CNN’s Rick Sanchez made a big splash in the world of Twitter last night by reading and displaying Twitter feeds on the air. I discovered this not from watching CNN but from watching TweetDeck display a constantly updating tag cloud showing the most popular discussion topics at the moment.

One of the things I now use Twitter for is to keep on top of the news of the moment. When I’m at my computer, I can watch TweetDeck out of the corner of my eye and observe which topics are becoming more popular. Then I either click on the topic in TweetDeck to view the conversation – or head over to the news channel to watch the stories.

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air application currently in a public beta test that works by linking to the popular Twitter short messaging service. If you’re not familiar with Twitter, it’s an online service used by people to send tiny messages (140 characters or less) that update their friends about what they are doing or working on throughout the day. Twitter is at times addicting, maddening, highly repetitious, purely self promotional and lots of fun.

In order to send and receive messages you’ll probably want to use one of dozens of programs that connect to Twitter. You may also log directly into Twitter at their web site. The program I’ve started to use heavily for Twitter is TweetDeck which for me has become more than just a way to send Twitter messages. It’s an extremely efficient way to learn about hot news topics without having to wade through hundreds of thousands of Twitter conversations. Follow along with me for a quick tour.

TweetDeck runs on either a Windows or Mac computer.

To get started, you first need a Twitter account which you can establish here. If you already have a Twitter account, skip that step and download TweetDeck from here. If you need the free Adobe Air program it will be downloaded at the same time.

Once you’ve installed the TweetDeck program by supplying your Twitter username and password, it will read in all of your data from Twitter. That’s all there is to setting up the program. To send a message, type it into the “What are you doing?” box and click the Tweet button at the top of the screen.

You’ll notice that since Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters TweetDeck has a handy way to abbreviate any web links you want to include in your messages. To short the link, paste it into the SHORTEN URL box and click shorten. Your URL link will be abbreviated using a service that condenses lengthy URLS – and then pasted into your tweet.

That’s the basic operation of TweetDeck. Now let me show you the two interesting ways that TweetDeck monitors conversations across all of Twitter in real time. This monitoring happens whether you are following the people on Twitter or not.

Use TweetDeck and TwitScoop to Learn What People Collectively Are Twittering About
TweetDeck has a built in link to the TwitScoop service which collects everyone’s tweets for the purposes of summarizing what is being talked about online.

This is handy because at any moment millions of people can all be sending out similar messages talking about sports, politics, breaking news and weather conditions. It would be impossible for you to read each and every one of those Tweets and wade through the inane chit-chat in order to learn of hot topics (typically breaking news) that are being talked about in multiple Twitter conversations.

Below is a TwitScoop summary as shown in my TweetDeck program from Saturday August 30, 2008. You can see the different hot topics people were twittering about. The bigger the letters – the more people talking about the topic.

Using TweetDeck together with TwitScoop will tip you off to interesting news.

It’s almost like sitting and eavesdropping on every conversation in a bar.

When you spot a topic of interest – click on the topic to be taken to a TwitScoop page summarizing all the Tweets that containing the keyword.

If I were to click on “Arkansas”, for example, here is the detail page I’d be view on TwitScoop. Notice how it shows both a graph which indicates the popularity of the keyword over time and the most recent Twitter messages which contain the keyword.

You can also create a column in TweetDeck which displays continuously updated twitter search results for any keyword you like.

This search can be global (all Twitter users) or local (only the users who you have chosen to follow). You’ll find this an interesting (and often very outspoken) way to learn more about the topics that interest you.

TweetDeck is a great way to keep up-to-date on what people are talking about on Twitter without having to read through hundreds of thousands of Twitter messages – many of which may not be of interest. It operates as an Adobe Air application which means it will work under either a Windows or Mac operating system. The program is free to download from the link below.

TweetDeck

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