My experiments with twitter - I

As with most other "social-networky" things I was hesitant to use twitter, although I had signed up a while ago. I guess I am a tad (my wife would say very) paranoid when it comes to my online presence. Be that as it may, it's been almost a week since I have started tweeting regularly and I think I really enjoy it. I lack the discipline and patience required for posting full blown blogs - a quick look on the right at my blog's archives will tell you as much. The short 140 character messages seem ideal for the indolent scribe in me.

But that's not what this post is about. I meant to share my experience using the awesome twitter client I am currently using. I had experimented with other twitter clients in the past but none of them seemed as capable as this one. So what was I looking for? I was looking for at least the following things:
1. Ability to group the people I follow into separate lists
2. Ability to synch up this structure on multiple clients
3. Clean uncluttered display

I was almost about to start writing my own little twitter app that I would run in an embedded jetty instance on my box at work and at home, but then I stumbled across TweetDeck. And boy, was I pleased! Not only did it satisfy my requirements, it threw in a slick polished UI as a bonus. Since I use my iPhone prodigiously as well, I was really overjoyed when I found that TweetDeck had a client for the iPhone too that looked and behaved almost exactly like the desktop version. I'll not lengthen this post by walking you through all the details about TweetDeck - others more accomplished than myself have done that already.

Here's to a lot of time whiled away tweeting happily...