Twitter is its ‘vanilla’ flavour is interesting, but usability is greatly improved by using a couple of additional applications.

Much has already been said about the purpose and potential of Twitter, and I shall avoid repetition. To help ‘Tame Twitter’ I advise installing the excellent Adobe Air based application TweetDeck. That begs a simple question, why?

1.    TweetDeck provides customisable panels that show the Tweet time-line, replies, DM’s, trending topics, groups etc. ‘side by side’
2.    TweetDeck supports groups. Think of a group as a filter on the ‘Tweet time-line’. This means you can assign people you are following to specific logical groups and only Tweets from members of that group appear in that time-line. I find this very useful for prioritisation and also switching around subject matter
3.    TweetDeck provides a nice simple interface from which to Tweet along with facility to shorten URLs (not a differentiator in itself, but this stacks well against Twhirl)
4.    TweetDeck supports searches, although I don’t tend to use this feature (see below)

Chris Brogan describes Twitter as a ‘phone’, an analogy I agree with ‘to an increasing extent’. I struggled initially to see where he was coming from, but having installed and configured additional tooling, I’m beginning to see parallels. In communication terms of course it is much less rich (no vocal intonation), but as a kind of ‘new wave soft-phone’ it kind of makes sense.

I’m an avid user of feedreaders, I mostly use Omea Jetbrains and I have set up a whole bunch of searches into Twitter on keywords and key phrases of personal interest. As someone who follows the SOA / Integration market (as an example) I am keen to track discussions on TIBCO, IBM WebSphere, OracleFusion and many others. As I’m not necessarily following everyone who might Tweet on these subjects I need to ‘eavesdrop’ on those subjects. This is of course a simple task:

1.    Get yourself a feedreader
2.    Go to search.twitter.com, search on the phrase words you wish to track
3.    On the results page grab the RSS feed into your feedreader
4.    Configure the refresh time on the feed as necessary (I use a range of 20 minutes to 4 hours depending on topic)
5.    Now you can check easily by scanning through your feeds in the feedreader (all in a central source)
6.    It is important to join the conversation (if it is suitably interesting) and start following interesting people talking about your subject area(s)

I have my feedreader configured to pull in large amounts of news on topics I work with including Business Intelligence, SOA, Enterprise Rules, Content Management, Document Management and Security. I can therefore easily Tweet about these topics and press releases as well as track Twitter conversations from the same application.

Implementing these two separate and very simple ideas have really helped me get a lot more out of Twitter. I can detect trending topics of interest simply and equally simply find new people to follow in my areas of technical interest.

With this, Twitter is somewhat ‘tamed’.

[Circumference of a Moose]