brand-new software, and free, so I’m prepared to forgive a few glitches for now.

If you’re a Twitter power user, TweetDeck is probably the best iPhone Twitter client available currently. TweetDeck for iPhone is a free download from the App Store.

Let us know your thoughts on TweetDeck for iPhone in the comments.

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Don’t Underestimate Twitter Search

For simple monitoring, this is the way to go. If you only want to monitor a single keyword or a small number of keywords, you can easily use the built-in Twitter search in your web browser. You can even use a fairly complex set of search operators to construct great searches. It updates frequently and lets you know how many new items have arrived since your last refresh. It also displays the number of new items right in the browser tab to make it easy to notice without paying much attention to the page.  Sometimes you just can’t beat simple and unobtrusive.

My Favorite Real-time Twitter Monitoring Tool: TweetDeck

TweetDeck runs as a desktop application with Growl notifications that alert me when something important happens. You set up columns with all of your followers, groups of followers, @replies, direct messages, custom searches, trending topics and more. I have my TweetDeck set up with several custom searches that look for my name and organizations or projects with which I’m involved. These searches generate alerts whenever someone posts something new on Twitter that matches my search criteria. The searches are similar to what you would find on Twitter search, and you can use Twitter’s advanced search operators for more complex searches. The biggest limitation is that TweetDeck can only use 10 columns, so I occasionally find myself bumping up against the limit when I try to add another search column for a new project.

Browser-based Twitter Monitoring: Monitter

Monitter certainly looks better than many of the similar browser-based online monitoring applications for Twitter (TweetGrid, for example). It works much like Tweetdeck. You add a column for every search and can add complex searches using the Twitter advanced search operators. Monitter can also use more than 10 columns. I haven’t bumped up against the limit, but there might be an upper limit to the number of columns. The downside is that it seems to be a little slow to update, and at times I’ve had it freeze up, leaving me waiting for new information.

Regardless of which tool you select, make sure to take advantage of the advanced search operators that Twitter supports. There are some cool options, including negative/positive attitudes, posts with links, posts asking a question, and much more.

What are your favorite real-time monitoring tools for Twitter?

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Last week, for example, Simon covered the release of skimmer, a desktop client that brings together notifications from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other services. Also recently launched is Cosmic Machine’s EventBox, a Mac-only application that similarly mashes together notifications and messages from a range of web services: Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Flickr and Reddit, as well as the capability to import raw RSS feeds.

Both skimmer and EventBox are pretty and pull a variety of web services into a single stream of information. But as a heavy user of multiple social networks and web apps, neither provides me with any real ability to manage the stream of information I get from all those web services. As far as I can tell, all they really do is to move noise from several separate sources into a single cacophony of content. There are some limited filters to fish out particular keywords from the stream, but nothing that I couldn’t use an RSS reader -– like Google Reader -– to replicate.

So here’s what I’d love to see from lifestreaming tools:

• De-duplication – When friends post the same update to Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn, I only get one update.
• Social volume control – Over time, lifestreaming apps should understand the content sources and people to which I pay most attention. I should be able to crank up the volume to show me everything, or dial it down to just the people and sources I really want to know about.
• Relevance – A simple text filter is a no-brainer, but how about a relevance filter, looking at what my connections are reading as a collaborative filter for my own content sources?
• Explore the “long tail” – I want my app to signal to me what’s mainstream and what’s niche, to allow me to drill down to esoteric opinions while at the same time getting a broader picture of what’s happening.
• Visualization – The app should let me see at a glance what’s happening in my sphere of connections and content. Let interesting conversations and contents bubble up to the surface so I only need to be distracted by things of importance.

So, what do you want to see in your lifestreaming toolbox?

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skimmer is a cross-platform desktop client, built using Adobe AIR, that gives you a single interface to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube and Blogger. Even in beta it works pretty well, and has some nice touches, such as displaying Twitpic images inline so you don’t have to open another browser tab. Think of it as a Tweetdeck-like app that also allows you to keep an eye on what’s happening with your friends on Flickr, Youtube and Blogger. You can also use it to upload photos and video. It is a very elegantly designed application that looks great.

If I wanted a full-screen Twitter/lifestreaming client I would probably consider using skimmer, but it’s a bit too heavyweight for me. I prefer having a small, unobtrusive twhirl window at the side of my screen to keep up-to-date with what’s happening on Twitter. While you can set skimmer up in a “widget”-size window, it still takes quite a lot of screen real estate; it’s probably best to run skimmer on a second screen.

I’d also caution that the app takes a lot of memory to run (a common problem with AIR applications). skimmer is currently using nearly 200MB of memory on my machine – hopefully this is something that will be addressed in a future version.

Have you tried skimmer? What did you think?

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Web working increasingly means having to read up-to-the-nanosecond trending topics and conversations across the social web, and on Twitter in particular. With the huge and growing number of Twitter apps and related services that are now available, it can be confusing to figure out the best way to quickly and easily extract those keyword-based threads that you need.

With that in mind, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land recently offered up a list of a number of different ways to track Twitter conversations based on keyword topics.

Sullivan’s specific mission was to find a way to aggregate tweets based on the keywords that he’s interested in and to import them directly into his Twitter profile’s stream.

With our SMX West search marketing conference happening this week, I wanted to keep track of the real-time buzz for SMX on Twitter. I knew how to do this manually by checking Twitter Search, but was there a way to have this flow into my regular Twitter stream, along with posts from people that I normally follow? Thanks to suggestions from people on Twitter, there was!

It is possible to do this, as it turns out, but it takes a little work. TweetDeck works well for tracking conversations based on search results via multiple panes, while Twhirl allows you to feed search terms directly into your Twitter stream by using the search box and “Activate” tool.

Twitterfeed is also mentioned as a potential solution as it allows you to import RSS feeds into a Twitter profile. Therefore, Sullivan’s mission is fulfilled in this way, as you can create a new Twitter profile, add RSS feeds based on Twitter search results (by grabbing the RSS feed from any Twitter Search results page) using Twitterfeed, and then follow that new Twitter profile using your main Twitter profile.

Personally, I’m not interested in inserting search results based on keywords directly into my Twitter stream because the “firehose” effect can overwhelm the ability to easily track multiple conversations and topics. And like Robert Scoble (who famously tracks quite a firehose of information already!), I’m “old school” in that, while I love TweetDeck and Twhirl, I mostly use Twitter on the web and simply refresh the page when I want to see the latest tweets in my stream.

I’m also a huge fan of RSS, so my favorite way to track conversations and trends that I’m interested in from the Twitterverse is to grab the RSS feed from search results on the Twitter Search site and simply add them to Google Reader. This way I can check in on topics I’m interested in anytime I like while handling my daily Twitter interactions separately.

Of course, Twitter is only one piece, albeit a significant one, of the larger social media picture. Increasingly, it’s important to track conversations across a variety of social media platforms. I like using Social Media Firehose, a Yahoo! Pipes mashup, for this. Simply type in the topics you’d like to search for, and an RSS feed is produced that captures “a slew of social media sites, including flickr, twitter, friendfeed, digg etc.” Social Media Firehose also lets you specify search by geographic location or by domains you’d like to filter out.

What’s your favorite method for tracking Twitter and social media topics?

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