Take Control of Your Social Life

Keeping in touch with your friends' activities becomes harder and harder these days and I believe that is the reason why social networking is suck a big success. Unfortunately, not everyone uses the same network and the time you spend checking all your accounts, news and comments grows every day.

And, since you have other things to take care of, you sometimes miss important events because you didn’t had the time to check your page for a couple of hours. If you need a small but efficient tool to keep track of the activity of all your social accounts, TweetDeck might be what you were looking for.

TweetDeck is not only designed to monitor specific feeds, but can also store the login information for each account, allowing you to avoid entering your details each time you want to see what is new. Using the Adobe Air technology, TweetDeck is still in beta stage, but is already providing support for Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn(recently added).

The Looks

The TweetDeck interface is mainly represented by a multifunctional window that you can easily resize, although the columns included have a default size. TweetDeck is initially opening four columns in the main window where you can follow status updates for different accounts, but also gives you the possibility to access a single column view. Each time you open a new section, a new column will be added to the “deck” and you can easily browse through them using the progress bar at the bottom of the window.

TweetDeck is generally following the common-sense rules when it comes to organizing all the functional buttons and bars. On the top-right corner of the window, you can find the login/logout button, but also the Help, Settings, Single Column View and the Refresh. On the left at the same level, you can enable the Compose Update panel, access the Add Column window, or easily search for profiles.

Still, the columns are “le piece de ressistance” when it comes to the interface design and are equipped with their own button bar on the bottom. For each category, you can see the popular items included, filter the content by a certain criteria, mark all articles as seen, clear the seen/all items, or change the column position in the deck.

The Works

Once you set up your accounts, all you have to do is select the categories you want to monitor and TweetDeck will open a new column. You can do that through the Add Column window that has separate panels for each social network. For the Twitter account, you can search for certain friends to follow, use your existent lists or create new ones, or use one of the core functionalities (see all your friends' tweets, the mentions' feed, the direct messages, your favorites, your new followers, the TweetDeck recommendations, or use the TweetScope, StockTwits and 12-second services).

If you need to monitor your Facebook activity, you can add several columns to see all your news, the status updates, the wall posts, the images, the videos or any other criteria, for everyone or for a certain group. When it comes to MySpace, you can see the friends' activity stream, your comments and your friends' status and mood.

Last but not least, TweetDeck gives you the possibility to monitor your LinkedIn account, allowing you to select the subjects you want to receive in the respective column: status, Q&A, applications, groups, connections, profile or recommendations.

If you finished organizing TweetDeck and you discover that a certain contact is in the wrong group or you simply want to stop following their messages, all you have to do is right-click on the message and choose to move, follow, unfollow, block and view the profile of the user or choose to report them as spam. When it comes to the actual message, using the same method, you can access multiple functions: reply all, reference to, favorite, email tweet, translate, untranslate, mark as read, or simply delete.   At the bottom of the main window, you will be able to see the last time when the feeds were updated, but also when the next automatic refresh will take place (by default, the autorefresh time is of one minute).

The best part is that TweetDeck is not only grabbing the feeds, but also gives you the possibility to preview the included images or the profile information within the application. If the content cannot be displayed in TweetDeck, the link is opened in your default browser. The latest TweetDeck release also provides support for the geotagged messages.

One of the most efficient TweetDeck features is that you can browse through feeds using the arrow keys and press Space if you want to see the “Heads-Up Display” that shows you the available options for each post (reply, retweet, send direct message, or add to favorites). The display also provides the keyboard shortcut for each feature.

The TweetDeck goal is to give the user an efficient way to stay connected with their friends. That is why TweetDeck offers the possibility to compose an update that they can send for one or for all of their accounts, or simply retweet a received message. In the second case, one must choose if they want to edit before sending the message, in which case they will also be able to upload an image, TweetShrink it, or use the built-in translation feature.

If the TweetDeck look seems to be a little too serious, you can easily change the default colors and the font style from the Settings window. Each time you receive a new message, you are automatically acoustically and visually notified. The preferences area also allows you to set the position of the notification window and the sound level.

The same window gives you the possibility to adjust the overall TweetDeck behavior. This way, you can choose to have the message-update window at the bottom, narrow the columns, hide the previously loaded or sent direct messages after restart, open the profiles and the images in webpages, use the autocomplete feature for the username, include hashtags when replying, choose to see the preview information for short URLs, display the follower counts in tweets, activate the Enter button for the send update feature, show preview information for short URLs, enable or disable the keyboard shortcuts, and activate the mark updates as read when moving with the keyboard feature.

Furthermore, TweetDeck allows you to adjust the Twitter API limit, the number of updates in column and set the default retweet button function. You may set the services you want to use for the URL shortening, the upload photos service, enable the Twitter counter, or change the interface language.

As far as the accounts go, you can add one for each service and create a TweetDeck account in order to use multiple Twitter accounts, back up your groups and columns, or synchronize your database on multiple computers or on your iPhone.

The Good

The Bad

The Truth