How do I use Twitter?

This is a question I get asked often, and I always mean to write a post about it.. so here goes!

Which tools do you use?

That is an excellent question! I use the following tools: TweetDeck on my Mac and my PC (Primarily PC due to that being my primary machine), Tweetie on my iPhone, and the Web interface on my Windows Mobile Treo (Because WM5 does not have any good ceApps) Note: I am trying out Seesmic Desktop at the moment in Beta, though primarily using it for Searches due to the color scheme being almost unbearable for me!

Why do you use those tools?

Let me put it simply by saying: These are the best tools available for Twitter on a regular basis.   I agree there are a lot of other tools out there, but more tools does not mean better!  As an example, Tweetie is a far better client than TwitterFon which is by far the 2nd best client for the iPhone (And it’s free!) If you’re using Twinkle or Twitterific today, Upgrade to TwitterFon for free or Tweetie for the nominal fee, it will change your twitter experience on the whole!

How do you use those tools?

TweetDeck:

• I have a column called “Technology” where friends and others in the Tech field (Direct Technical, Marketing, Analysts, Bloggers, YouTube, Blogosphere, Storage, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Etc) are all stored.  Basically if you’re in my “Technology” column, among all of the chatter on twitter, I guarantee I’ll read it when I’m in front of this computer :)
• I also have a column called “Chicago” where friends, folks, people I meet, etc from Chicago who are on twitter are ‘stored’.  And yes, some people are in both Technology *AND!* Chicago, which works out well :)
• On a similar note, I do have a column called NetApp, this is where I store NetApp employees, and only NetApp employees – It’s a smaller list with fewer updates, and thus I’m less likely to miss those as well
• One additional column is a “Search” column, searching for “netapp OR netapps OR ntap” whereby when there’s chatter about our company, a typo of our company or our stock, I can see it!  I’ve used this numerous times to help folks who ran into issues with our systems or equally for those inquiring about information.  I like to help, so this is a great vehicle for that helping!

Tweetie:

• Honestly, I use Tweetie almost the same way I use TweetDeck, except without the groups – so when I’m on the go, it is primarily to read @ responses and DM’s, and random chatter in the ‘all friends’ column, because I lack the grouping capabilities of TweetDeck!

Web:

• Web is truly the only way I can work on my WM5 Treo, so I’ll launch it if I need to/want to share something and my iPhone is dead or has no signal!  This is especially useful when we’re out as a family and we’re tweeting to eachother in a museum or something :)

Seesmic Desktop:

• Seesmic Desktop is interesting, it provides a number of features (more or less, the exact same features of TweetDeck) with the exception that Seesmic supports multiple accounts, and can expand beyond 10 columns.   It’s lack of color changing support makes it nearly unbearable for me, because as you can tell from this blog, I read text against a black background, and when it’ falls against a light background, I have a hard time reading it.  But I’m giving it some rigorous testing in its course! (Though, for what it’s worth… Seesmic is a memory hog, akin to the old TweetDeck Pre v0.25days) Oh and it just crashed on me when I noticed it took out my API limit for the hour ;)

So, hopefully this helps explain and helps you use these tools a bit yourself!  I’ll break it down a bit more over time, but this is just a high-level touch of how I do some of these things (and effectively, and enjoyably :))