First off, I’ve been loyal to Tweetdeck for a few years now and every time I use the main website “in a pinch” I feel like there’s no way I’d use Twitter as much as I do if there were no third party apps.
The layout I’ve gotten used to in Tweetdeck looks like this:
TOP – Home – Search:RecordSetter – Activity – F1 – Interactions
- TOP is a custom, private list I created that has my top 20 or so people in it. I don’t read every single thing here, but I try to stay mostly up to date. Folks here include: @snerko (business partner), @ewrun (wife), @kenjennings, @shalenseman, @codinghorror, @michaelianblack, @malecopywriter, @sacca, @cdixon, @cshirky
- Home is my actual feed. As of this writing I follow 594 people. A lot of those are dormant and I could clean it up, but why bother? I don’t even try to read all of this. For the most part, I don’t even scroll this list beyond what I can see on my screen. I don’t make it a habit to keep Tweetdeck open either, even though I have enough screen real estate that I could because it updates so frequently that the motion is enough to be entirely too distracting.
- Search:RecordSetter – keeping tabs on what is going on with my company RecordSetter.com. Fortunately our name has low non-related noise. Maybe once a day someone will tweet something like “just showered in 2 minutes #recordsetter” but it is not enough to be a problem.
- Activity – This is pretty noisy, but I find some gems in here in the form of people favoriting tweets that are relevant or funny to me. I’ve been finding lots of interesting new people to follow this way.
- F1 – a list of Formula One personalities. I almost always watch F1 races a few days delayed via DVR, so on race weekends, I’m very cautious about what I look at on Twitter. Frankly it is a healthy break from being tuned in all the time.
- Interactions – when people tweet at me, etc.