Twitter Tools

I started tweeting at about the same time I started this blog.

I had signed on to Twitter a lot earlier with a name that I use occasionally as a throw away when I don't want to give someone a permanent e-mail address. It changes every year and when I used it on Twitter, it was also designed to be temporary.

I just wanted to read the tweets of other people to get a feeling for what it was all about. By the time I wanted to go mainstream, I had a handful of followers, despite the fact that I never tweeted. So I notified these people that I was switching my name and then I did so and started tweeting. I'm now on Twitter using my real name, LouDornbach. (If you're wondering where this blog got its name, look at the first four letters of my actual name.)

As people followed me, I followed them back, but that didn't grow my followers very fast. However, I started seeing tweets about tools that would help bring in followers and make tweets easier to read, and I also read about them in Twitter Power.

So far, I've gotten two tools and am still on the lookout for more, if they would help me do something that the others don't. However, that is one of my problems now. I haven't been able to get one of the tools working yet.

The two tools I've gotten so far are TweetAdder and TweetDeck. I can't say enough good things about TweetAdder. You'll have to take this with a grain of salt, since I'm hardly an expert on Twitter tools. That said, TweetAdder works well and has a good manual to get you started. And, when I couldn't understand something or figure out how to do something, I e-mailed them through their help screen. They sent back replies promptly and the replies explained what I needed to know. They've also told me some things about a future release. It has several features that I haven't used yet, but for me, it automates following and unfollowing users and automates some tweets. For more information, go to www.TweetAdder.com. (I have no commercial interest in this tool.)

TweetDeck is another story. It was mentioned in Joel Comm's Twitter Power and appears to work fine. It is a tool that is in a Beta version, and so far, it's free. What it does is let you see tweets in columns. You can reportedly break up your incoming tweets into columns so that they will be easier to read, (or ignore). It appears to be stable and works fine. It has a lot of options that I haven't used yet, but I can't figure out how to do one simple thing. That one thing is how to move Twitter users from one column to another.

I put in a help question about 2 weeks ago but so far, I haven't gotten a response. Their website has my question up, the number of days it's been open, and even the name of the person it's assigned to, so I can't exactly say that they're ignoring me. It's likely that the person who has my problem hasn't even looked at it yet. I say that because the problem doesn't appear to be a hard one. Once he sees it, I should get an answer quickly. Either that, or I misunderstood what the tool does. It actually does have a decent help screen, but I can't find my answer. I've tried just fooling around but I haven't found the answer that way either. I suspect that it's something so obvious that they didn't think it was worth documenting. Unfortunately, it's not obvious to me. I still want to use the tool because it looks like it would be a big help once I learn how to use it.

Is there anyone out there that uses this tool that can help me get started with it?

- - - - -

Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It’s not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it’s when you’ve had everything to do and you’ve done it. - Margaret Thatcher