There are hundreds of applications based on the Twitter API, however I think the dashboard applications are some of the most useful. If you’re not using a dashboard, you are likely not getting the full experience of what its like to participate in the twitter community.
Dashboards allow you to monitor, interact, retweet, sort, categorize, follow trends, create groups, search and much more. Here are a few of the dashboards that I’ve used and like.
Tweetdeck
The first dashboard application I ever used is Tweetdeck. It’s still my favorite dashboard today, but there are several others viable applications that are nipping at the heels of Tweetdeck.
Packed with some really great features that allow you to see your friends twitter stream, @replies, direct messages, create groups, Twitscoop, 12seconds, stocktwits and even your facebook status updates. I particularly like the groups feature to watch groups of friends that I am interacting with on a more regular basis or for watching the most active, informative or entertaining tweeps that I follow.
Seesmic Desktop
Another very cool dashboard was developed be Seesmic. Once you’ve installed the Seesmic dashboard you will notice that it looks very similar to Tweetdeck. The design is fairly clean and light compared to Tweetdeck although it doesn’t have all the features of Tweetdeck it does allow you to add multiple twitter accounts and tweet from one dashboard — a great feature for true twitter addicts.
Nambu
For Mac OSX users there is a dashboard from Nambu. Nambu has many similar features as the two dashboard I’ve already mentioned but also has some flexibility to switch from a combined view, to a sidebar view, to column view. This can be handy if you are challenged for screenspace. Nambu also allows for multiple accounts, timelines, mentions and direct mentions in a single or separate streams. Twitter Groups so you can separate people or services into separate groups so you never miss that key tweet. Threaded @mentions so conversations you are having appear together in one place, with the original tweet you sent.
And coming in the future, look for them to have integrations with FriendFeed, Ping.fm and Facebook to cover all your social messaging services in one great desktop application.
Hootsuite
One last online site that I also like is hootsuite. They also allow you to have multiple accounts and to allow other “editors” to work on those accounts. This might be of particular help if you have several employees posting to a variety of twitter accounts on behalf of a product, service, or company. I also really like the design of hootsuite.
I hope you enjoy checking out these applications and let me know what your favorite dashboards or other applications you are using for twitter. I’m excited to see how these applications become more integrated, more intelligent and more useful over the coming months.
