If you haven’t jumped on the Twitter train yet, then this post will probably not interest you. Then again since quite a few of my recent posts are Twitterish in nature, you may just wanna hit the x now ha! It took some time indeed, but I’m able to say with certainty at this point that I’ve finally been bit by the Twitter bug. I’ve been a member for a year now but only recently finally really started seeing the value of what this nifty little social networking service has to offer. So what better than Twitter? How about some helpful resources and tools that make Twitter itself better? Sound good? Read on!

In this post, I’m going to address the topic of Twitter clients, which are applications that provide an alternative to tweeting directly from the Twitter.com website. There are a gazillion to choose from but after trying out about a dozen, there were two that won in my book, hands down.

Tweet Deck

Gotta have it, can’t live without it. I’ll even go as far as to say that I didn’t get nearly as involved in my tweeting until I installed this beautiful little Adobe Air desktop application. It stacks tweets into columns, completely customizable with as many columns as you can imagine needing. It looks rather like a deck of cards, hmmm Tweet”deck”! Oh and it’s 100% FREE.

It also features a powerful search function, a terrific way to filter out results for quickly narrowing down tweets, and my favorite feature, Groups. When one has hundreds of followers, it’s near impossible to keep track of who’s tweeting what. I use this feature to create Groups and open them in columns. Wanna know what’s being said about something in particular on Twitter? Create a column for that keyword and voila! In addition to all this, NO manual refreshing, all tweets come in automatically in real time.

TweetDeck is your personal browser for staying in touch with what