TweetDeck consolidates, shows previews and fixes "that leak"

Release 0.25 of TweetDeck, available now from TweetDeck.com consolidates the updates from the previous test versions into a new single release. It also has some much-needed bug fixes, as well as some cool new features that the user-base have been requesting. The biggest news is probably the fix of “that” memory leak that caused a lot of people real headaches.

Lets explore the changes in detail.

First off, the new stuff!

New: URL previews

You now have an option under Settings that will enable a preview window for all URLs.

This introduces a pop-up window whenever you click on a URL in a tweet. The information displayed in this window will be different depending on the type of URL.

Bit.ly shortened URLs:

Digg.com shortened URLs:

URLs that have been “picked up” by TweetMeme.com:

ALL other URLs (shortened or not):

New: TwitPic previews

Now, when you see a tweet containing a link to a TwitPic photo, clicking that link will show a preview of the photo in a popup window within TweetDeck.

If you want to go on to see the picture in full on the TwitPic site, just click anywhere in the preview window and it will open the full image.

If you want to close the preview window, just click the cross in the top-right.

This is a nice addition, that really starts to cement the role of TweetDeck as a one-stop-shop for your Twitter experience.

New: Full release of Facebook and 12Seconds integrations

The functionality included in the previous test releases, reviewed here and here, are now rolled into this release. So everyone now has the ability to record 12Seconds video clips from within TweetDeck and to view & create Facebook status updates plus access Facebook chat directly in TweetDeck.

New: Spotify URLs and URIs open in Spotify

Support is now built in for Spotify URLs and URIs, so clicking one of these links in a tweet will open Spotify (providing you have it installed) and start playing. the track that has been shared.

Next, what’s changed…

Changed: URL shorteners limited to top 5, but includes Digg

As Iain had previously published on the TweetDeck blog, this release of TweetDeck only includes the top five services: bit.ly, digg, is.gd, tinyurl, tr.im and twurl

Yes, you read that right. TweetDeck does now include the Digg.com URL shortener!

Changed: Auto-include #tags now a preference

In a previous version the feature was introduced that would auto-copy hashtags from a tweet into any reply. This works well in some circumstances, but some people found it unnecessary. This feature has therefore been made optional by creating a setting to enable it.

Changed: Cannot DM yourself

Some people have found themselves mistakenly sending a Direct Message to themselves instead of a friend. TweetDeck now blocks that from happening and, hopefully easing some of the confusion that this behaviour caused.

Finally, what’s been fixed…

Fixed: “That” Memory Leak

The best fix of all is that the dreaded memory leak, which often left TweetDeck using over 1gb of RAM if left overnight, has been fixed. You should now be able to run TweetDeck for any length of time and the memory footprint will not rise beyond a certain level, depending on the columns you have defined.

In my tests, with 4 Search columns, 2 Group columns, All Friends, Replies, Facebook and Favourites, TweetDeck started at around 130mb and rose gradually to about 200mb over the first hour. Where the previous version would have continued to rise, this version has stayed pegged arons the 200mb mark all day and shows no sign of moving.

This is great news and should really improve the user experience of TweetDeck, allowing you to once again leave the application running through the night to collect tweets without the fear of it crashing your machine due to lack of resources.

Iain Dodsworth still admits that the “standing memory” footprint could be lower, and he will work to reduce that in subsequent releases, but for now, this is a huge improvement.

Fixed: @Reply Auto-complete

Version 0.21.6 introduced auto-complete for @replies, reviewed here.  This gave you the ability to easily @reply or DM someone without having to see one of their tweets. There were, however a couple of flaws that made it a bit awkward to use, mainly with the auto-completed rply always wanting to appear at the end of a tweet.

Well, this has now all been fixed and you can type @ anywhere in your tweet and the username will always appear in the right place. Want to insert an @reply in the middle of your tweet? Now you can. Just position the cursor and press @, select a username and the @reply will appear in the right place.

Fixed: Empty Replies column bug

In previous versions there was a bug that caused some people to be faced with a blank Replies column. This has now been fixed and this column should function as expected once again.

Fixed: Email Tweet bug

In previous versions there was a bug that caused some people to find that clicking “Email Tweet” resulted in a blank email. This has now been fixed and the Email Tweet function should now operate normally.

Fixed: “<” characters clipping tweets

In previous versions there was a bug that caused tweets to be clipped short in search columns at the point where a < character was encountered. As many people used this character to indicate the start of their comments in a ReTweet (e.g. “@richardbarley Check out this cool link http://bit.ly/tdheld << Yeah that IS great!” this was causing some confusion.

This bug has now been fixed and these tweets should no longer be cut short.

Fixed: Other small issues

Several other small issues have been fixed, all details of which can be found over on the TweetDeck blog.

And finally…

There’s a super-swanky new look to the TweetDeck website. Check it out!

So there you have it, a good solid release of TweetDeck, with a good mix of new features and fixes that sets the stage for some major changes ahead.

If you are looking for more tips about TweetDeck, take a look at the most comprehensive list around in my previous post “All Your TweetDeck Questions Answered”

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What do you think to this new update? If you gave up on TweetDeck because of the memory leak, will this bring you back? Let me know in the comments, or catch me on Twitter @richardbarley

Facebook updates, posting and chat come to TweetDeck

Facebook recently released some new features of their API making it easier for 3rd party applications to develop rich Facebook functionality. At the SXSW conference in Austin last week, where it seems almost EVERYONE was using TweetDeck, it was announced that Seesmic had the “first desktop client” using this new functionality. This prompted everyone to ask “When will we get these features in TweetDeck?”

You may or may not know, but Iain Dodsworth is the sole developer of TweetDeck, so implementing new features are a labour of love for him – sadly there is no TweetDeck development “team” to do the work, just him! But thanks to Iain’s dedication and hard work, today sees the release of Facebook features in TweetDeck v0.24.2, including some items that are not available in certain other clients yet

This new test release allows you to:

• see your friends’ status updates right there in a TweetDeck column, auto-updating, just like your other TweetDeck columns
• view your Facebook friends’ profiles on the web with one click
• post your status update to Twitter and/or Facebook at the same time
• see which of your Facebook friends are available for Facebook chat
• start a FaceBook chat session from direct inside TweetDeck

Here’s the lowdown on these great new features

Adding a Facebook column

To see your friends’ Facebook status updates in TweetDeck, you need to add a Facebook column.
To do this, click the new FaceBook button on the top-left toolbar.

This will then display the Facebook login page. Mine is in French as I am currently in France, but yours will probably be in English.

Fill in your normal Facebook login details, and tick the box to remember your details, then click “Login”.

You will then be presented with a screen asking you to allow TweetDeck access to your facebook profile. If you do not allow this access, your TweetDeck column will not work, so go ahead and click “Allow”.

You will now have yourself a Facebook column. Check it out, remembering you may have to scroll over to the right to be able to see it.

The column will show the current status for all your friends and will update as changes occur. When a status updates you will see a standard TweetDeck notification alerting you to the fact.

Working with Facebook status updates

There are two options when you hover over the profile picture of a Facebook status update: Email Status and Tweet Status.

The “Email someone’s status” function works in the same way as it does for a normal tweet, i.e.  it copies the status message into a new email using your default email client.

This is very handy for sharing a status update with someone who may not be on Twitter or Facebook.

The “tweet someone’s status” function is like re-tweeting a normal tweet, i.e. it copies the Facebook status into a new tweet, prefixed by FB RT: (for FaceBook ReTweet).

