Twitter Update Management : What the heck is that ?

Twitter is a lovely place to get info from all over the world , this is a plus and a minus . Plus because of the sheer depth of information and minus because of redundant information and the number of updates that you need to read in any given instant of time . This gets more complicated if you throw in the additional variable of the number of people you follow . If you are following more than five hundred people , you will understand what I am talking about , it is really tough to keep up with updates in your time-line . So how do you read the good stuff and not miss it ? Simple , the answer is Twitter Update Management or TUM as I fondly call it !

The first thing you need to do is get off the web and start using a good twitter client . I use Tweetdeck and recommend it very strongly it is really good and has a lot of nifty features .Or the other strong alternative is Seesmic . Choose one of the two . Now on to the real business at hand . Before anything else , let us see how to sort out tweeps in your time-line . Here is how I sort my tweeps

• Linkers : Folks who mostly tweet links to cool and really useful stuff
• Quoters : Folks who tweet a lot of inspirational quotes and other similar things frequently
• Fun peeps : Folks who are good at tickling your ribs with their funny and thoughtful quips
• Opinion Leaders : Folks who have good opinions and musings on current events that are worth a read
• Buddies : Folks who are my friends and I want to read WHATEVER they tweet

With that out of the way , it is now time to classify tweeps into these categories . After you are sure that you have the grouping right , here is what I do with Tweetdeck . I use Tweetdeck groups (not to be confused with twitter lists) , create one group per category and add all the relevant tweeps to the right group . Tweetdeck sorts each group into it’s own column for you and PRESTO , life is now easier ! All that you have to do to catch all relevant tweets is just stare at the right group . What’s more , you can also export these into actual twitter lists and anyone can then follow these lists from your twitter home .

But wait , we are not yet done , there is the other important side of TUM , conversations , the REAL reason why twitter is so great . You need to be absolutely on the ball when people @reply to you or mention you and acknowledge / respond to that correctly . If you are following many people , that is also tough , you need to again use your client more efficiently for this . In my tweetdeck , initially I removed the mentions column to save on API calls and replaced it with a search for my @handle ( @v_shakthi ) , strangely , the tweets in that column never tallied with my mentions feed on twitter .Some legitimate replies never showed up . Then I used the mentions feed on the web and the search for @v_shakthi on tweetdeck in conjunction . That improved things greatly . I never missed one . So eventually I added the mentions column also to tweetdeck and enabled the auto API management option . And from that day , I never missed a conversation , I swear !

So that my friends , is TUM , hope you like it !

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