Twitter, the best service that I am aware of. OK, I won’t get into my love for Twitter, but this post if about Tweetdeck, twitter client, that changed the way I use twitter.

These were my main issues that I was facing

1. There were a set of people I wanted to follow, but didn’t want to read each and every tweet. I just wanted to read their tweets when I was free.
2. There were a set of people whose, I didn’t want to miss any of their tweets.
3. There are a few celebrities (@Scobelizer etc)  that I follow and I didn’t want to follow them all the time but wanted to know their opinion and check their (past) tweets in free time.
4. I didn’t want to miss any instance of @kv used by anyone ( even from my non-followers). Sometimes when someone uses replies to multiple people, it does not show up in one’s timeline (replies).
5. Since twitter stopped IM service, there was no way of ‘track’ option and that was one utility I miss the most.
6. I wanted to use other services which use Twitter credentials to log in and their ecosystem is based on twitter. e.g. TwitPic.

How Tweetdeck solved all the issues:

I can for groups in Tweetdeck and that sorts out the problem of grouping people. I have formed groups such as Buddies, Blacksburg, Celebrities and that gives me an option to concentrate on group that I want to talk to. I can clear tweets individual group of tweets and ignore a group if I want to.

Now, I do not miss any tweets that have mention of @kv because Tweetdeck replies group not only check using API but also uses Twitter search.[Check above image, last tweet in second group is a retweet of my tweet]  This has one more advantage, I reduce the Twitter API calls.

Track option can be simulated by search option provided by Tweetdeck. We can create search groups with particular keywords (f1, Yapodcast, semantic web, ces, mumbai) and can get results in one or more groups. Search functionality includes AND and OR option too for optimizing our searches.

At the same time using other services such as TwitScoop, I can which what are the current buzzwords on Twitter. That is a very fast way of getting news. (In the image above, I could see Earthquake as buzz world and just one click on it told me, people are talking about earthquake at San Bernardino, CA which occurred just 10 min back)

Not only this, I can use my other favorite services such as TwitPic, 12seconds and a lot of choices of URL shortening services. Now, I don’t have to open browser and login to multiple systems.

Shortcomings:

1. Tweetdeck stores all the group and search settings on the client side only. So, if one formats the systems and reinstalls Tweetdeck he will have to create his groups and searches again. But, how often do we reinstall our system. I believe Tweetdeck team would be trying to include a server level component too, which will store all the info on Tweetdeck server. This should not be a difficult task to do.
2. Tweetdeck’s groups take too much space on desktop and we have to scroll sideways. I would say, use it judiciously and you wont get into trouble like this. Any tools which provides group functionality will have to face this issue.

Suggestions

1. I would like to see a tagging system included into Tweetdeck. I can create few keywords that I usually want to use as hashtags and then I can use a drop down to include them in fast way. Going ahead, there can be an algorithm which can include hashtags on its own from my set of hashtags. (I suppose this also does not need algorithm, just a call to Open Calais API can provide that functionality)
2. I should be able to resize the group tab on Tweetdeck.

This twitter client proves two things, firstly, how simple tools can transform the way we use a service and secondly, flexibility and simplicity of twitter, we can mould it is any shape we want for our usage.