Twitter is a two way street, you can post as much as you like but it’s only when you start to listen that you become part of the conversation.  In fact I didn’t really ‘get’ twitter for quite some time and it wasn’t until I installed a great tool called tweetdeck that it finally made sense.

The problem with twitter (I think anyway) is the twitter website, it’s just not well designed for having conversations with people.  I use twitter without EVER VISITING THE TWITTER WEBSITE! I use it from my phone and from other software that I have installed.

So what’s tweetdeck all about?  Tweetdeck (available from www.tweetdeck.com) presents information in columns on your screen with each column showing different types of tweets (updates).  You can re-arrange the columns to suit, however the default is that:

• The first column shows tweets from all the people you are following, in date and time order.  It normally only shows the last 50 tweets or so.

• The second column shows tweets that are replies to you or contain your twitter username.  This allows you to see who has responded to your tweets and further see if people have re-tweeted your tweets.

• The third column shows direct messages to you, kind of like your email inbox.

Here’s the cool part, from any column you click on small icon to reply or re-tweet messages and also at the top of the screen is a big box to add your own updates to twitter.  To me this made twitter ‘make sense’, I could finally see all that was happening and specifically could see those interested in having a conversation about what I was tweeting about.