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http://www.tweetdeck.com

Grouping Information Lets you Manage it

Without a doubt, Twitter can dump an unfathomable amount of information into your lap, but only if you let it. Even though I follow about 6,800 people on Twitter (some Twitter accounts are just news feeds from BBC and CNN), I can manage the flow of information and still keep up with my friends (which is what Twitter was originally designed to do). How? Simply by grouping people together, and having an application that lets me look at those groups easily.

TweetDeck is a free application (Mac, PC, and Linux) for Twitter that enables me to build groups of Twitter accounts that I follow and put those groups into separate columns. For example, I have a column just for news sources and a column just for tweets that mention me. I have columns for friends and one for colleagues. I also build columns for searches of interesting topics. These searches let me search through all the tweets posted on Twitter, not just from the people I follow.

TweetDeck is just one example of a Twitter tool with this sort of functionality. Web-based services Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com) and Brizzly (www.brizzly.com) both have this capability as well as applications like Nambu (Mac only) and Mixero (Mac, PC, and Linux). I think looking at the deluge of content that Twitter can unleash makes it pretty obvious why bloggers need tools to group, filter, and search through Twitter.

Now if I could only do this for email.