For journalists new to Twitter or just a casual user who hasn’t ventured away from Twitter.com, these three tools can really help those in journalism (or anybody) manage their ever-growing “following” list.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is your best choice if you follow many people or feel like you cannot seem to keep up with the constant flow. You can have up to ten columns to customize with options, such as: All Friends, Groups, Custom Searches and TwitScoop.
Caution: If you do use more than four (or five with the narrow option checked) columns, it can be somewhat annoying scrolling back-and-forth.
To anybody who may use multiple monitors, I would definitely recommend trying TweetDeck in full-screen on the additional screen.
TweetDeck may be light on features, but does a great job at its main objective: splitting your Twitter feed into something much easier to follow.
Twhirl
If you want something a little more simple, try Twhirl.
Features include:
- Notification windows (one of my favorite features)
- Spell checking
- Ability to post pictures to TwitPic
- Multiple ways to shorten URLs
- Ping.fm support (allows you to update Facebook, Myspace, etc., with your Twitter updates.)
Both TweetDeck and Twhirl both require Adobe Air, a free download from Adobe.
TweetGrid
TweetGrid allows you to create custom-sized grids to track any given topic on the fly and save them for sharing or future use.
TwitPicGrid, a recently released feature allows the same concept to be applied to pictures from TwitPic.