This function alone could start to really open up the communication between folks on FaceBook and Twitter as status updates on both are easily shared and repeated across the two networks.

Clicking on the Facebook username under a status update will do one of two things.

• If the person is currently online in Facebook chat, it will open a chat session with that person (see “Chatting with Facebook friends” below).

• If the person is currently offline in Facebook chat, it will take you to that person’s profile page on the Facebook web site.

Clicking on the words “via Facebook” will always take you to the person’s profile page on Facebook, whether or not they are logged in to chat.

Posting a status update to FaceBook

In order to post a status update to Facebook from TweetDeck, there are now two new check-boxes next to the tweet box.

If you have the Twitter box ticked, your tweet will be sent to Twitter exactly as normal.

If you have the Facebook box ticked, your tweet will be sent to Facebook as a status update.

If you have both boxes ticked, the tweet will go to both services.

If you have neither box ticked, you will not be able to send your tweet.

The first time you send an update to Facebook, you will have to authorise TweetDeck to be able to update your status.

Just like when you added your Facebook column, if you do not allow this, the update won’t work, so just go ahead and click “Allow Status Updates”.

Your status will then have been updated.

Important note: If you send a Direct message from TweetDeck, even if you still have “Facebook” ticked, your DM will not be published to Facebook. TweetDeck sees that you are sending a DM and ignores the feed to Facebook in this instance, thus saving you having your private message set as your Facebook status. The same is also true of @replies starting with @username, so your Facebook status will not get “spammed” with replies to twitter users that your Facebook friends know nothing about.

Chatting with Facebook friends

In your Facebook column, if a friend is logged-in and available for Facebook chat, then you will see a small green dot after the word “Facebook”.

Clicking this dot will open up a Facebook chat session.

From this point you are now using standard Facebook chat, so it will operate just as if you had opened it from the Facebook page. Click a friend’s name on the right-hand column to start chatting with them, go online/offline, change your settings… all the same as in Facebook.

When you’re finished chatting, just click the X in the top-right corner of the window to be returned to TweetDeck.

In other news…

One other small change in this release is the grouping of options under the “Other Actions” menu. Since it’s appearance, the bottom-right icon when hovering over a profile pic has become quite a favourite, but it was a little long.

So now the menu is split into two groups: User and Tweet.

Under “User” you have the options: Add to Group, Follow, Unfollow, View Profile and Search

Under “Tweet” are the items: Email Tweet, Translate, Untranslate, Favourite,Mark as Read and Delete

Just a small update here, but it tidies that menu up a bit which gives scope for adding more options in future releases.

And finally…

And there you have it. The first of what will no doubt be a raft of Facebook integrations  to come to TweetDeck in the near future, thanks to the new API features released back in February.

Be warned, this is very much a test release and will not be pushed to TweetDeck users automatically. If you want v0.24 you will need to visit tweetdeck.posterous.com and download it manually from there.

So, in short, this is phase 1 for Facebook in TweetDeck. Give it a try and see how you like it.

If you are looking for more tips about TweetDeck, take a look at the most comprehensive list around in my previous post “All Your TweetDeck Questions Answered”

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What do you think to this new update? What other Facebook features would you like to access from TweetDeck? Let me know in the comments, or catch me on Twitter @richardbarley

New TweetDeck brings 12seconds video to the desktop

In another optional update to all-powerful Twitter client TweetDeck, you can now record video updates direct in the applications and post to the 12seconds.tv site and Twitter.

What is 12seconds.tv?

12seconds.tv is a service that allows you to record videos 12 seconds long and post them to sites such as Twitter as a kind of video-status-updates. For all the information about the service, take a look at their help pages here: www.12seconds.tv/help.

TweetDeck has included the ability to create a 12seconds column for quite a while. This special column will show you all the video updates from the people who you have flagged as your “friend” on the 12seconds.tv website. This worked well, but up until now you have had to visit the 12seconds website in order to actually record an update of your own.

But now, with release 0.22 of TweetDeck, you can record your 12seconds video updates directly in the TweetDeck application. This is made possible by a new authoring API just released by 12seconds.

Adding your 12seconds.tv solumn

Using the 12seconds integration is really quite easy.

First, you need to add a 12seconds column to you TweetDeck by clicking the “12″ button on the top toolbar.

You will then be prompted to either create a new 12seconds account, or enter your username (“12ername”) and password.

Checking the box “Check here to see everyone’s posts” box means the column will, as you would imagine, show the “public timeline” of 12seconds posts. If you leave that box unchecked, your column will only contain the video posts of you and your 12seconds friends.

Clicking Submit will create your 12seconds column.

Recording a 12seconds.tv update

At the top and bottom of your 12seconds.tv column is a “record” button

To start recording an update, click the record button. This will initialise the recording window, which may take a few seconds first time around, but should be quicker for subsequent updates during this TweetDeck session.

You may be faced with a small Privacy box, where you need to grant the Flash player access to your webcam and microphone. Just tick “Allow” then “Remember” and you shouldn’t be bothered by this in the future.

Once over that small hurdle, you have the option of changing the webcam and microphone in use, plus a big pink “record it” button. To start recording your video, just click this.

You now have 12 seconds to do/say/show whatever you feel the need to. As you record the seconds count down at the bottom of the screen, so you know how long you have left.

Once the clock reaches zero, you will be given the option to

• preview your video, by clicking the “play” button in the centre of the frame
• cancel, which will delete the recording and take you back to TweetDeck, or
• post it, which will take you to the next screen to post your video to 12seconds.tv and Twitter

Posting and tweeting your update

Presuming you wish to continue, click “post it”. This take you on to the final step, which involves giving your video a title, tags and location.

The title will not only be the heading for the video in your 12seconds column, and on the 12seconds.tv website, but it will also be the text that accompanies the link to your video when it is posted to Twitter. So if you want to direct the video message at a particular Twitter user, include @username in the title. You could also include #tags if you wanted.

Clicking “Submit” here will then post your video update. It will appear in your 12seconds.tv column shortly after.

A tweet will automatically be send containing the text you entered and a link to view the video on the 12seconds.tv website.

The verdict

Although this is not necesarily a high-priority update, it is another example of how Iain Dodsworth is continuing to push TweetDeck in different directions. There will of course be comparisons with the Seesmic integration in Twhirl, but I think it is important to understand the differences in the two video services on offer here. 12seconds is a small, young company and this is all very much still in beta, so there are certainly improvements to be made in both the 12seconds service and TweetDeck itself.

Overall though, in my opinion this is a good improvement to an already excellent application.

Where do I get it?

Once again, this is an optional upgrade, so you will need to visit tweetdeck.posterous.com to download it.

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What do you think to this new update? Will you use the 12seconds facility? Let me know in the comments, or catch me on Twitter @richardbarley. On 12seconds.tv I am richardbarley

All your TweetDeck Questions Answered

Welcome to All your TweetDeck Questions Answered, the blog post that has grown from a few words of advice into the most comprehensive list available of frequently-asked questions (FAQs) about TweetDeck.

I hope that you find these FAQs helpful. If you did, do let me know either by leaving a comment or reaching out to me on Twitter (@richardbarley).

