All of us – even the very best – make typos. No matter how accomplished a writer you are there are times when you are going to make mistakes, certainly when trying to squeeze something desperately important into just 140 characters.

In an ideal world, everybody would run their Tweets through a word processor, or Twitter.com would come with a built-in spell checker/grammar grader/text-speak remover. But that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

So, picture the scene: you’ve written your Tweet, clicked the update button, and off it goes into the Twittersphere. Then, suddenly: the horror, the horror. You’ve made a hideous error.

Errors within Tweets come in all shapes and forms, but will generally be one of the following:

a.     A shocking spelling mistake
b.    Terrible grammar
c.     A bad link
d.    You forgot the @ symbol
e.     Twitter and alcohol don’t mix
f.      You said something positive about Scientology

Now what? Well, if you’re like most Twitter users, you’ll simply re-type the message and submit it again.

This is the worst thing you can do.

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When Twitter started – way, way back in March 2006 – the service was, essentially, built around the same principles behind the very popular status update feature on Facebook.

However, times have changed. While it’s certainly true that Twitter’s insistence on asking you “What are you doing?” definitely encourages too many people to take the question literally and reply with something fairly inane – i.e., like the majority of Facebook statuses – there are some significant differences between the two platforms.

Too often I see people using ’status manager’ services like HelloTxt to update their statuses across a variety of platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Plurk and so on – and this is, in my opinion, a major mistake. Why? Because of the differences in how updates on Facebook and Twitter read to other users.

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Next week, we’ll be looking at the difference between its and it’s…

I’ve observed a few times on here about how one of the most lacking features on Twitter, Seesmic Desktop, TweetDeck – or anywhere else, for that matter – is the ability to mass-delete direct messages.

Once you’ve been on Twitter for a reasonable period of time, thanks to auto-messaging and genuine DMs from your friends and followers you’ll very quickly build up a large list. This is fine until you decide you want to delete some or all of them. Twitter only allows you to do this on a per message basis. If you have a lot of them, this will take forever, and the most likely result is that you won’t bother.

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So you’re into Twitter, you’re following lots of people, and now suddenly it all seems a bit of a… blur?

The reality is that while you can run even a very large Twitter account on Twitter.com, the site itself is pretty limited. Tweets very quickly fall off of the page, @replies sometimes don’t arrive at all, and basic functions like re-Tweets and direct messages require you to actually type things on the keyboard. What is this: the 90s?

Fear not, my friends, because TweetDeck tackles all of these issues with easy one-click solutions. It also allows you to filter your Twitterfeed in different ways, allowing you to keep track of your favourite Tweeters, as well as yourself.

What Is TweetDeck?

To quote directly from the site itself:

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that is currently in public beta. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e., Twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.

TweetDeck enables users to split their main feed (All Tweets) into topic or group specific columns allowing a broader overview of tweets. The default columns can contain All Tweets from your timeline, @replies directed to you and direct messages. The GROUP, SEARCH and REPLIES buttons then allow the user to make up additional columns populated from the live tweet information. Once created these additional columns will automatically update allowing the user to keep track of a twitter threads far easier.

Essentially, TweetDeck makes Twitter a more enjoyable and manageable experience for the user.

What Are The Advantages of Using TweetDeck Over Twitter.com?

• TweetDeck has one-click access to replies, direct messages and re-Tweets.
• Comes with built-in link shortening functionality (i.e., TinyURL.com, is.gd, snipurl.com, and so on).
• Can be configured into specific ‘groups’, each of which will filter a certain part of the Twitterstream (as per your settings). This makes it a lot easier to follow your friends or favourite Tweeters.
• If you’re working in another program, TweetDeck will run in the background, and notify you when you have new Tweets.
• Built-in search functionality.
• Updates continuously while open. No more refreshing the page. (If you leave the software open overnight, it will store all updates.)
• TweetDeck can be resized to your exact specifications: from a single column to a full-screen multideck (and anything in between).
• Comes with built-in translation software.

Installing TweetDeck

TweetDeck is available for both Windows and Macintosh operating systems.

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