What is TweetDeck? It’s a third party application developed by Adobe Air to help you manage your Twitter account. Unlike the Twitter home page, TweetDeck provides you with the tools you need to maximize your Twitter experience and enhance the benefits of having a Twitter account.

Once you acquire hundreds of followers, having to refresh the Twitter home page to keep up with the constant stream becomes a full time job. TweetDeck is a free program, designed to manage your followers and follow pertinent Twitter conversations without having to continually refresh, complete with alerts, customized columns, and an URL shortening service.

The download is fast and easy to install and takes up minimum room on your computer. Columns are pre-loaded to display “All Friends”, “Mentions” (or @Replies), and “Direct Messages”. You are able to set up your own columns according to your interests and direction. For instance, you can add specially designated columns that displays “Friends”, “Family”, and “CoWorkers” to help you better manage the people you are following. Or, you can create a column devoted to business industry topics and the movers and shakers in that industry. You’re only limited by your imagination and ten Twitter columns.

In addition, additional columns can be set up to reflect specialty groups or search terms. If you are interested in trending news, for example, you can create a column specifically for “health care”, and all the Tweets that reflect that particular phrase will show up in that column. This is a good way to find fellow-minded Tweeters you may not have ordinarily encountered.

You may have up to ten Twitter columns, and there is a slide bar at the bottom for access, or you can restrict yourself to a single column view. Twitter settings are easy to change from the tool button at the top right of the screen. Uploading a photo, recent hashtags, and even translation buttons are also available on the upper right of the screen.

In the beginning of your Twitter career, the Twitter home page may be enough for you to handle your followers and interests, but as you become more involved in the Twitter universe, gaining and following more interesting people, the Twitter home page will not be enough for you to manage efficiently. Relevant columns set up with TweetDeck will organize your Twitter experience and reduce the amount of frustration from missing a relevant Tweet or just trying to keep up.

TweetDeck is not perfect – the interface may seem a little intimidating at first, but it is user-friendly and easy to navigate. Colors can be changed in settings, and if the chirp of the Twitter alert is annoying, you can mute it entirely. All-in-all, TweetDeck is a very efficient way of managing your Twitterverse, designed to minimize frustration and help you get the most out of your Twitter experience.