I talked about TweetDeck in my article TweetDeck: The Ultimate Twitter Client and I wanted to do a video walk-thru but didn’t get it done, so with this blog post, here’s a video introduction to TweetDeck.

You can watch the video full screen by clicking on the second button in the lower right-hand corner of the video, next to the volume control. Click on the HD button as well and you can watch it full screen in high def. You can also view it at YouTube.

Have you heard of TweetDeck?  It’s the premier client software to interact with twitter.  Well, at least that’s my opinion today.  Once you become familiar with using twitter at their website, you might want to try other software that interacts with twitter and that’s what TweetDeck does.

And for those that don’t know what client software is, it’s software that resides on your computer.  You install it on your computer where it runs and “talks” to the twitter service. TweetDeck requires Adobe’s AIR runtime software that allows rich internet applications to run outside the browser.  Below is a screenshot of TweetDeck.

TweetDeck displays twitter messages in columns.  As you can see in the image above, by default you have an All Friends column, Replies column and Direct Messages column.  However,  you can remove columns, add columns and move columns from left to right.

Here’s another screenshot (below) of the All Friends column, a search column that is displaying all the twitter messages with the word facebook, and the StockTwits column that is displaying all messages on StockTwits.  StockTwits is one service that comes with a button on the TweetDeck menu and is a website where people talk about stocks.

The TweetDeck menu choices include:

• The main tweet box which includes various url shortening services built-in.  One of those services – bit.ly – can be used to shorten a url as well as track some stats on that url at the bit.ly website.
• The All Friends menu button displays all your friends tweets in a column.
• A Replies button for folks who reply to your tweets.
• A Direct Message button that display the direct messages sent to you.
• A Favorites button that displays the tweets you’ve marked as your favorites.
• The Group button.  This is great because you can create groups out of the people you are following and watch just their tweets in that group column.  You can create more than one group column.  So for instance, I’ll create a column called SEO and put the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts in that column so I can watch what they are talking about.
• The twitter search button as we’ve seen above that is extremely powerful by providing real-time conversations about what you’re interested in.  You can also have multiple search columns going at once.
• A Twitscoop button also resides on the main menu and it displays what’s trending on twitter.  Twitscoop displays its messages in kind of a tag cloud metaphor in a column.
• The StockTwits menu button allows you to see your various types of stock tweets over at StockTwits.
• Drum roll please……There’s even a facebook menu button that allows you to see your facebook friends status messages.

To the right of the main menu you’ll see a refresh menu button, a single column button to make TweetDeck thin and not take up so much screen real estate, as well as a settings button with quite a few custom settings so you can make TweetDeck your own, and a log out button.

If you have an extra computer with a huge monitor, TweetDeck makes a great real-time interactive news source.  Of course, a bit distracting, but you can always turn it off for a while.  

Have you tried TweetDeck?  What’s your favorite twitter client software?  Let us know in the comments.

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