Making sense of Twitter chatter

By now, everyone's heard of Twitter. And if you haven't, where have you been?

Twitter is the smart "new" gizmo for keeping up to date with everything that's happening. It's a microblogging tool that everyone seems to be using for personal, social and business networking. Imagine text messaging across an established network or broadcasting your messages to everyone who subscribes or ‘follows' you, as it's known. Tell your friends, colleagues or customers your latest news as it happens and let them read your updates at their leisure.

But the Twitter website is a bit of a nightmare for reading the updates. It can be very difficult to read, it's visually very noisy and aesthetically displeasing. Plus, not everyone wants to be logged into a website through their browser 24/7.

Whilst Twitter is on the cutting edge of communications, couldn't you be getting more out of it?

Here are three ways to help the Twitter chatter make a little more sense.

Twhirl - This is a desktop client for Twitter. Developed in Germany, but now owned by Seesmic. Twhirl allows you to send Twitter messages from your desktop, rather than by using the website. From Twhirl, you can update messages, read and reply. It's a tool that some people call a ‘notifier'. In other words, it notifies the user of postings or messages, all without having to visit the Twitter website.

You can also use Twhirl to follow public tweets from anyone and search across the Twittersphere for other user's profiles. It comes neatly packaged like a little Instant Messaging program, so it sits on your desktop tweeting away just like an IM.

Twhirl is available for both PC and Mac Users. The software is totally free, so you don't need to pay out to get the most out of Twitter!

Twitterfox - This type of Twitter notifier was developed for the Mozilla browser Firefox, the only real competition for Microsoft's Internet Explorer (thanks, Google, for developing Chrome in order to make that statement out of date just as I finished it!). It's an extension or add on to Firefox and allows users to check and reply to message updates from within the tool bar of the browser.

Conveniently placed on your Firefox toolbar is a tiny little icon that lets you know about update tweets with a small balloon popup on the right hand corner of the browser. What's more you can write into a small text box to update your own status.

Twitterfox is a free program that can help you keep up to date with Twitter, without logging into the Twitter site itself, or having an additional IM-style program running at the same time. Twitterfox is available on Windows, OS X and Linux platforms, which should make it accessible to all users who aren't still grappling with Internet Explorer.

If you want to get the most out of Twitter through your browser, but don't want to stay logged into the Twitter site, this is a highly convenient and helpful tool.

Tweetdeck - This Adobe Air application (still in BETA testing) is designed to organise the massive amounts of information that arrives via Twitter. Tweetdeck allows you to manage this information by topic, category or term. The left side of the Tweetdeck shows all the feeds, whilst the right shows what you have filtered into Tweet Groupings. This is a great tool if you can't stand the visually noisome interface on the Twitter website. You can even search through all of your tweets for specific messages or integrating with the Summarize program, search across Twitter for specific keywords.

Because Tweetdeck works as a message database, it's possible to answer tweets offline, these will be sent once the user goes online once again. It also updates over night, so when you switch your machine back on, you'll receive all the tweets that you missed, nicely slotted away into categories. The interface is reasonably customisable, so you can adjust it to suit yourself.

This revolutionary new way to organise and administer your tweeting is available on Mac OS X and Windows for PC (Vista and XP).

So there you have it; three ways to organise the Twitter chatter and begin to make more sense of the Twitter world.

One last thing that may also help:

Tweetake is one of the latest developments for making the most out of your Twittering.

The Tweetake tool is not associated with Twitter themselves, Nikki and Alfred developed it for personal use, but it soon became clear that others could also benefit from it.

To read the rest of this article, visit nikkipilkington.com