And if you know of anyone else who is new to TweetDeck and looking for some tips, why not help them out by directing them to this site? They’ll think you’re a great friend and I’ll love you forever (in an author/reader kind of way, nothing funny…)

If you leave this post thinking “darn, he never did answer my question”, then I want to know about it. If there’s a question about TweetDeck that you want answered, let me know and I’ll see if I can add it into the list. If I feature a question you suggested (or an answer you provided), I’ll give you my thanks and a link to your site, so don’t be shy!

The TweetDeck FAQs

1. TweetDeck takes up too much space. Can I resize the columns?
2. That notification sound is rather annoying. Can I turn it off?
3. I liked getting the TwitterCounter statistics in my stream. How do I get it back?
4. Some tweets go over 140 characters but these do not get fully displayed in TweetDeck. Can I quickly see the tweet on the web site?
5. How do I see which tweet a tweet is in reply to?
6. I get fed up with seeing the notification for new tweets in my All Friends column. Can I turn that off?
7. What is the API? And why is my “Rate limit exceeded”?
8. How can I mark a tweet as Favourite? And how do I remove it from my favourites?
9. I know I can use TweetDeck to keep up with my friends tweets, but can I stay up-to-date with what is being discussed on Twitter generally?
10. How do I see my list of followers in TweetDeck? How about the list of people who I follow?
11. How do I search for people in TweetDeck like I can on the Twitter website?
12. Why are links that I click in TweetDeck not opening in my default browser?
    
13. Why don’t all my friends show up in the list when I’m creating a group?
    
14. How do I use the TwitterKeys characters in TweetDeck?
    
15. I tweet from more than one Twitter account. Can I easily handle both accounts in TweetDeck?
    
16. My TweetDeck columns are full of tweets. How can I filter what I see?
    
17. What’s all the recent fuss about 12seconds? What does that “12″ button do?
    
18. Why does TweetDeck take up so much memory?
    
19. Is there an easy way to upload photos from TweetDeck? Is that TwitPic?
20. I use TweetDeck on two different computers. Can I sync my settings on both machines?
    
21. I sometimes struggle to fit my message into just 140 characters. Is there an easy way to compress my tweet?
    
22. How does Search work in TweetDeck?  Why am I still receiving notifications for a search I performed ages ago?
    
23. How do I use groups to organise my Tweets?
    
24. What is ReTweeting and how do I do it inTweetDeck?
    
25. I use Facebook as well as Twitter. Is there a way of interacting with my Facebook friends in TweetDeck?
    
26. Why do my DMs and @replies take a long time to appear in TweetDeck?
    
27. Something’s wrong! My TweetDeck is broken! Should I give up and move to another client?
    
28. I love TweetDeck but don’t like the black colour. Can I change it?
    
29. My “Replies” column is empty. What’s going on?
    
30. My TweetDeck is linked to the wrong FaceBook account. How do I change this? *New*
31. I changed my Twitter password and now TweetDeck says “Not Authorised” – what do I do? *New*

1. TweetDeck takes up too much space. Can I resize the columns?

You cannot size the columns freely, but there is the option to choose “Narrow columns” under settings.

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2. That notification sound is rather annoying. Can I turn it off?

Yes indeed you can. Just go to Settings and untick “Play notification sound” then your notifications will all be silent.

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3. I liked getting the TwitterCounter statistics in my stream. How do I get it back?

This feature, that inserted an automatic tweet into your Replies column containing statistics from the TwitterCounter service (Follower numbers etc.). This has now been made an optional, manual function. i.e. you have to click a button to generate a statistics tweet each time you want it.

To generate a TwitterCounter tweet, go to Settings > Services and press the TwitterCounter button.

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4. Some tweets go over 140 characters but these do not get fully displayed in TweetDeck. Can I quickly see the tweet on the web site?

Yes! Just click on the date and time under a tweet to be taken to the web version, which will show all the message if it is over 140 characters.

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5. How do I see which tweet a tweet is in reply to?

In your “All friends”, “Replies” and “Group” columns you will see the text “in reply to…” under a tweet that is a reply. Click that text to be taken to the original tweet to which this tweet is replying.

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6. I get fed up with seeing the notification for new tweets in my All Friends column. Can I turn that off?

Yes you can!  Go to Settings and untick “Include All Friends notifications”. You will now no longer receive notifications for new tweets in your All Friends column. Notifications for all other columns are unaffected.

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7. What is the API? And why is my “Rate limit exceeded”?

The Twitter API is basically the part of the Twitter service that allows 3rd-party applications like TweetDeck to access the Twitter data and functions.

Every Twitter account can make 100 “calls” to the API per hour. So when TweetDeck updates the “All Friends” column, that takes 1 call. The same applies to the Replies and Direct Mesage columns. Viewing a user profile within TweetDeck (rather than using the new “View profile on the web” option) also consumes calls – 3 per profile view in fact.

If you use up all your 100 calls within an hour, you will see the mesage “Rate limit exceeded” and will be unable to make any more calls until your API allowance is reset for the next hour.

You can keep track of your API usage in the top-right corner of TweetDeck.

In the example above, I have 81 of my 100 calls remaining this hour. My allowance will reset back to 100 at 16:53.

If you do run out of API calls, you can still continue to send tweets, but you wont get any more updates in All Friends, Replies or Direct Messages. Search and Group columns will still continue to update though. And of course you can switch to using www.twitter.com if you need to check replies in the meantime.

Iain Dodsworth has a great article which goes over this subject in more detail here.

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8. How can I mark a tweet as Favourite? And how do I remove it from my favourites?

You can mark a tweet as a “favourite”, which is rather like bookmarking a web page in your browser.

In TweetDeck, to favourite a tweet, hover over a profile picture next to the tweet and click on Other Actions > Favourite.

This will add the tweet to your favourites. You can add a Favourites column to your TweetDeck by clicking the Favourites button at the top-left.

This column will just show those tweets that you have marked as a Favourite.

If you want to remove a tweet from your favourites, locate the tweet in your Favourites column, hover over the profile picture on the tweet and click Other Actions > Favourite. The tweet will be removed from your list of favourites.

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9. I know I can use TweetDeck to keep up with my friends tweets, but can I stay up-to-date with what is being discussed on Twitter generally?

It’s easy to spot topics that are popular on the whole of Twitter if you add a TwitScoop column. Do this by clicking the TwitScoop button in the top-left.

This will create a TwitScoop column, which pulls data from www.twitscoop.com about topics that are “buzzing” right now. This column will automatically update so you can always see which are the hot topics of the moment.

Clicking on one of the terms in the Twitscoop column will take you to the Twitscoop websitea where you will see the recent tweets on this topic, along with a chart showing the popularity of the topic over time.

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10. How do I see my list of followers in TweetDeck? How about the list of people who I follow?

At the moment there is no way to view a list of your followers, or those that follow you, within TweetDeck itself. To see this information you have to visit your own profile on the Twitter website.

You can view your Twitter website profile in two ways from TweetDeck, depending on how you have your settings configured.

If you have “Open profiles in web page” ticked, you just need to click on your own name somewhere in TweetDeck (in an @reply or under one of your own tweets.

If you do not have “Open profiles in web page” ticked, open your profile in TweetDeck by clicking on your name, then clicking on the URL of your Twitter page e.g. www.twitter.com/richardbarley

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11. How do I search for people in TweetDeck like I can on the Twitter website?

There is no “people search” function in TweetDeck per se, but you can still find people by using a search column and searching for their username.

If you do not know the username, searching for the persons name may throw up some tweets that might help locate the username you require.

