If you’re new to twitter, you probably felt like I did when I first started – how on earth are you supposed to monitor what’s happening when you can only see 10 messages (tweets) at a time on your twitter home page? And you’re getting 10 updates a minute shooting past?
It can feel like looking at a constantly scrolling wall of unmanageable chat that’s confusing and often irrelevant to your interests.
The good news is there are 3 ways to tame twitter and help you get the most out of this exciting new way of communicating online.
Tweetdeck is a free tool that has lots of features to make managing twitter a breeze. You can search for specific words, and see who is talking (tweeting) about that topic, set up groups to manage the people you follow, and discover hot topics as they develop. I’m not the only person to say this is the interface twitter ought to have had 
Tweetspinner is great for managing your friends and followers. Finding like-minded people can seem a bit daunting at first, but with Tweetspinner you can search for people who are tweeting keywords you’re interested in. I have added a search for anyone who mentions usability, for example.
You can also use Tweetspinner to manage your followers – you can remove twitter accounts that haven’t been updated in 3 months, for example, or people that haven’t followed you back within say 2 weeks. It does even more than that, but these two features make it a no-brainer to sign up, for a free account, or a subscription account you can upgrade to if you find it really useful.
You can search twitter accounts listed on Twellow to find people with particular skills you want to follow. I found it really easy to identify a lot of usability professionals and software developers using Twellow, and it meant I was no longer dipping my toe into the water, following celebrities like Stephen Fry and Demi Moore, for example
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