Making Twitter Easier: Tweetdeck, Part II

You've got Tweetdeck going and everything's pretty good, except you don't know how to send a message or do any of the other supposedly cool stuff I promised. Today, we'll get into some of that.

To display or hide the area for entering Tweets, click the button all the way to the left with the dialog balloon displayed (the one directly next to the reference to Tweetdeck and the version number).

If you want to Tweet, enter your message in the What are you doing? field. To the right you'll see a counter that keeps track of the number of characters you have left.

Shortening a URL
URLs aren't typically short. The base URL for this blog (http://pub-news.blogspot.com/) is 28 characters long, and that's before I include anything that directs you to a specific post. Fortunately, there's a field where you can enter a URL and engage a service to reduce its length. Just enter the URL in the Shorten URL field, then click the Shorten button. For the base URL displayed above, this function reduces the length from 28 character to 19 characters. For longer URLs, the reduction is much more dramatic.

Interacting with People
If you want to send a message to all your followers, just type it in the What are you doing? field and either press Enter or click the conversation balloon butto to the right of the Twitter and Facebook checkboxes.

If you want to reply to an individual person's Tweet, hover your mouse pointer over their picture and click the Reply to button (upper left corner). @theirusername appears in the What are you doing? field. Adding the at sign and the person's name to the Tweet assures it will show up in their Replies area.

Retweeting allows you to forward someone else's tweet to all your followers. To retweet someone else's tweet, hover your mouse pointer over the person's picture and click the button with the right-facing arrow (the lower left button). Retweeting replicates the person's tweet with an RT in front of it. It's an honor to be retweeted. It's also okay to edit someone else's Tweet if it won't fit.

To send a direct message to someone, hover the mouse pointer over their picture and click the envelope. Sending a direct message starts the tweet with D thatpersonsname, which uses up some of your 140 characters. If you send someone a direct message, they're the only one who sees it.

Making Twitter Easier: Tweetdeck, part 1

As cool as Twitter is, it's a pain in the neck when you're working on it from the Twitter web page. You have to reload to see any new message and moving between your feed, the messages that reference you (@yournamehere), and any sent directly to you, is too difficult.

If only there were a tool that would allow you to do all that quickly and easily.

There are several tools like that, two of which are most popular: Tweetdeck and Twhirl.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is a bigger application than Twhirl, but if you don't mind switching among applications, it's worth the monitor space. I have Tweetdeck set up with three columns: one for all messages, one for messages that reference me (@christheauthor), and one for any messages sent to me privately (DMs, or Direct Messages).

The key to using Tweetdeck is the Settings function, which controls how Tweetdeck works for you. Most of the settings are self-explanatory (or will be after you fiddle with them a little). The most important setting is found on the Twitter API tab.

Important: The Twitter API
Twitter has to control how many times you connect to the server, or its performance will suffer and--if things get too busy--it will crash. To prevent that, Twitter limits the number of times you can hit the server in a fixed period of time.

Tweetdeck lists a Remaining API ratio in the upper right hand corner of the window. The API starts at 100/100, and is reduced each time you hit the server. It resets every hour, and if you reach 0 before the hour is up, you can't attach to the server again until the next hour starts.

In the picture below, my API is down to 58/100 with 48 minutes to go before the next hour starts. In other words, I'm likely to get to 0 before then, which means any updates will be delayed until the next hour.

Controlling the API Value
To control the API value, click the setting button (the wrench button), and click the Twitter API tag. The settings listed below generally keep me clear of any API problems when I use Twitter.

Next time: Some other cool things you can do in Tweetdeck.