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12. Why are links that I click in TweetDeck not opening in my default browser?

You may find that hyperlinks in TweetDeck do not open in the browser you expect. You may also notice that if you copy & paste a link from TweetDeck that it starts with “Event:”. This is generally a problem with Adobe Air and Windows.

For Vista, see the support article from Adobe here, but essentially the solutions is as follows:

1. Select Start > Default Programs > Set Program Access And Computer Defaults.
2. Click Continue in the Security Alert dialog box, if it appears.
3. Select Custom, and then select your preferred browser under Choose A Default Web Browser; click OK.

For Windows XP, the solution is pretty much the same, but here’s a link that explains it all very nicely with screenshots. Thanks to @InsultComicDog for pointing that out to me.

For Windows 2000 Professional, set your default web browser using the instructions here. Thanks to Matt Wardman for the link

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13. Why don’t all my friends show up in the list when I’m creating a group?

When creating a group column, the list of friends that is displayed only shows a subset of your total fiends list. This has been done deliberately to save on both time and API calls (see Question 7) because the Twitter API only allows fetching of 100 friends per call. If you have 2000 friends, that would be 20 API calls and quite a wait.

The list of friends available to pick from starts with your most active friends, and grows over time.

Iain explains the situation in more detail over on his blog here.

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14. Can I use the TwitterKeys/Unicode characters in TweetDeck?

Yes you can, but with some restrictions.

If you are a fan of the Twitterkeys site, that allows you to enter special characters into your tweets, like ♥ ☺ and ♫, then you may have noticed that these characters do not show up by default in your tweets from TweetDeck.

In order to make use of these symbols, you must enable the “International Font” under settings.

With this font selected you should now be able to see some of the Twitterkeys characters. Note that not all the characters will show up. After some extensive testing (thanks @richardwiles and @sean_lin for helping!), this is the list of characters that do work in TweetDeck. Copy & paste them from the Twitterkey bookmark popup (as explaiuned on the Twitterkeys site), or just grab them from here:

♥ ☺ ♠ ☻ ♫ ♪ ♀ ♂ ☼ © ® ™ … ∞ € £ ƒ $ ≤ ≥ ∑ « » ç ∫ µ ◊ ı ∆ Ω ≈ * § • ¶ ¬ † & ¡ ¿ ø å ∂ œ Æ æ π ß ÷ ‰ √ ≠ % ˚ ˆ ˜ ˘ ¯ ∑ º ª ?

The International font is also useful if you want to read tweets in languages that use special characters in the alphabet, e.g. Russian, Chinese etc

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15. I tweet from more than one Twitter account. Can I easily handle both accounts in TweetDeck?

The answer here is “Not yet”. Currently there is no support for tweeting from multiple accounts in one TweetDeck session. In order to tweet from a different account, you must first log out, using the Log Out (change password) button in the top-right.

This will shut down TweetDeck and log you out.

When you restart TweetDeck you will be prompted for your Twitter username and password. You can now log in using your alternate account.

This issue is very high on the list of functions to be offered in an upcoming major release of TweetDeck, so watch this space for a more elegant solution to multiple accounts in the very near future.

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16. My TweetDeck columns are full of tweets. How can I filter what I see?

TweetDeck is truly great for gathering and organising tweets from all over the twitterverse, but sometimes you do want to narrow your view somewhat and filter your tweets.

There are filter options at the bottom of each column:

Clicking this button will reveal the filter options available to you.

You can choose to filter by the following four options:

• Tweet Text – the actual text of the tweet, including any URLs
• Username – the Twitter username of the person who sent the tweet
• Source – via which service the tweet was posted e.g. Web, TweetDeck, Twhirl, Dabr etc.
• Timeframe – the number of hours between the date the tweet was sent and the current time

Select the option from the list that you wish to filter by – only one filter can be in place on each column for now.

Next, select wether you want to filter by including or excluding by selecting + to include or - to exclude

Filtering by including would result in your column ONLY showing tweets that match the text you enter in your filter.

Filtering by excluding would result in your column containing all tweets EXCEPT those that match the text you enter in your filter.

Depending on how you want to narrow your column down, decide which method will work best.

Finally, enter the text that you wish to filter by.

As you type, the tweets in the column will start to be filtered based on the options you have chosen. In the example above, this column would show only tweets that contain the characters “air” within the tweet text.

If I had chosen the following configuration…

…then the column would be filtered to contain only tweets that do not contain the characters “air” in the tweet text.

Some more examples:

This will exclude all tweets from the column that were sent by the username “iaindodsworth”.

This will filter the column to only display tweets that were sent by awesome mobile Twitter site Dabr.

This will filter the column to only include tweets from the last 2 hours.

To remove the filter from a column, just click on the X at the end of the filter.

It is important to note at presently the filters you create in this manner are not persistent i.e. when you close and reopen TweetDeck any filters you created will have been removed.

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17. What’s all the recent fuss about 12seconds? What does that “12″ button do?

TwetDeck got a new update today that allows you to post video “tweets” from inside TweetDeck. I have covered this in detail on this blog here: New TweetDeck brings 12seconds video to the desktop

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18. Why does TweetDeck take up so much memory?

One of the biggest complaints about TweetDeck is that it uses up too many resources, and this is true. THere does appear to be an issue with TweetDeck eating up large portions of your PC’s available RAM over time, especially if you have a large number of search columns pulling in a high volume of tweets.

Iain Dodsworth has acknowledged the problem and has confirmed that he is making it a top priority to be addresses in the next major release of TweetDeck. However,  part of the problem does lie with the Adobe Air platform which TweetDeck is built upon, and other Air applications suffer similar issues. TweetDeck highlights the problem more than others due to its complexity and volume of data.

In the meantime, I suggest simply closing down and restarting TweetDeck a few times through the day (something that I often have to do with Firefox). This frees up all the resources it was using and TweetDeck will start up again with a more sensible amount.

As a guide, on my laptop I have 2gb RAM and only need to restart TweetDeck a couple of times a day. On my home PC I only have a tiny 512mb RAM and find I have to restart TweetDeck every couple of hours.

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19. Is there an easy way to upload photos from TweetDeck? Is that TwitPic?

Yes it is! TwitPic is a photo-sharing service that integrates with Twitter and TweetDeck has a really easy way to post a TwitPic photo directly in the application.

Underneath the tweet box is the TwitPic button.

Click this button and you will be prompted to select a photo from your PC.

Select your photo and click “Open”.

TweetDeck will then start uploading your photo to the TwitPic site.

Once uploaded, you will be left with a short twitpic.com link in your tweetbox.

This link will take people directly to the photo you have just uploaded. You can now add some text to go along with your link if you want, explaining what the photo is etc. This is now just like sending a normal tweet.

Send the tweet and you’re all done. Folks can click the link in your tweet and it will take them to the TwitPic site, where they can see the photo and comment on it if they want to. Comments people make will be tweeted to you as an @reply.

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20. I use TweetDeck on two different computers. Can I sync my settings on both machines?

There is no official solution to this at present, but one is planned and will hopefully be with us soon.

In the meantime, here’s a great article by Christian Mohn (h0bbel) that seems to give a pretty good workaround using online file storage sites such as Dropbox.

I haven’t tried this myself as I’m limited to one PC at the moment, but it looks like it has worked for some follks, so may be worth giving it a go.

If anyone has a solution for other operating systems, let me know and I’ll add a link and a shout out here.

