Reading Twitter

[Doughnut]

I've never used twitter. What's the easiest and quickest way to start reading Twitter feeds?

I don't know if I need to create a Twitter account to do this or not. I'm not interested in writing my own Tweets.

I guess what would be ideal would be a web page with separate areas for different categories of Twitter feeds (i.e. separate panels for F1 Tweets, Hockey Tweets, Cycling, Comedians, Friends, etc.) that way I could easily read everything I'm interested in all in one place.

How do I do this?

[Doughnut]

P.S. I guess a Windows app would do, especially if that means it's easier and/or faster and/or more up to date than a web app would be.

[Pies]

You do need an account to read tweets so you can follow people. Theres no need to tweet in order to do this. To find "feed", theres a search bar at the top where you can type something you're intrested in and it brings up tweets including these words. Its not possible to filter tweets unfortunatly.

[GuinnessMan]

Once you have set up an account, and found the 'tweeters' you are interested in you can put them on 'Follow' so these are filtered into your tweeting sessions, then you can also allocate them into 'Lists'. For instance, I follow ice hockey and have assigned several tweeters into that category, so i can just select that list and it only shows the tweets from those assigned to that list.

I have probably made it sound a lot harder than it is. It really is quite straight forward.

[NottinghamMatt]

Application wise,

blueonionsoftware.com/tweetz.aspx for Windows Sidebar/Desktop Gadget

www.tweetdeck.com/ if you want to bring twitter/facebook/linkedin etc. under one roof. In fact reading your description of what you want Tweetdeck would be perfect, lets you have columns for searches, lists etc.

[Doughnut]

That Tweetdeck looks like it might be what I'm after. I'll have a closer look later.

Are there any similar alternatives worth comparing it with?

[NottinghamMatt]

That I've heard of there is also hootsuite.com/ which I'm considering having a look at, as it lets you resize columns, which is my biggest issue with TweetDeck as I'm managing 2 twitter accounts, a Facebook account and a LinkedIn account from it and when I'm using it on my 15.6" rather than 17.3" laptop the columns go off the screen!

[David]

i use tweetdeck. tweetdeck is good.

[Ian]

A friend of mine who is something of a social networking guru uses Hoot Suite.