Taming The Fire Hose That Is Twitter With Tweetree

Twitter is hailed as micro-Blogging, but it’s much more like rapid fire Blogging. Even if you only follow a handful of friends, it can quickly get unwieldy, hard to manage and confusing to follow any semblance of a conversation. There are many (including me) who have said that following Twitter is a little bit like drinking from the fire hose.

The bigger question is: how do you get more out of the fire hose than the occasional dribble? The answer is that you can’t (unless you’re willing to give up your life to stare at the screen all day). Over the past few days, one of the better ways for me to interface with Twitter has been through an iPod Touch with the paid application, Tweetie (hat tip to Eden Spodek). Everything from the overall usability and navigation felt much more intuitive than the web-based version of Twitter (which was very surprising, as most mobile applications usually pale in comparison to the Web versions).

Then, Dave Winer over at Scripting News posted this Blog item: Tweetree. It turns out that Tweetree is a brand new web-based tool that looks exactly like your regular Twitter page, but does a whole lot more including certain threading to replies, and sucking in cool stuff like images, videos and web pages that are described in the Tweets. It makes the whole experience of Twitter that much more manageable. It’s not perfect (what is?), but it does make things just a little bit cleaner and better flowing.

If you’re going to be using the Twitter interface and have yet to be swayed over to TweetDeck (more on that here: TweetDeck – How Tweet It Is), you should definitely check out Tweetree. Besides, Tweetree seems brand new, and who doesn’t like being the cool kid on the block with the latest shiny object to play with?

What do you use to manage Twitter? Do you prefer web-based or mobile applications?