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21. I sometimes struggle to fit my message into just 140 characters. Is there an easy way to compress my tweet?

Yes there is! TweetDeck includes an integration to the TweetShrink service, which will take your long message and attempt to shorten it so it fits into a 140-character tweet.

To shorten your tweet in TweetDeck, type your long message in the tweet box and click the TweetShrink button:

This will shrink your tweet, using abbreviations and shortcuts, so that it fits into a standard tweet.

Then just send your tweet as normal.

The result isn’t always fantastic, and some shortened tweets may need tweaking before sending, but it’s a good start if you just have to say that bit more and it won’t all fit in.

This quote from the TweetShrink website says it all:

Shrinking tweets is neither an art nor a science. Just a guesstimation which can be tweaked, poked, and prodded. Sometimes the results are helpful, sometimes they are laughable. But what’s important is that we try. Hopefully the result is enjoyable, usable, and fun.

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22. How does Search work in TweetDeck?  Why am i still receiving notifications for a search I performed ages ago?

TweetDeck is all about search, but how does it actually work?

TweetDeck allows you to set up search columns – columns that are populated by tweets matching the criteria you specify – which auto-update every minute using data from the Twitter Search API.

To create a search column, click the Search icon at the top-left.

You will then be prompted “What are you searching for?”. Here’s where you enter your keywords. To start with, just enter one keyword.

This search column is going to look for occurrences of the word “tweetdeck” in any tweets and display them in the column. Click the magnifying glass icon to create the search column.

Don’t forget, the column will be added to the right of your right-most existing column, so you may have to scroll across to see it.

Your search column will start by displaying the most recent 100 tweets (a limit of the API) containing your keyword. It will refresh every minute, adding any new tweets found and generating a notification message (if you have them turned on):

This is why you may find you continue to get notified about searches you performed a long time ago. The search created a search column and it is still sitting there refreshing every minute.

To remove the column, and hence stop the notifications, just click the X in the top-right corner of the search column…

…then click the delete icon on the confirmation box.

As the warning says, once you have deleted a search column, you cannot restore it – you will have to recreate a new search column using the same search parameters.

So you now know how to create a search column for one keyword.  But you can get smarter than that, as the search function will accept OR, AND and phrases in quotes.

So you could have a search column looking for tweets containing both TweetDeck AND Twhirl:

Note that if you use AND or OR they must be in CAPS.

Here’s a column looking for tweets containing either Tweetdeck OR Twhirl:

Phrase searches can be performed by putting your phrase into “quotes“

For a full list of advanced search operators, you can view this help page from the Twitter Search site. All the examples there should work in TweetDeck, apart from the “near” and “within” operators, which will not work in a TweetDeck search.

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23. How do I use groups to organise my Tweets?

One of TweetDeck’s great features is the ability to collect your friends into groups. This is an invaluable function when you have more than a few dozen friends as it allows you to focus your attention on different groups of people in different ways.

You could have a “Celebs” group for all those tweeting celebrities, a “Work colleagues” group for all the folk at the office, or maybe a “Really helpful” group for people who always tweet helpful hints.

However you choose to group your friends, it is very easy to achieve.

To create a group, click the group icon on in the top-left of TweetDeck.

This will display the list of your most active friends (see number 13 above for an explanation of this). Enter a name for the group and tick the boxes next to the friends you wish to add to this group.

When you have ticked all the friends you require, click the Save Goup button at the bottom of the list.

This will then add a column to your TweetDeck (to the right of all your other columns) containing all the recent tweets from the people you added to the group. This column will auto-refresh every time the All Friends column refreshes.

If you want to change the group membership, you have several different methods at your disposal.

a)  You can click on a group header…

…which will display the list of friends that you saw earlier. Tick the friends you want, as before, and click “Save Group”.

b)  You can add someone to a group directly from one of their tweets, either by clicking the [+] button next to their name…

…or by clicking “Other Actions”…

…and then clicking “Add to group”

Both of these actions will pop up the list of groups. Select the group(s) you wish to add this person to and click the cross in the top-right.

c)  You can add someone to a group from their profile page. Just click the Groups button at the bottom of a profile screen in TweetDeck.

This will pop up the group selection screen as seen in b) above. Tick the groups you wish to add this person to and click the cross.

Once you have created all your groups, you may want to turn off notifications for the All Friends column and just be notified about new tweets in your group columns. You can do this under Settings, by ticking “Show notification window” and unticking “Include All Friends notifications”

This will stop you from receiving notifications when you get new tweets in your “All Friends” column. You will receive notifications for tweets that appear in your groups, replies, Direct message and search columns.

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24. What is Re-tweeting and how do I do it in TweetDeck?

Re-tweeting is a bit like forwarding an email. When you see a tweet that you want to share with your friends, you can re-tweet it so everyone who follows you will see it.

Items are generally re-tweeted when they are particularly interesting, funny or insightful. A tweet that has been re-tweeted multiple times can very quickly spread to many thousands of people so is a great way of sharing important news.

To re-tweet in TweetDeck, just hover over the profile picture next to a tweet and click the “Retweet” button:

This will copy the text of that tweet, prefixed by the original tweeter’s username, into your tweet box.

You can now just send your tweet as normal.

However, you may want to add a comment to the re-tweet, for which there are various conventions. My personal favourite is to add “<<” to the end, followed by my comment. So on the above re-tweet I may want to comment like this:

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25. I use Facebook as well as Twitter. Is there a way of seeing my Facebook friends in TweetDeck?

Yes there is! Test release v0.24 of TweetDeck introduced some great new features to allow you to interact with your Facebook friends from within TweetDeck, including viewing friends’ status updates, posting a status update to Twitter and/or Facebook and initiating Facebook chat with a friend.

I have covered these new features in great detail here, so you should find all the information you need there.

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26. Why do my DMs and @replies take a long time to appear in TweetDeck?

All your tweets arrive into TweetDeck via the Twitter API (see number 7 above). The rate at which the different tweets arrive is governed by your settings on the “Twitter API” tab.

The 3 sliders represent the 3 types of tweet that TweetDeck recieves: All Friends (those in the All Friends column and any group columns), Replies and DMs (Direct messages).

Moving the slider changed the % of the APi limit you wish to use in collecting each type of tweet, remembering that Search columns are, in practice, not limited.

As you adjust the %, you will notice the polling time changing over on the right-hand side of the slider. This indicates how long it will be between each “batch” of new tweets in this category.

So, in my example above, I will recieve new tweets into my “All friends” and groups columns every 3 minutes. I will receive @replies every 1 minute, and i will get my DMs into TweetDeck every 30 minutes.

Incidentally, I am not too bothered about getting DMs into TweetDeck quickly, as I receive an email and an SMS pretty much straight away, so I have TweetDeck just pick them up later.

So, if you are finding your tweets are not arriving quick enough, try adjusting these settings. But remember, don’t set it so that the total API is above 100% or you will be constantly running out of API calls. In fact, keeping it down to about 80% is best, but this is described in more detail in number 7.

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27. Something’s wrong! My TweetDeck is broken! Should I give up and move to another client?

Woah, hold on now. There’s no need to go abandoning TweetDeck just because there’s a problem.

As I explained up in number 7, TweetDeck uses the Twitter API to get all its data. Other than the Facebook status updates (which come direct from Facebook), there is no other source of data for TweetDeck.

So… if the Twitter API goes down, or is having a bad day, you will find that TweetDeck has problems too.

