“What is TweetDeck?” you may ask. Basically, it is a social networking dashboard that you can run from various different platforms, ensuring that you’re always in touch with all of your social networks. As you will notice when you get to the website, TD is available for your desktop, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Android and Chrome. It’s compatible with Microsoft, Mac and Linux Operating Systems, and as of June 2009 (a little outdated I know) was the most popular Twitter application with 19% market share. 

Tweetdeck (TD) was originally aimed at Twitter alone, but has gradually evolved to include columns that connect to your Facebook profile, or news feed, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, FourSquare and even MySpace. 
If you don’t have it already, you can download TweetDeck from here http://www.tweetdeck.com/. 

As with many new programs and apps, you will need to create an account, which will be best linked to your regular e-mail account (I use my Gmail), where your notifications will be sent. 

Once you’ve linked your account and signed into your TD, the first thing to do is to choose which accounts you’d like to link to, and which columns you want to see. Go to TweetDeck > Preferences (on a Mac) or File > Preferences on a PC. Your other option is to look along the top right hand corner of your TD - the middle button has an icon that looks a little like a wrench, is the shortcut to the settings button. Look down the options on the left-hand side and select accounts. If there are no visible options, select Add New Account. This will bring up the 6 options. As you select each account, you will be required to log in, allowing TD access to that account. You shouldn’t have to log in to each account every time you open TD as it remembers your details, however I do find that my FB column logs me out every now and then. It could be because I access my TD from several different computers and it gets confused, but that’s just my thought. 

Once you’ve chosen your accounts, your options should look something like this:

Next have a look through all of the options along the left-hand side and select or unselect whichever work for you. There are a couple of things I find particularly useful which I’ll list below:

General Settings:

The only box I have checked under General is “Use Autocomplete for usernames”. This is particularly useful if you tweet a lot of people, or if the people you tweet have slightly confusing or difficult-to-remember handles. It is also a great time saver as the block pops up as soon as you type the @ sign and then runs alphabetically, narrowing the list as you continue to type the name. 

The one thing that you might like to change here is the way re-tweets are sent from your TD. Either you can always RT directly, always edit and then RT, or always be asked which option you’d prefer. I go for the third on my TD as sometimes I don’t want to comment, but sometimes I do. This will result in  your update bar posing a question before anything is sent, like this: 

At this point, you can also decide which of your linked accounts you would like this comment to be sent to. You can select any number of accounts to send each comment to, and can be selective depending on your view of the relevance of the comment to each account. For example, I mostly send my comments to Twitter alone, but every now and then, if I find a great site or a funny video, I’ll post the link to both Twitter and FB simultaneously. 

Notifications:

I have switched all of my notifications off. My notifications options window looks like this:

This is because the more people you start to follow, the more often that little notifications window will pop up. If you are anything like me, you will never get anything done with that distraction popping up in the corner of your screen. Especially if it has a sound attached to it. I think that even the most dedicated and focused person on the planet would battle to concentrate with all that going on. This way, even though my TD is constantly running, I only check it when I think about it, or have a spare minute.

Colours/font:

You can change these options to whatever you want. Trial and error is the best way to figure out what is going to be the colour/background combination that is easiest on the eye, on-screen. Yellow or bright red on a light or white background can be very difficult to see and most of us strain our eyes enough during the course of the day, staring at computers without making it any worse. as you will have noticed, mine is set to a fairly dark background with some pink, and white links:

Services: 

I’ve left everything as is here for the time being. For my purposes the initial settings have served me well, however there are other options. You can use a different service to shorten your links (which happens automatically when you paste them into your TD, rather than going via a link shortening site)and to uploads your photos. You can also change your default language from English if you feel the urge - There’s a fair variety of options there.

Save those settings now that you’ve made your changes. 

The next thing to consider is which columns you would like to see from each of your accounts. Along the top left-hand side of your TD, you will see three little circles that look like this:

Click on the second one with the little plus, to customise your columns. 

Core Options:

The most important section, for me, is the “Core” options of the Twitter options - this can give you access, in one screen, to your standard timeline, your mentions, which I use so that I don’t miss out on when people are talking to me, about me, or re-tweeting posts (this gives me an idea of the sort of tweets and links that people appreciate), and whatever else you feel might be important to you. You can keep track of your new followers as well as your direct messages if you like.The Favourites column can be used as a way of ‘bookmarking’ tweets you’d like to keep track of, as you would websites in your web browser. If you favourite someone’s tweet because they posted an awesome link, this tweet will show up in your favourites column, enabling you to refer back to it. 

Along the same lines as above, you can choose which columns you would like to view on your TD for each of the linked accounts you have connected to. Depending on the size of your monitor, seeing more than 4 or 5 columns will require scrolling across your screen, which I honestly find I rarely bother to do. If you find you have more columns than you can see, you can select the option in your General Settings, to narrow your columns, but this will mean that each tweet or status update will take up extra vertical space rather than horizontal space and will require you to scroll down on each column to see further. I personally prefer to leave my columns wider, but it is entirely up to you what you decide to do. 

Another thing that’s quite handy is the ability to shift columns left and right. Once you have set up your TD, you may find that you’d like your FB news feed on the left-hand side, but because of the order you selected the columns in, you are currently having to scroll across to the right in order to see it. If you have a look at the icons along the bottom each column, the left and right options are arrows, which enable you to shift each column in whichever direction you want it to go. It will shift one column at a time so just keep pressing the direction arrow until you have your column right where you want it. 

If you find you are not using a column as much as you may have originally though you might, you can simply close that column by clicking on the little close cross on the top right hand corner of the column, which you will see over the Twitter or FB icons, when you hover your mouse over them. If you close a column by mistake, you can simply go back to the add column option, and select that column again, shift it back to where you want it, and you’re sorted.

Along the bottom of the columns, you will also see an icon that looks like a cloud. By clicking on this icon, you will be able to see “what’s popular in this column”. This can be an easy way to discover what’s been trending during the timeline of the column. 

You can easily filter a column, if you are looking for tweets with a specific word or phrase in them, or by a certain person. This can be achieved by clicking on the button that has a little arrow pointing over a black box. There are various options that will be visible in a drop-down (or pop-up) menu, through which you will be able to filter - including, or excluding, various things.

You can also choose to clear your columns of all content if you wish to start a column from fresh (or hide something). 

If you’re interested in learning more about TD and its origins you can check it out on Wikipedia.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TweetDeck