I can’t help it, I like Twitter.  I love the format of communication it provides.  People don’t have to know who you are for you to get their updates… and you don’t have to know who someone is for them to get your updates.  That makes for some really interesting possibilities.  Additionally, since the media blitz surrounding Twitter has continued to build, more and more “service” type of accounts have popped up which actually provide useful, timely information in a quasi-push format.

In general I’ve used pretty standard Twitter clients.  Ones which were obviously based around what the standard Twitter web site provided as an interface.  It’s a basic approach which just shows all the tweets that have come from all of your friends since you last took a look at it.  I’m not particularly unhappy with the clients I’ve been using (in particular Twittelator Pro is good) but a month or so ago I decided to look around and see what was out there.  Enter TweetDeck.

TweetDeck, right from the get-go, is different.  It offers columns, which are basically different views of your Twitter information arranged… in columns.  These columns can be built however you want to build them, which is where I have found my new best Twitter tool friend.

By default TweetDeck offers what you would probably consider pretty standard columns, “All Friends”, “Mentions” and “Direct Messages.”  For a while, I depended on these and while they were cool, they didn’t offer much functionality that I didn’t already have elsewhere.

Then I got the bright idea to start using the columns to separate information.  “What if I didn’t have an ‘All Friends’ column at all?”  Well, it turns out that’s a great thing…

So I set about making a column for “Friends and Family” which included… er… all of my friends and family.  Then I made a column for my “Professional” folks.  I kept the mentions and direct messages columns.  And here’s where it gets fun, I made a column for “Celebs and Bands” (I follow a lot of bands and band members) and one for “Services.”  The “Services” column is where I did some things that were new to me…  I followed several of my favorite news services and added them to this column.  Now, I can use Twitter to keep up to date with my friends, post ideas / discussions and now… dun dun dun… keep up with news!

Further, what’s really, really cool is that TweetDeck allows you to create a TweetDeck account and save the columns you have created.  Once you save them, you can sync your columns anywhere you use TweetDeck (it works on Windows, Linux, Mac [all using Adobe Air] and the iPhone).  This is great for me since I use several operating systems as well as the iPhone.  This made things really easy and I’ve found myself using Twitter more and more.