JC - Technology and Stuff

Ok, I’ll just come out and say it. I’m in love with Twitter!! It’s probably a bit of a one-sided relationship as I’m sure Twitter doesn’t care one bit about me. Oh well, an unrequited love!

I’ve been using Twitter seriously for a few months now and I’ve come to rely on it as my main means of getting my boring life out there on the Internet. My Twittersphere (if there’s such a word) is growing and I’m sensibly adding new ‘follows’ and getting ‘follows’ in return at a manageable rate. A lot of people think that you need to be following thousands and thousands of other tweeps (and that’s fine if that’s what they want), but if you do this there is no way you can sensibly keep up with things. I only have a couple of hundred and it’s already a small nightmare!

In this blog post I thought I’d write a little about how I’m using Twitter on a day-to-day basis and what software helps me. So, here goes:

Tweetdeck: I’ve written about Tweetdeck before, and on my main home PC this is my software of choice. It’s not perfect (it eats up memory voraciously) but it is the best of the bunch out there at present. What I like about it is the ability to create ‘groups’ of follows so that you can at least filter your Twittersphere a little. Doing this enables me to have several ‘columns’ for e.g. favorites, celebrities, writers, publishers, etc. Tweetdeck also gives me columns that show all my replies and direct messages separately. The service is augmented with URL shortening tools and picture sending abilities, as well as tweet shortening tools should you go over your 140 characters.

Twitpic: I have an account set up on Twitpic that allows me to send any pictures I take on my phone directly to Twitter. All I need to do is take the picture, opt to share it and then email it to the account I have at Twitpic. Then within a couple of minutes the picture appears on Twitter, with any comment I make about it. Cool!

Disgsby: I’ve written about Digsby before, and it’s sort of an all-over IM, Facebook, Twitter and social widget thingy! On any non-main PCs (like at work, or on my laptop) I use Digsby to communicate with all my networks. Of course, Digsby doesn’t split up all the tweets into categories, nor does it have any special tweet send features, but at least it lets me stay in touch.

Gmail and Twittergadget: If I want to send a Twitter on a PC that only has my Gmail, I use Twittergadget. It’s very simple, but has built-in URL shortening abilities, and easily manages sending and receiving tweets from my network.

Twitter: Of course, the standard fallback client is actually Twitter itself, although I have to say that the only time I really use this is if I want to look up people’s profiles and search for a few esoteric things.

Tweetgrid: Sometimes all you want to do is follow a few particular subjects (or hashtags), and this is where Tweetgrid comes in particularly handy. It’s a very simple web-based tool that allows you to split your screen into a number of ‘grids’ and put search criteria in each grid. Then Tweetgrid keeps these grids updated realtime, displaying every tweet out there that satisfies that criteria. You can also log into your account while you’re using Tweetgrid and send tweets using the tool. Depending on how you use Twitter, this may be a great tool for you.

So, there we go, a few ways to use Twitter in the real world. Of course, all I’ve covered here is the PC: it’s also perfectly possible to (and a lot of people actually do) use their phone to send tweets. Each phone has its own client, so I haven’t covered any of them here.

I also have Twitter update my Facebook status at the same time it posts my tweets too. That saves me updating in two places at once.

Whatever you want to do with Twitter, there’s a tool for you. Let everyone in the world know what you’re up to - in 140 characters or less at a time!

Now the only thing I’m waiting for is a company that can develop a web portal that looks like Facebook, but that is for Twitter. That way I can look at tweets of my friends individually and have other information more readily available. I live in hope!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 11:57 am and is filed under Home, PC Tool, Technology, Thoughts, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.