This may manifest itself in different ways.

a) You may find you have “0/0″ remaining API calls in the top-right of your TweetDeck screen

b) You may see a message in the bottom-right that there is a “Problem with @replies” feed, or “All Friends” feed

c) You may see “there is a problem – don’t panic” in the bottm-right

d) You may see “Twitter problem, please try again” to the left of the tweet box when you try to send a tweet

e) You may see “Update failed” in the bottom-left of TweetDeck

Each of these messages is an indication of something going wrong trying to fetch data from or send data to Twitter. Pretty much all of these errors can be blamed on a loss of internet connection, or the API being down.

If you are experiencing trouble with TweetDeck, try these steps:

i) Can you access normal websites ok? If not, it’s clearly a problem with your internet connection. If the web is fine, then its likely a Twitter problem

ii) Go to the Twitter Status blog here: http://status.twitter.com Are there any currently reported issues listed there? If so, keep checking back to see when they are fixed. Twitter are not very quick at updating this site, so there may well be a problem, even though it is not listed here.

iii) Go to Twitter Search here: http://search.twitter.com and search for “tweetdeck”. Do you see tweets from other people complaining about TweetDeck behaving odly? If you do, it’s very likely a general Twitter API issue

iv) If all else fails, tweet @tweetdeck or me @richardbarley from www.twitter.com (the Twitter website doesn’t use the API so should generally be available) and ask for help.

But, above all…

DON’T PANIC

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28. I love TweetDeck but don’t like the black colour. Can I change it?

Yes you can! You really can tailor TweetDeck to suit your own personality by setting the colours of virtually all aspects of the application.

To access the colour settings, click on Settings > Colors/Fonts.

Then click on one of the colour boxes that you wish to change.

This will reveal a colour palette window.

On this window you can either:

• click the colour you want from the grid
• or enter the HEX number that represents the colour in the box at the top and press Enter

This will change the colour of that aspect of the TweetDeck interface to the colour you have selected.

Repeat this for each of the different colour boxes to complete your colour scheme.

Here’s a guide showing which box changes which area of the TweetDeck screen.

Set your colours as you want them and you are good to go!

If you want to go back to the default black and grey colour scheme, just click the “Reset Colors” button

All your custom colours will be lost and you will be back to the standard colour scheme again.

Sharing your colours

If you have come up with a super-stylish colour-scheme and you want to share it with the world, you can click the “Tweet colors” button.

This will take the HEX codes for each of your colour settings and inserts them into the tweet box, ready for you to send.

Your friends can then copy and paste your colour values into their own colour settings and then they too will be able to use TweetDeck in your super-stylish colour scheme.

Likewise, if you see a similar tweet from your friends, copy and paste each number into the colour palette box in turn to replicate your friend’s colour scheme.

And while we’re on the subject of sharing colours, why not check out TweetDeckColorSchemes.com by Royce Fullerton. Its a very simple little site that is just aggregating TweetDeck colour scheme tweets and showing them as a colour palette. You can click through to the tweet and grab the colours from there. Simple, but cool.

Setting the icon brightness

On a related note, you can also change the brightness of the TweetDeck icons.

Back on the colour settings screen there are two sliders:

Adjust these sliders to sete the initial brightness of the icons within the TweetDeck user interface. When you hover over an icon it will always “glow” with full brightness.

Here is a guide showing which icons are affected by the two sliders:

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29. My “Replies” column is empty. What’s going on?

A bug was found in versions 0.24.2 and 0.21.5 that was causing some people to end up with an empty replies column. This bug has now been fixed and rolled into the download versions available from TweetDeck.com.

So if you have an empty Replies column, try reinstalling using the following links:

v0.21.5 (latest FULL release): http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/

v0.24.2 (latest TEST release – with Facebook integration): http://tweetdeck.posterous.com

If reinstalling still doesn’t fix the problem, please contact @iaindodsworth or @richardbarley for further guidance.

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30. My TweetDeck is linked to the wrong FaceBook account. How do I change this?

If you created your Facebook column in TweetDeck and linked it to one account, but now need to change it to link to another account, here’s what you need to do.

In TweetDeck, delete your Facebook column by clicking the X in the top-right of the column.

Then click on the trash can to confirm deletion.

Close down TweetDeck.

Go to http://www.facebook.com and login using the account that is currently associated with the TweetDeck column.

Click on Settings > Account Settings.

This will show the list of Facebook “applications” you are using. We need to filter this list to be able to see TweetDeck, so change the “show” dropdown to “Authorised”.

This will show all applications that you gave authorised to access your Facebook account.

Locate TweetDeck in this list and click the X next to it on the right.

This will bring up a box asking for confirmation. Click Remove. PLease note, this is not uninstalling the actual TweetDeck applicatiuon itself, just the authorisation for it to access this Facebook account.

If all is well, you will then recieve confirmation that the TweetDeck authorisation has been removed. Click OK.

You have now successfully removed the link between TweetDeck and the current Facebook account. You should now sign out of this Facebook account and go back to TweetDeck to re-add your Facebook column.

Instructions for adding a Facebook column are given here Facebook updates, posting and chat come to TweetDeck, under “Adding a Facebook column”.

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31. I changed my Twitter password and now TweetDeck says “Not Authorised” – what do I do?

When you change your Twitter password, any site or application that accesses your Twitter account via your user ID and password will also need updating. This includes TweetDeck.

When you first logged into TweetDeck, you provided one user ID/password combination, but once you change your password, these become invalid, hence the “Not Authorised” message in the bottom right-hand corner of the TweetDeck screen.

In order to put things right, follow this procedure:

Log out of TweteDeck by clicking the Logout button in the top-right toolbar

This will log you out of TweetDeck and will close the application.

Then go to the Twitter website (http://www.twitter.com) and click on Settings…

…then Password

Enter your current password, followed by your new password twice, then click Change

Once you have seen confirmation that your password has been changed, go back and re-open TweetDeck.

You will be faced with the login screen. Now enter your Twitter username and NEW password, then click Login.

You should now be back into your normal TweetDeck screen with a status of “All Good”.

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What TweetDeck questions do you have that I could answer here? Let me know in the comments or get in touch via Twitter @richardbarley

Tweetdeck gets auto-complete for replies and DMs

TweetDeck really does keep getting better and better.

Hot on the heels of the previous release which introduced some great new features, the next release will see another seriously cool improvement to the king of Twitter clients – auto-completion of usernames as you start to type replies or direct messages.

Previously, in order to reply to someone you needed to locate a tweet from that person and use the Reply or DM function. Or you need to remember the person’s exact user ID (or run the risk of tweeting to the wrong person).

But now we have auto-complete and it works like a dream.

You looking @ me?

If you want to reply to someone you just type “@” as normal. Or for a Direct Message, type “d” followed by a space (as normal).

This will pop up the username search window:

Start typing the username you are replying/DMing to (no need to click, just start typing)

You can then either click the name you want from the list, or scroll down the list with the arrow keys and press [Enter].

Whichever method you prefer will close the search box and place the selected username in your tweet box (with a space after, ready for you to start typing your message)

And clearly, for DMs the function only works if the d [space] is at the start of the tweet, whereas @s can be anywhere in the tweet.

Very nice so far.

Tweeting with @itude

But wait, what about you speed-typing ninjas who don’t want to mess around with searching and windows and stuff? Isn’t this going to get in the way?

No-sir-ee bob, would be the answer there.

