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Twitter is the most popular microblogging social networking tool on the Internet today. Think of it as a “mini” blog where your posts or “tweets” as they’re called can only be 140 characters in length. That means you really have to use “economy of expression” and keep your tweets short and to the point.

As popular as twitter is, the fact that its browser based makes it a bit cumbersome to use. Tweetdeck has changed all that.

So What Is Tweetdeck Anyway?

Tweetdeck is a desktop application based on AIR technology from Adobe, the folks who brought us the ubiquitous Flash player. It runs on Windows as well as the MAC. It does everything Twitter site does and much much more.

Standard Twitter functionality on the desktop

Right off the bat you get all the tweeting, retweeting, following and direct reply functionality that Twitter provides you, but in a slick intuitive and more responsive user interface on the desktop.

Tweet Notifications

One of the first and best things Tweetdeck allows you to do is to get notifications when a new tweet arrives. You’ll get a nice small window that appears unobtrusively. You don’t get that on the Twitter.com website. In fact you have to refresh your browser to see the new tweets and who wants to continuously do that?

See Multiple Groups At A Time

Tweetdeck allows you to group the types of tweets that you get. You get the standard groups like the catch all group ALL FRIENDS that shows you the tweets of all of your followers and a “direct replies” group that shows you the posts of folks that have replied directly to you only. But the coolest thing is you can perform a search and take the results of that search and create your own group! And this group will be constantly updated with tweets that have the search keyword you selected. This is GREAT for doing any kind of marketing research.

Url Shortening

Url shorteners are services that take really long names and shorten them for you. Tinyurl.com will take something like myreallyincrediblysoverylongurl.com and give you back tinyurl.com/ur489lup

Since you only get 140 characters to a post or tweet using Twitter you really have to choose your words wisely. TwitterDeck comes with an awesome built-in tool that allows you to choose from a variety of Url shorteners when creating your tweet.

We’ve just scratched the surface here of what Tweetdeck can do. Its one of the most powerful twitter tools on the Internet today and you should check it out and see how it will drastically improve your Twitter experience.