To me, twitter is mostly a source of information. I rarely use the actual twitter web pages, and I don’t send out tweets much anymore. One can only search for one single topic at a time there. I have use tweetdeck for windows for close to three years now. Just google it. I highly recommend it. Twitter actually owns it now. With this tool one can have multiple search columns such as News, #tcot -#p2, Freerepublic, #emptyChair, just to name a few of about 30 searches or groups I have. Most trending political topics such as this #ObamaSongTitles will show up in the #tcot feed. Just click on a #hastag in one of the posts and a new search column will open up with that filter set. #tcot is “Top Conservatives on Twitter”. I have noticed that hot news typically appears on twitter within minutes. It can be a good way to keep on top of events, as well as find interesting topics and articles. In the #tcot search I show above, ‘#tcot -#p2’ will show posts with #tcot tag but not those that also have #p2 tag, which is the major liberal channel tag, so it cuts down on the Lib noise a bit.
One can create groups of users in twitter. So grouping all of the major news org twitter accounts into one group, you get one single column of headlines scrolling by. Over time I had identified many of the good conservative information sources and put them into a single group I call ‘Conservative Union Of Souls”. If here any are interested, I can publish that list so you could subscribe into it. Just message @ri4dc.
You don’t need to have a large following on twitter to tap in to its usefulness. You just need to know how to search for the feeds that interest you. Tweetdeck helps to organize these searches with ease over the single threaded web page searches. What you end up with is a console of scrolling news and information, and some funny and interesting stuff flows from it. Just one more available tool.
Why in the world would you rely on Twitter for information, when you’ve got the whole big wide internet to play with? That’s like searching for a diamond in a sh**pile.