Firstly you can, should you wish, turn off the whole auto-complete function by deselecting it under Settings (it is on by default).

Or, if you’d rather keep it there, you can feel safe in the knowledge that this function should fit very snugly with your ninja typing skills.

For example, you may think that typing a short username is now going to take a lot more effort, but this would not be true.

Say I wanted to reply to Twitter CEO  Evan Williams (perhaps to beg him to up the API limit for paying customers…?). I can still just type @ev followed by a space and the application will skip happily though the screens.

“@” will bring up the search box

“ev” will search for Ev in the list of people I follow

[space] will just take the text I have entered (“ev”) and bung it into the tweet box next to the @, just as if I had typed it normally. no extra clicks, no extra button presses required.

And another handy feature: If you search for a username and are left with just one person in the list, just press [Enter] and that username will be chosen, no need to click it or scroll down and select it.

So if I start typing “d iaindo” that will bring up the search list and, as TweetDeck developer Iain Dodsworth is the only person I follow whose username contains the characters “iaindo”, his name is the only one in the list. I can therefore press [Enter] without having to complete the rest of his name. I can then continue my DM without having wasted rpecious tweeting seconds on unnecessary characters!

You can leave your @ on

And finally, if you just wanted to type an “@” without it being a reply, e.g. “I’ll meet you @ 8pm tonight”, that is still possible.

Just type “@” then hit [Esc] (or click the cross in the top-right) to close the search window.

Okay, I’m sold. Where’s it @?

The new feature will be in release 0.21.6, which will be available for download from www.tweetdeck.com/beta very soon. Also see Iain’s blog at tweetdeck.posterous.com for his release notes. There you’ll also find a helpful video walkthrough that should explain things very nicely for you.

Note that this update won’t be pushed out automatically, as Iain felt that another update coming so soon after the previous one may be a little too much.

So you will need to install it manually from http://tweetdeck.com/beta/TweetDeck_0_21_6.air

If you want to comment on this article, or have any questions about Twitter or TweetDeck, leave a comment below, or catch me on Twitter @richardbarley

TweetDeck goes global with latest update

Did I mention that I love the Twitter client TweetDeck? Yes? Ok, good.

Well,  I was lucky enough to be able to test out the new features of the updated TweetDeck v0.21.5 (get it here) for a couple of days, and I have to say “It rocks”.

No, actually I don’t have to say that. I want to say that, because in this release Iain Dodsworth, sole developer and all-round superstar, has implemented some tricks that could potentially change the way I use Twitter.

So what’s new?

Other Actions

Hover over an avatar and you now have an “Other actions” button.

A click on this button will reveal a new menu giving access to  various functions, some old some new.

Email Tweet

The first of the new functions will simply copy the tweet into a new email message, using your default email handler

This is not a huge feature, but could be just save you a few clicks if you want to continue the conversation via email.

Translate

Half the world’s population speaks english. Great stuff. But what about the other 3.3 billion people? That’s right fella, they are all chatting away in all manner of different languages. Now I have no idea how this ratio of language speakers is reflected in the Twitter population, but one would have to imagine there is a fair amount of non-english speakers on there. And currently, unless one is bilingual, or prepared to put a lot of work into manually translating each tweet written or received, these non-english-tweeters will generally be excluded from the conversation.

But no more. In this release of TweetDeck there is a “Translate” option for both tweets in  a column and tweets you send. This is genius. I can now follow all the non-english speakers I like,so long as Google can translate their language, and just by clicking on Translate in the “Other actions” menu, their tweet will be translated for me, right there in the column.

And if you want to go back to the original tweet text, just choose “Untranslate” et voila! – sorry – and there it is!

There are still improvement to be made in this feature. For instance, indicating the tweets that have been  translated (perhaps with a small icon or different text colour), but I’m sure this is on the cards for a future release.

Translate tweets before sending

Okay, so we can read those French (or Arabic, or Japanese or whatever…) tweets nice and easily now, but how do we respond? Well, luckily you can also translate your outgoing tweets before sending as well.

Clicking the “Translate this tweet” button…

…will reveal the list of available languages….

Clicking the required language will instantly translate the text in the tweet box into that language using the Google translate engine.

Obviously the translation is only as accurate as Google,which can sometimes give very odd results, but it should be enough to allow you to open up the communication channels with your foreign friends.

Hashtags, Profiles and StockTwits

Some smaller improvements include:

• A drop-down next to the tweet box that contains the last 10 #tags that you have used. This will make it a lot easier to use consistent hash tags in your tweets without fear of typing errors
• An option to show profiles on the Twitter web page rather than in the TweetDeck client. This may seem like a backward step, but it will save you 3 API calls,which could make a big difference to heavy users
• TweetDeck now integrates with StockTwits in much the same way as it does with 12Seconds. I’m not a StockTwits user so haven;t tried this extensively, but it seems to be an elegant solution if you are a user of the service

And the rest…

• Several new preferences under “settings” for clearing tweets and DMs on startup
• Control the brightness of the icons
• Auto-include hashtags from a tweet when you reply
• Lots of bug fixes, including the issue with the Follow/Unfollow button being confused on occasion

In Summary

This is a point release of TweetDeck, not a major upgrade. there are still issues with resources, although a lot of this is down to Adobe Air, and there is still no support for multiple accounts, but these issues will be addressed very soon. Iain assures me that the next major release will focus in on these problems, as well as improving support for Vista.

So, for now, sit back and enjoy the new goodies that TweetDeck has delivered in this small update and lets all say “well done” to Iain Dodsworth for continuing to delivery an innovative and exciting application.

Want to discuss this? Leave a comment below, or catch me on twitter: @richardbarley

Wanted: TweetDeck & SMS integration

I love TweeetDeck.

No, seriously. I LOVE it. With a rather worrying level of obsession sometimes. But then I’m the kind of guy who likes to see technology working for people and not making people have to work round the technology.

I won’t go on and on about how great TweetDeck is here, or how everyone should be using it. Just assume that I have said all that stuff and go out and install it, m’kay?

No, what I wanted to document here was just a thought I had today that would make the whole Twitter experience go from “Great” to “OMFG”.

Here’s the thing.

The thing

I sit at my desk and live in TweetDeck most of the day. I am also signed up with TwittSMS to send my any DMs or @replies to my phone so I never miss out on anything (luckily I am not so popular that I am flooded with DMs or @replies daily…)

However, each text I receive costs me money and, while I am sitting at my TweetDeck, I don’t need the text as well.

So here’s the proposition…

The Proposition

TwitSMS (or some other service – I don’t really care who) will open up a small API to turn on and off the SMS sending function for my account.

TweetDeck adds a button to the application to toggle SMS sending on/off. This will simply tell the SMS service to start or stop sending my SMS messages. Kind of like an “Out of Office” in Outlook, but for Twitter.

An extra cool thing would be to have the option for TweetDeck to automatically set me to “Away” after x minutes of inactivity in TweetDeck, and thus activate the SMS sending.

It could even give me the option of turning SMS on at shut-down and off at login.

At the moment I can already stop my SMS updates during a certain time period, but this is a global setting. For example on a weekend I want them all the time as I am rarely at my desk.

What do you think?

is this feasible?

Is there already an elegant solution to this problem?

I’m not looking for some crazy mash-up that required me to change how I work, just something nice and simple that allows me to work in TweetDeck, and only receive SMS updates when I’m not actively working there.

Any thoughts?

More than 30 friends on Twitter? You need TweetDeck!

Twitter [www.twitter.com] is great. Its a really easy way to keep in touch with people you know, but also to keep tabs on people you don;t know but would like to, and also those who you will never know but only dream about.

My friends fall into 3 distinct groups:

• Real friends – People I know and have possibly even met
• Publishers – People who say stuff on Twitter that I find interesting and/or useful
• Celebs – Not just true celebreties but generally people who I will probably never meet

I interract with these groups in very different ways.

• For my real friends I want to read every tweet as it comes in so I can react and hold conversations with them.
• When a publisher tweets I may well read it it it is relevant to me and possibly respond.
• My celeb tweets will generally only be read at the end or start of the day.

i have also divided up my friends geographically so I can focus my attention on conversations in the USA, UK, France and the rest of the world.

How on earth do I sort through all these?  By the power of Greyskull TweetDeck [www.tweetdeck.com]. 

Got to get grouping!

As I have blogged previously, my Twitter client of choice has been Twhirl [www.twhirl.org] , but recent improvements to TweetDeck caught my eye and I decided to give it a go. And boy am I glad I did as I am now so happy with it. 

Basically the big win for TweetDeck over Twhirl (and every other twitter client that I know of) is its group function.  I can assign each of my Twitter friends to any number of groups, and the tweets that fall under each group are displayed in their own column. So this then allows me to seperate out my conversations with my friends down the road from the ramblings of Scobelizer and chums. My “publisher” friends have their own group so I can pick out what is relevant, while the “celeb” group gets pushed out to the right-hand column where it can be viewed late in the day over a glass of wine.

Monitoring your brand

And groups are not just limited to individual users that you select. You can also create a group from a search. So, when it was the recent Future of Web Apps conference in London and I wanted to keep up with the chatter around it, I simply searched for “FOWA” in TweetDeck and that became a new column. Every time someone mentioned FOWA in a tweet somewhere on Twitter, it showed up in my FOWA column. Perfect!

Want to keep a look out for your brand name being mentioned? Search for “eDoofers” in Tweetdeck and everytime someone mentions “eDoofers” in a tweet, you’ll get it right there in your client. Better than alerts as you don’t need to check an email or read a text message. Everything you need it there in the client.

Iain Dodsworth [www.twitter.com/iaindodsworth] the developer is a very active tweeter and seems very open to new ideas and reports of problems, which is really encouraging. At the moment I am eagerly awaiting the release of v0.20 which is expected to bring big improvements due to a reworking of the underlying structure of the client

And don’t get me wrong, there is still room for improvement. The manner in which you create groups of people could be better, and it is still a little rough round the edges. The notifications could be better too (I like the notifications from Feedalizr [www.feedalizr.com], mentioned in my last post [here] ).

The must-have tool

But overall TweetDeck is now a gerat product and should really be on the desktop of every windows-based Twitter user. Especially those with a large number of friends. How one can manage more than 20 or 30 Twitter friends without TweetDeck is beyond me. It has become one of my most essential communication tools and I look forward to seeing what else it has to offer in the future.

Feedalizr – a new pretender to the Twitter client throne?

I blogged a while ago [here] about the toss-up between Thwirl [website] and TweetDeck [website] as my Twitter client of choice. Having given TweetDeck a good run out, I did eventually go back to Twhirl, finding it just did everything I needed in a nice, slick, compact manner. TweedDeck was a bit rough around the edges and, although I really like the ability to group people and have their tweets visible in separate columns, i found the multi-column interface just too clumsy for me. I like my Twitter clients slim, trim and straight up-and-down .

However, a recent comment from Leezl [here] pointed me toward a new contender in the arena,  namely Feedalizr [home page]. So, always one to try out new stuff, I gave it a go.

Feedalizr (they just had to miss out a vowel somewhere) is an Adobe Air application, just like Twhirl and TweetDeck, that combines some of the best aspects of both rival clients into one pretty slick package. It manifests as a single column,  but with the ability to create separate tabs for items filtered by username or service (Feedalizr supports Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr and Jaiku). This is reminiscent of the filtering offered by TweetDeck, but not quite as flexible. The tabbed interface is a big improvement though, and is something that TweetDeck should really look at implementing.

Overall the interface of Feedalizr feels good. Everything is smooth scrolling and the flipping effect when opening the “options” dialog is cool, if rather unnecessary. Click on someone’s name and their entries will appear in a new column. A nice slick way of picking out the signal from the noise.

One very nice feature that  that both Twhirl and TweetDeck lack is de-duping of FriendFeed items. If Feedalizr spots that someone has tweeted something, and that tweet then appears in that user’s FriendFeed list, it will hide the duplicate entry so you don’t read what your firends are eating for breakfast two times over every day.

There are a few niggly issues that take the polish off this potential Twhirl-beater. It doesn’t have Twhirls ability to click on an @name to display that users profile. And the pop-up notifications for new messages contain a rather spurious explanation, which I found unnecessary and distracted from  my reading of the messages.

It is still early days for Feedalizr, which, naturally,  is still in beta, but it’s certainly a promising start and I shall continue to look out for updates. I have added a few of my issues to their site on Get Satisfaction [here] so I’ll see what their response is.

Could Twhirl finally lose it’s crown? Not yet, but maybe soon.

Thwirl or TweetDeck? How to Twitter…?

You may have noticed that I use Twitter, the up-and-down conversation/micro-blogging tool. Over there on the right-hand-side is my latest Twitter status from www.twitter.com/richard_barley.  I like using Twitter because it allows me to keep up with lots of folks, some who I would call friends, some who I have never met, without having to invest a lot of time and effort. This suits me as I am essentially rather lazy when it comes to socialising and anything that makes it easier is a winner for me.

Twitter works on the basis of people publishing messages of up to 140 characters. These messages could be anything such as notifications about new blog posts, comments on the weather, updates on a baby’s progress, breaking stories from news outlets, or just plain old “How are you ? I’m fine” type conversations.

There are lots of celebrities using Twitter both real and fake, and I even started up a conversation with Tickle, the cat from the holiday home we recently visited in Carcassonne, which was rather surreal.

Anyway, the big question for me currently is how to access Twitter? There are almost as many different ways to access it as there are crumbs festering in my keyboard. I have tried several in-browser solutions, but none of these gave me the nice warm glow that I was looking for. I use Digsby for all my IM conversations and that handles Twitter well, but I still couldn’t get on with it.

Then I discovered Twhirl and how I loved it’s Adobe Air sexiness. Functionality-wise, it does the lot for me and is a very stable and well-developed application. Then I came across TweetDeck – a new pretender to the crown. This has many of the same features that Twhirl has, but also some that it doesn’t, which are what make it appealing. One of the biggies for me is being able to collect your friends into groups. These groups automatically refresh when new messages (“tweets” in twitter language) arrive. This is really quite cool and allows me to skim down the tweets from those people I don’t really know, but just like to keep an eye on, while pulling out the important tweets from my closer friends and key notifications.

Where TweetDeck falls down is that it is still in early days. The interface can be a bit clunky and there are some important features missing – following/removing friends for instance. These will be addressed, but how soon?

So I have a dilemma. I know there is a redesign of the Twhirl interface coming along soon, and TweetDeck is constantly improving too. I would like to make a decision, but I think these two clients will be battling for my desktop space for a while to come.

In the meantime, why not sign yourself up for Twitter and see what you think? Let me know if you have a better solution.